Paying Farmers to Protect Nature | Toronto Star
From a Toronto Star article by Margaret Webb (with a hat tip to Energy Bulletin):
When farmer Bryan Gilvesy looks over his 44 acres of native tall-grass prairie in Norfolk County, Ont., on Lake Erie, he sees truly green fields.
By planting this ancient "crop," which once covered much of Southern Ontario and is now one of the most endangered in North America, he is also showing that farmers can become leaders in combating climate change.
These native grasses thrive in draught, extreme heat and poor soils. The roots, which plunge up to 16 feet into the ground, can sequester as much as 1.8 metric tons of carbon per acre. ...
Gilvesy is the chair of the Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) project in Norfolk County, which is developing a new model for farm support that could shift Canadian agriculture into a greener future.
The farmer-driven initiative has cobbled together a small, $1 million budget from 16 funding sources to run a three-year pilot that pays farmers $150 annually for every acre they devote to ecological functions, the rental rate for cropland in the area. ...
The first major global assessment of agriculture, initiated by the World Bank and United Nations and delivered last year, called for a shift to ecological farming systems; payment to farmers for restoring land, soil and air, to ensure future harvests; and a new partnership between farmers and science to increase ecological food production rather than corporate profits. ... The assessment won the support of 59 countries. Only three dissented: Canada, the United States and Australia.
From the global assessment mentioned by Webb, "Agriculture at a Crossroads" (Synthesis Report pdf), produced by the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development):
For many years, agricultural science focused on delivering component technologies to increase farm-level productivity where the market and institutional arrangements put in place by the state were the primary drivers of the adoption of new technologies. The general model has been to continuously innovate, reduce farm gate prices and externalize costs. This model drove the phenomenal achievements of AKST (Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology) in industrial countries after World War II and the spread of the Green Revolution beginning in the 1960s. But, given the new challenges we confront today, there is increasing recognition within formal S&T organizations that the current AKST model requires revision. Business as usual is no longer an option. This leads to rethinking the role of AKST in achieving development and sustainability goals; one that seeks more intensive engagement across diverse worldviews and possibly contradictory approaches in ways that can inform and suggest strategies for actions enabling to the multiple functions of agriculture. ...
Successfully meeting development and sustainability goals and responding to new priorities and changing circumstances would require a fundamental shift in AKST, including science, technology, policies, institutions, capacity development and investment. Such a shift would recognize and give increased importance to the multifunctionality of agriculture, accounting for the complexity of agricultural systems within diverse social and ecological contexts. It would require new institutional and organizational arrangements to promote an integrated approach to the development and deployment of AKST. It would also recognize farming communities, farm households, and farmers as producers and managers of ecosystems. This shift may call for changing the incentive systems for all actors along the value chain to internalize as many externalities as possible.
