Addressing food crisis, maintaining biodiversity

By: Ahmad Maryudi
Published by: The Jakarta Post, 26 May 2008

The world is facing a global food crisis with food commodity prices creeping up. Many believe this is a short term crisis but continuing evidence of higher international prices for food crops such as grains indicates these may be long-term trends.

In Food Outlook released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in November 2007, soaring food prices are described as "unusual" since they affect nearly all major food and feed commodities.

This growing crisis has become a powerful social and political issue. Just recently the prime minister of Haiti was forced to step down due the failure to keep soaring food prices under control. Even in some developed countries, for instance the United States, the UK and Germany, food prices have become " the big issue" aside from fuel prices.

Ecosystems and biodiversity provide the basic necessities of life, such as food, water and air, and offer protection from natural disasters and disease by regulating climate and preventing floods and pests. Biodiversity loss disrupts ecosystem functions, making ecosystems more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances, less resilient and less able to supply humans with what they need.
Conserving global biodiversity will maintain the essential life processes of the earth, and help meet essential human needs, maintaining an hospitable environment for human beings.

Agriculture having profound impacts on global biological diversity

In the '90s, the Indonesian government converted more than 1 million hectares in Kalimantan (supposedly mostly peat-swamps, but including productive forests) into agricultural land, with very adverse environmental consequences, while trying to promote rice self-sufficiency.

The project failed to create the planned paddy fields, but become one of the biggest environmental disasters in Indonesian history. It devastated the biophysical and hydrological features of the peatlands as well as changing the area micro climate.

Apart from this project disaster the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) records other conversions of biologically rich wetlands into agricultural land. Yet, conversions of forestlands into monocultural plantations (most notably palm oil) are still ongoing. Current food shortages suggest that conversions might take place at an even greater pace with more incentives to boost food production.

The latest example is a government regulation (PP N0.1/ 2007), which promotes investment, which might potentially lead to increased forest conversion.

This line of argument does not necessarily mean that forests and forestry should be completely protected from food security priorities. For centuries, forests and forestry have provided livelihoods for people living in the areas surrounding them.

In the last few decades access to forestlands and the resources within them has often been restricted to forest zone residents with attention focused instead on commercial production from scientific industrial forestry. It has been widely acknowledged, even by Jack Westoby, one of the main supporters of this strategy, that this has failed to promote sustainability or to result in "trickle down" benefits to local communities.

In Indonesia one of the main features of forestry programs is to provide local communities with spaces within forestlands to cultivate agricultural crops alongside the main forestry species.
Community forestry programs have massive potential in fighting hunger and alleviating poverty, particularly for the people living within and around the forest and when applied genuinely to the benefit of the poor. State-owned forestry company, PT Perhutani, manages nearly 3 million hectares of state forests in Java with at least 600,000 potential allocated to growing agricultural crops.

The application of agroforestry systems in Java's forests, which are mostly monocultural, will probably not lead to biodiversity degradation. Instead, it will improve diversity of species and even enhance the integrity of the ecosystem.

In addition, especially forests in the Outer Islands remain a vast pool of non-timber forest assets, which can be potentially extracted as food and beverage products. Sago palm, cassava, wild fruits, edible leaves are only a few examples of edible non timber products, which are abundantly available in forests.

Massive conversion of forests into agricultural land should be avoided. Instead, an appropriate combination of agricultural land cropping alongside forest species through agroforestry techniques can be seen as the priority option.