9
Introduction to Ecoagriculture
J. McNeely and S. Scherr
The Challenge: Agricultural Intensification, Rural
Poverty and Biodiversity
Many ecologists fear that the world is poised on the brink of the largest wave of
wild species extinctions since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. If
current trends continue, we could lose or greatly reduce populations of 25 per cent
of the world’s species by the middle of this century. Since global awareness of this
crisis emerged in the late 1970s, conservationists have focused on protecting
endangered species and endangered habitats primarily through the establishment
of protected areas. Nearly 10 per cent of the Earth’s land is now officially protected,
and land purchases to create private reserves are expanding such areas. Agricultural
production areas, by contrast, have been largely ignored by conservationists. These
areas were assumed to have habitat conditions so radically modified from their orig-
inal state that their potential contribution to biodiversity conservation could only be
marginal. Permanent croplands were estimated in the early 1980s to account for only
12 per cent of global land area, so conservation efforts were understandably focused
elsewhere (apart from widespread efforts to limit farmland conversion).
Part I [of Ecoagriculture] draws on new global data to argue that in this new
century food and fibre production – both that produced by agriculture (domesti-
cated crops, livestock, trees and fish) and harvested from natural systems (forests,
grasslands and fisheries) has come to be the dominant influence on rural habitats
outside the arctic, boreal, high mountain and desert ecoregions. Growing human
populations, increasing demand for food and fibre products, and growing concern
about rural poverty mean that agricultural output must necessarily expand for at
least several more decades until the rate of human population growth begins to
stabilize, or even begins to decline (as it already has in some eastern European
countries). Adequate growth in supply is by no means assured, especially in areas
where productivity is limited by poor soils, difficult climates and insufficient water.
Reprinted from Ecoagriculture by Jeffrey A McNeely and Sara J Scherr. Copyright © 2003 Island Press.
Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington DC.