By incorporating biodiversity as a priority in agriculture chain
could yield multiple benefits, says experts at the Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO), reports NaijaAgroNet.
FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva made this call
for transformative changes on how to produce food, grounded in sustainable
agricultural systems capable of producing healthy and nutritious food while
simultaneously safeguarding the planet's biodiversity.
"Biodiversity is essential for safeguarding global food
security and nutrition, improving rural livelihoods, and enhancing the
resilience of people and communities," he said in keynote remarks made at
the start of a three day international dialogue (on mainstreaming biodiversity
into agricultural policies and practices.
Healthy ecosystems provide a number of key services upon
which humankind relies, such as water quality maintenance, nutrient cycling,
soil formation and erosion control, and carbon sequestration. And healthy
agricultural ecosystems provide the ecological foundations for food production,
and the biodiversity of crops and livestock plays a critical role in humankind.
But today planetary biodiversity — genetic diversity at the
level of organisms; diversity at the species level; and diversity ecosystem
level — faces a number of threats, the FAO Director-General noted.
"The way we are producing our food is a big part of the
problem", he said.
"Today, the world still produces food mainly based on
the principles of the Green Revolution that started more than 50 years ago, and
implies the use of high chemical inputs at a high cost for the
environment," according to Graziano da Silva.
Yet he also noted that massive swaths of the Earth's surface
are being used to grow food, raise animals, capture and farm fish, or produce
forest products. This means that if managed sustainably — with biodiversity as
a priority — the agricultural sector can make significant contributions to
protecting biodiversity.
This renders promoting and facilitating the mainstreaming of
biodiversity across all agricultural sectors "fundamental," FAO's
Director-General argued.
Isaac Oyimah/GEE
