Agriculture today is being pursued and promoted through the auspices of intensive production. This is characterized by high input and high output farming. Intensive agriculture employs ‘force feeding’ measures to bear products in the shortest time and space with less regard at consequences. The focus in intensive agriculture is financial profit based on quick fixes resulting in bountiful harvests and food security. However, its environmental and social costs have less consideration. The over dependence on chemical inputs such as mineral fertilizers and pesticides and injurious practices such as  monoculture, excessive tillage, overgrazing, deforestation for agriculture, bad irrigation and more deplete soil health, through erosion, compaction, loss of biodiversity and diminished soil fertility. Tragically, the exhausted environment demands for more chemical inputs to maintain the yields and thus creating an unsustainable vicious cycle of chronic dependency on destructive agro-chemicals.

The depleted soils and soil structure from intensive agriculture is prone to consume more water from the environment and loses even more water and soil to runoff from recharge areas, incubating a water crisis. The erosion from fields carries with it harmful chemical residues into surface and underground water bodies harming aquatic life and humans downstream. This system also significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, driving climate change and its associated extreme weather patterns that threaten future food production.

Generally, though intensive agriculture is credited for creating employment and mass agriculture production at relatively low cost due to economies of size, it often times undermines human health and welfare. These often occur as a result of large-scale operations with dependence on heavy machinery and harmful chemicals, its undeniable cost is disguised in displacement, unemployment and health problems for farmworkers and nearby residents.

Intensive systems are vulnerable owing to the dependence on international trade of inputs and outputs, intensive production systems, suffers significantly to vulnerability due to unforeseen external shocks. For example, the Russian-Ukraine conflict since 2022 have directly affected world fertilizer, fuel prices, negatively impacting productions which depend heavily on those inputs. Other external shocks which render this system vulnerable are; currency dynamics, trade regulations, disease outbreaks (such as H1N1 Influenza of 2009, Ebola in 2014 to 2016, Covid 19 from 2019 to date) climate change effects and many more.

There is need to reconsider and reevaluate our food systems.  Shifting towards the needs to sustainably conduct agriculture with food security in mind as opposed to desired to maximize profits. A focus on community based food system (short food supply chain) as opposed to long value chain approaches in agriculture has proved to offer resilience and responsible utilization of natural resources. Farming with nature has through history proved to withstand shock caused by nature or humans. In Cuba for example, after the United States of America imposed trade embargo, and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Cuba was forced to self-sustain due to lack of imported agriculture inputs and machinery. The Cuba navigated its way to organic agriculture within its context and managed to achieve food security and has since gained global recognition as a model for sustainable agriculture.

Finally, more efforts should be focused at agriculture practices which enable nature to regenerate and thrive such, maintaining species diversity, crop rotation, organic farming, maintaining soil covers, agroforestry, so as to restore soil health, conserve water, reduce emissions, and support health food supply to current and future generations.

The writer of this article is a specialist in Agriculture Food and Sustainable Development.

Ignitious Nkosana Moyo

nkosanam6@gmail.com