Agriculture needs to move away from monoculture to more sustainable farming to improve food security, enhance biodiversity and create a buffer against climate change, writes Lyse Comins
Environmental and agricultural experts say the impact of “monocropping”, specifically in KZN where single crops like sugarcane, maize and timber are extensive, is profound.
Agroecological farmer at Bonakude Farm in Richmond and University of KwaZulu-Natal associate professor in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at UKZN, Mvu Ngcoya, says that the long-term impacts of monoculture include a deterioration in soil quality and the need for strong chemical pest control measures.
“Because of lack of biodiversity, which by nature preserves soil quality and helps limit pests, monocropping and plantation systems require extensive use of external inputs such as synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. The short-term costs are both economic and environmental.
“The long-term environmental costs are quite extensive as these agrochemicals infiltrate groundwater and lead to further biodiversity loss.
The use of heavy equipment associated with monocropping also affects soils, causing soil compaction.” Added to this, the social costs are historically immeasurable.
“It’s the monocropping and plantation system that intensified slavery and continues to produce tremendous suffering among workers across the globe. From a food security perspective, heavy reliance on a single crop is insanely risky. The historical record affirms this.”
The Irish Potato Famine was caused by the planting of a genetically uniform clone and the outbreak of late blight – which destroyed almost 80% of the crop – lead to mass migration, starvation and death. Similarly, the Bengal famine in the 1940s resulted from a disease that decimated rice production in India.
Farming “with” rather than “against” nature, is the solution. When farmers focus on a wide range of diverse crops and varieties, combined with animals and other creatures, they are less dependent on a single commodity and more economically resilient. The costs of their operation are also reduced by adopting natural pest management and soil management systems that are not expensive. While the plantation system relies heavily on external knowledge and a few corporations govern that knowledge economy, a more diverse, agroecological approach values local and popular knowledge (obviously not against scientific expertise), but farmers are more in control.
“An agroecological system, on the other hand, values biodiversity among species, populations and ecosystems and provides not only benefits to nature but continues our ability to provide adequate food, fuel and fibre.”
Ngcoya says sugar, maize and timber farms account for most of the province’s arable land. “While their economic value is undeniable, it’s a sad irony that we rely on so few crops when our province is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, even though that biodiversity is under constant threat from urbanisation and monocropping. So, there is a wide range of indigenous crops and other plants we could grow for food, medicine, and other uses.
However, the cultural and economic conditions would obviously have to change for that to happen.”
A major challenge to making the shift to agroecological systems is access to markets. “Food that is produced sustainably in South Africa gets no extra rewards. Since most of the sustainable farmers operate on a small-scale, they really can’t compete with the behemoths that control much of our agricultural system. They are locked out along various stages of the value chain. There is little institutional support besides that offered by a few independent associations and NGOs. The state favours the conventional large-scale industrial agriculture model.”
University of Cape Town Department of Environmental and Geographical Science and bioeconomy research chair Professor Rachel Wynberg says that out of 2 000 to 3 000 crop opportunities, only about 150 species were planted globally, while the extensive use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers was destroying soil health.
“About 12 species are providing about 75% of the world’s plant-based foods including rice, wheat and maize. We are losing the microorganisms in the soil and the importance of having life in the soil is fundamental to everything,” she said.
“The negative impacts of monoculture are in a broader sense around a loss of diversity and a loss of resilience, especially in the context of climate change. If you are planting one type of crop you have a much greater chance of losing your entire productivity to drought, pestilences and disease.
“Very little of SA is suited to crop production, and that part which has been planted very intensely leaves our soils in a very bad way. The Free State is a pretty dead landscape, KZN might not appear visually as bleak, but if you look at sugarcane along your coastline and trees like Eucalyptus and pine, these are very intensive forms of monoculture. The coastline has been so heavily decimated by sugar and tree production, it is quite difficult to rehabilitate the coastal forest,” she said.
Wynberg said farmers should seek to plant more indigenous crops, such as sorghum and millet, which have natural resistance and are more tolerant to drought. “It’s not about replacing a maize field with a millet field, but rather looking at diversity and planting local crops in addition to other crops.”