Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

Increasing population and consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate on a global scale. To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially while, at the [...]

They found that, in many areas, water production can be substantially increased without harming the environment. In Africa, for example, most cropland is rain-fed and only four per cent of available water is captured for crops and livestock.”Somehow, we have to get more food without taking more water — and the most promising way is [...]

The question of how to meet rising food demand at the least cost to biodiversity requires the evaluation of two contrasting alternatives: land sharing, which integrates both objectives on the same land; and land sparing, in which high-yield farming is combined with protecting natural habitats from conversion to agriculture. To test these alternatives, we compared [...]

Global stress on water and land resources is increasing as a consequence of population growth and higher caloric food demand. Many terrestrial ecosystems have already massively been degraded for providing agricultural land, and water scarcity related to irrigation has damaged water dependent ecosystems. Coping with the food and biomass demand of an increased population, while [...]

The production, transport and processing of food products have significant environmental impacts, some of them related to climate change. This study examined the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production and transport to a port in Sweden (wholesale point) of 84 common food items of animal and vegetable origin. Energy use and [...]

Calculating the costs and benefits of investing in biofuels may become easier for policymakers with a guide launched by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).The Bioenergy and Food Security (BEFS) Analytical Framework, released last month (17 May), was developed over the past three years and tested in Peru, Tanzania and Thailand.Heiner Thofern, head of [...]

With so much of U.S. fields planted with genetically modified (GM) crops—93% for soybeans—everyone agrees it’s impossible to completely exclude transgenes from organic fields, but they can be kept to minimal levels. With a defined threshold, scientists can figure out the appropriate distances between fields to minimize gene flow. In the future, computer models of [...]