COP27: Climate-proofing agriculture to enhance food security

Agricultural systems will have to change to adapt to climate change and improve food security. This was the message that emerged from delegates at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP27, held at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.

COP27: Climate-proofing agriculture to enhance food security
Farmers in Africa are often worse affected by climate change than producers in developed countries, which are greater emitters of greenhouse gases, according to local industry stakeholders.
Photo: FW Archive
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Speaking to Farmer’s Weekly, Daneel Rossouw, functional head of agriculture at Nedbank, said that it was “not fair” for the responsibility of this change to be on farmers in Africa, including South Africa, as many developed countries were greater polluters than developing countries in Africa.

Despite this, Rossouw added that farmers had no choice but to make the relevant changes to adapt to climate change.

“The need to produce food sustainably has gone beyond being the right thing to do, to a business imperative. Not only do innovations, such as renewable energy and water efficiency systems, save precious resources, they also reduce costs and increase farm profitability.”

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He also highlighted the importance of conservation and regenerative farming, which, by improving soil health dramatically, improved the water-retention ability of the soil, and helped to promote biodiversity.

This, in turn, lowered the risk of wildfires, and improved “natural pest control and crop pollination”.

“Failing to climate-proof the sector will have devastating consequences, [such as] significantly reducing the income from exports on which our economy relies, endangering jobs and livelihoods across entire value chains, and posing a serious threat to food security,” Rossouw said.

Speaking from COP27, Theo de Jager, former president of the World Farmers’ Organisation and chairperson of the Southern African Agri Initiative, told Farmer’s Weekly that there had been a strong drive at the event to “move more than eight billion people over to a plant-based diet”.

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He said this would be devastating for South African agriculture, because large parts of the country were only suited to livestock production, and this was also true for about one-third of the world’s arable land.

“Through strategic grazing [livestock farming] can help to maintain and even improve this land.”

He added that converting to a plant-based diet was not the solution, as it would drive up deforestation and water usage.

The carbon footprint of making and sustaining this switch could result in even higher carbon emissions than those emitted by livestock, due to all the inputs required to produce these crops, and the cost of transporting these commodities to parts of the world that were unsuitable for their production, according to De Jager.

The origin of food products was, however, important. De Jager quoted a recent study, which found that the carbon footprint of exporting meat from New Zealand to the UK, for example, was lower than that of meat produced in the UK.

The reason for this was that New Zealand had a free-range farming system, whereas most of the animal feed used in the UK had to be imported, which was further exacerbated by that country’s heavy dependence on carbon-based heating systems.

“We would like to see the introduction of livestock carbon taxes to reward countries such as South Africa and New Zealand for making use of free-range and regenerative farming practices, and to ‘penalise’ countries that are unsuitable for livestock production.”

A regenerative farmer producing layer hens, beef and pork near Stellenbosch, Angus McIntosh, said that switching to regenerative farming practices in South Africa would be possible without negatively affecting food security. The key would be to incentivise farmers to make this switch.

“The problem with the current food system is that it does not take into account the consequences of using a system that is negatively affecting the environment and making people ill.

“We need to find a [system] that rewards farmers and consumers for this switch, for example, by introducing carbon credits for sequestrating carbon through production.”