Should We Intensify Farming to Prevent Disease Epidemics like Coronavirus? An Interview with Josef Settele
Dr. Josef Settele
Interview, May 4, 2020
Dr. Josef Settele, Professor of Animal Ecology and Social-Ecological Research, Dept. of Community Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ
On April 27, 2020, Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz, Eduardo Brondizio, and Dr. Peter Daszak published an article which argued that “Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people.”
Given that intensive farming requires significantly less land than traditional farming, and is widely viewed as an essential conservation solution, I interviewed Dr. Settele and Dr. Daszak by phone to understand what he meant. The following transcript includes edits by Dr. Settele.
Michael Shellenberger (MS): Is it scientifically accurate to say humans are causing a sixth great extinction?
It’s not; we don’t say that; it’s rather a popular catchy expression. In scientific circles we speak about mass extinction when at least 70% of species on Earth are getting lost, but luckily we are still far from this. So it is not a sixth mass extinction in the sense of the previous ones. Of course this is no reason for relief; the situation is grave, with extinction rates being at least tens to hundreds of times faster than the background extinction rate prior to human intervention. We show that nearly all indicators of nature are declining from extent and integrity to composition and diversity of ecosystems and communities.
It’s not helpful for all of these activities to come across as being alarmist — that’s also a matter of credibility. You have to look at the evidence. Sixth mass extinction shows up in the media, but not because we said so, rather because certain circles prefer using this term.
MS: Can you explain what you mean when you wrote that “intensive farming having contributed to the pandemic?
Research on the origins of zoonotic diseases gives us important clue to answering this question, in particular to its links with the industrial raising of animals: the dangerous “highly pathogenic” strain of H5N1 influenza virus evolved in wild ducks and geese, and entered the human population through poultry farms; Nipah virus emerged in Malaysia in 1999 due to intensive farming of pigs in wildlife habitat where fruit bats that carried the virus live. Thus it is not specifically about the present pandemic but about the contribution to pandemics in general. Of course, it’s difficult to use the term intensive without any further specification, which we originally had in a longer version of the article. It depends on your definition.
If you look at the area we need for farming, then at first sight you need less space if you have more intensive production, which is good of course in terms of land you need, assuming everything else is unchanged. However, research shows that industrial-scale intensification does not necessarily prevent further expansion of agricultural frontiers, in fact both processes can take place side by side, such as in regions like the Amazon.
This also assumes that there is no impact whatsoever on other areas, that there is no “leakage” from the industrially managed areas to those managed in other ways, and that maintaining agricultural expansion under control is subject to firm and transparent governance. All these assumptions are often not met in practice, such as in tropical regions where such expansions continue at accelerated rates.
Getting back to the definition: Esther Boserup stated in her classic 1965 piece ‘the conditions of agricultural growth’ that ‘any classification of land use in relation to the degree of intensity is necessarily arbitrary’; it depends on the point of reference.
Most commonly the term is associated with the degree of increase in input factors such as energy, fertilizers, pesticides, financial capital, and “technological sophistication” used, irrespective of the actual output or cost-benefit of the system. To this end I sympathize with Robert Netting’s classic work from 1993, “Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture,” where he states that the relationship between these input factors and intensity is often assumed as a component of industrial-scale agriculture rather than demonstrated.
Any kind of agriculture is intensive to some degree, so we have to be careful of what is meant; if one takes output or productivity as a reference, systems that would be considered extensive through input factors like energy and technology would instead emerge as very intensive: even if their ‘technology’ is very simple, labor and knowledge make some of them the most intensive systems of production anywhere: if you, for example, look at traditional and often terraced irrigated rice production in Asia — where I did my Ph.D. — or agroforestry systems in South-America or Africa.
Given these considerations, the use of the term intensive agriculture in our guest article possibly was not sufficiently differentiated, although the fact that it is mentioned in the context of industries gives a good hint that it particularly refers to increased input factors – to which also intensive animal husbandry belongs. We were focusing more specifically on industrial-scale monocropping and industrial raising of farm animals (“factory farming”).
MS: In poor nations where ⅔ of the population are farmers and rich nations where 2 percent are farming, I associate intensive farming with farming in rich nations. But it sounds like you’re saying intensive farming is connected to the spillover and that’s confusing. I can see how the expansion of agriculture is connected, but it seems that intensification reduces the labor force in agriculture and is occurring in areas further from the forest frontier. So how did “intensive farming” make your list?
I agree with you that if you have intensification in certain areas you can save areas in other places. This means you can produce on smaller areas. But what we meant is explained already in the answer to your previous question.
However, it is important to note that demographic decline in rural areas has many other determinants than agricultural intensification, and in some regions the two have no correlation. In some regions, expansion of industrial agriculture contributed to rural population decline, but not necessarily because it replaces labor, but in many cases, because it displaces of more marginalized and less capitalizes groups of farmers, or make smaller-scale agriculture less feasible.
The picture I have in mind is that nations develop and reduce pressure on natural areas by intensifying agriculture and increasing technical and energetic inputs and we reduce the labor inputs. Is that the wrong picture? Is the right picture where we keep people on farms and extensify agriculture?
It depends on the context. For instance, when the Brazilian Amazon reached a peak of deforestation in 2004, strong command-and-control policies were put in place, carrying strong sanctions for municipalities and farmers to comply with legislation. This helped to halt expansion (by 80%) and “forced” farmers to improve their productivity through better practices in a region where land is cheap. Once command-and-control policies were relaxed, agricultural expansion through deforestation continued at full speed, as it is now. In regions such as the Amazon, and others, agricultural expansion is not only about food production or intensification, but as much about a land market that is intended to bring public land into private hands, the cheapest way possible.
If we get more yields on certain areas it is better at first sight, because you need less area, or in other words, if you have more efficient agriculture in one area you’ll be better in preserving natural areas. This is the “land sharing” and “land sparing” hypothesis at the global scale.
If you have more intensive agriculture, and more inputs from the outside, it might however not be as positive as it looks like. Let’s take soy. We import soy as feed for our cattle and then export meat. Surely this is not the kind of agriculture that preserves nature. Also, if you produce with larger inputs of fertilizers and pesticides - which I guess is the element most commonly associated with intensive agriculture – this has numerous side effects on the environment but also on human health, and might as well create economic dependencies. I believe we have to think in several directions: moving into a higher degree of self-sufficiency of nations is one important component.
If the aim is to avoid losses in the tropics for example we have to produce within our domestic landscapes. This is often not the line of thinking in regional or local conservation circles, where sometimes I have the impression that the aim could be to create a nice backyard garden type of landscape with nice biodiversity while getting food from elsewhere, without having clear responsibilities for the distant environmental impacts of the products we consume.
So one might have to think of more intensive ways of production on the input side. But then it is as well a matter of priorities in food consumption. Moving in our diet away from the dominance of meat would result in much fewer requirements of area for production (domestically and abroad) and one could easily afford a type of agriculture which is often called organic – a type of agriculture which is less intensive on the input side, but might be more intensive on the labor and knowledge side – while I personally do not live in world of either organic or conventional, I live in between these, where e.g. the concept of ecological intensification comes in.
MS: So if Germany produces more soy then it might be able to import less from Brazil’s Cerrado savannah/
If Germany consumes less meat there is no need for such an import. But at the same time, we might have to produce more fruits. Only recently I learned that Germany produces less than one-third of the fruit it consumes; the rest stems from imports. So here we may need more production domestically, which also should be possible without major intensifications on the input side as there are quite a number of tested integrated fruit production concepts – a component of intensification on the knowledge side, which also requires good insights on the function of ecosystems and pollination in particular.
More domestic production also reduces the pressure on other ecosystems and reduces our extinction footprint because extinctions are much more severe in regions of the global South.
MS: In both this document and the Platform report there’s a view that we prioritize economic growth at any cost. That strikes me as strong. We have a lot of restrictions on growth. But the picture I get from reading the Platform and your opinion is the picture of growth as opposed to nature and the more growth you have the less nature you have. Is that the picture you have? Or do you have a more subtle view?
You can have development in the sense of increasing wellbeing for people without devastating impacts on nature. And increasing growth per se, while certainly destroying nature, does not ensure wellbeing. If we produce too much food and waste it rather than distribute the benefits of it, then what is the human benefit of growth?
The outcomes of the Global Assessment of IPBES – which I assume is what you mean with Platform report – and in particular, its SPM, which is the Summary for Policymakers, writes about the limited paradigm of economic growth. The paradigm that states that you need to keep growing, in terms of profit, in terms of having more, faster irrespective of the consequences, the paradigm that states that such thing is not only desirable but even physically possible. And this not just an esoteric phrase of some obscure scientists, it is the phrasing agreed upon in the negotiations of the document among the delegations of all IPBES countries – it is a document characterized by a consensus on every single sentence. Which means it is a widely shared view.
It is also important to remember that there are countless efforts, from sectors to country level, for changing the measuring stick of progress away from GDP. Likewise, when the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals were agreed upon, it posed a call for transformative change, including on how we think about economic growth.
MS: But what comes across is a picture of the economy as a machine grinding up nature and I’m skeptical that’s the right way to think about it.
There are many people who share the view that indeed, the present dominant model not only grinds nature, it also grinds up many people. However, the question isn’t about the economy as such but growth at all cost as the dominant paradigm. It seems that we are moving towards other social narratives, which rather focus on the quality of life or human well-being, with increasing respect for different worldviews and the common good.
MS: There’s a lot of language in the Platform of nature as the basis for prosperity and wealth but you’re referring to agriculture. Do you see agriculture as ‘natural’?
In the context of IPBES Nature – and now I quote from our glossary “refers to the nonhuman world, including coproduced features, with particular emphasis on living organisms, their diversity, their interactions among themselves and with their abiotic environment”. So Nature is an integrative term and the degree to which humans are considered part of nature varies strongly across different world views. Many aspects of biocultural diversity – which is considered as biological and cultural diversity and the links between them - are part of nature, while some others pertain more to what we call nature’s contributions to people and anthropogenic assets. Agriculture is nearly entirely based on plants and animals we eat and thus on nature. It is a core area, although by no means the only area, where nature’s contributions to people materialize.
MS: What is the purpose of the IPBES given the existence of IUCN?
IUCN is an NGO and IPBES is an intergovernmental process to provide updated information for policymaking. IPBES has different objectives and one of these is assessments. These assessments are drafted by scientists who have been nominated by countries or organizations; they then lead into a final product, which is the assessment and of which there is a so-called Summary for Policy Makers – SPM - as a jointly produced consensus document which contains the essence of several years of work; jointly produced refers to the involvement of scientists, policymakers, private sector, and many other groups of stakeholders in order to accommodate very different perspectives in such a document. Thus the whole process is very different from how IUCN functions, as is the groups of people involved and the tasks they have – but most importantly such an assessment is an exercise that provides information which decision-makers ask from the scientific community in order that they can make better-informed decisions. This is a process that mirrors the one of the IPCC in the context of climate change; and the global Assessment is the first of its kind since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, which however didn’t have this intergovernmental mandate.
A 2011 Nature paper found species-area model overestimate extinction. The Platform reconstructs the species-area model. What is IPBES doing?
For the number we are mentioning in our guest article we used the IUCN Red List data including to which different groups are threatened; for the well assessed animal groups, like mammals, birds, reptiles, etc., and higher plants like conifers, cycads, etc. the estimation is around 25% of these species are threatened with extinction within the next decades if we do not counteract; taking a total of roughly 2 Mio. species, this leads to half a million species. Insects are by far the most species-rich group, and the proportion of insect species threatened with extinction is a key uncertainty. But available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10 percent, which leads to roughly another half-million; in the end, we say that about one out of eight species is threatened; according to the best estimates there are around 8 million species on Earth, and we then end up with extinction of one million in the next decades, if we don’t counteract. If in the press they say 1 million species are about to get extinct already now, that’s not what we said in our report.
MS: What would you say to people who say there’s a lot of human-wildlife interaction and while conservation is valuable it’s misleading to suggest that more conservation would reduce the risk of spillover. Risks of spillover are very high with 8 billion people and the focus of pandemic prevention should be on surveillance and preparedness. Some might say you’re trying to take advantage of the pandemic. Why would more conservation make much of a difference when it comes to reducing the frequency of spillover?
That question is not rare. You have to make people aware that pandemics originated in nature. It’s more making people aware of the close link to nature and impacted by how we deal with nature. More conservation indeed decreases the risk of a pandemic because it minimizes the close and frequent contact between humans and wild animals which are typical of situations of rapidly expanding agricultural, mining and forestry frontiers, and fragmentation of habitat that forces these contacts even more. In addition, if we maintain diversity, and spread the risk, there isn’t a high risk that single species become very dominant; in other words: diversity reduces the chance for pathogens to spread and spillover – this is the so-called dilution effect. Furthermore, appropriate regulation of the trade of wildlife and wild-life related products, which are classical conservation measures, strongly decrease the opportunities of pathogens to “jump” to domestic animal and human hosts. We – and many others - wrote about this interaction of biodiversity and risks already 10 years ago.
MS: What would say to people who say that the problem isn’t that people don’t know there’s increased risk or that people don’t care about nature but that the people on the forest frontier are the poorest people. In other words, isn’t the picture of greedy corporations deforesting rather misleading when there are a lot of economically desperate people there?
In the strategies we mention as a potential way forward, there is point 3 where we wrote about the need to improve health care, livelihood opportunities and incentivize behavioral change in order to give these poorest people and local communities better-living conditions.
MS: But isn’t the pressure on natural areas forests reduced by attracting people to the cities? Isn’t it urbanization that reduces pressure?
But how do you produce food and export and consume it? Urbanization is not a solution to social conditions. If you look at Brazil, Manaus, or Manila this is the kind of urbanization with no planning, and with people living in poverty, crowded, without sanitation or minimum access to safe housing is surely not a solution for those people. It might be in richer countries.
MS: When you say it’s not the solution, what do you mean? Urbanization has been going on for 200 years.
It’s not an aim worth following. We should be keeping people on the landscape to produce in a sustainable way.
Are you saying that going from 2/3 of the population as farmers to 2 percent as farmers is wrong? We should keep the population out of cities?
We should keep the population spread across the landscape and out of cities to create conditions to allow people to live on the land. And it is also important to consider that most of the real food in the world – the food which covers a larger part of the overall consumption by humans - is produced by relatively small farms; also, a lot of industrial agriculture does not necessarily increase the amount of food for those who really need it. This means that if we need to feed the world, which we have to, it won’t be by industrial agriculture but rather by small-scale farming which is far away from having 2 percent of the population as farmers.
MS: I’m not understanding. It sounds like you’re saying poor countries should continue to be nations of small poor farmers as opposed to developing into rich nations like Germany.
I think that it is a matter of inequity which causes a lot of difficulties. Urbanisation has many aspects and just thinking that living in a city can’t be an aim per se, but often is in many countries. I guess that it is important to have a balance of urban and rural populations and critically assess the paths for the future nationally and internationally.
The reason why in Germany we have a very low proportion of farmers also is linked to intensification on the technology side, while this at the same time impacted our environments and ecosystems (incl. the agro-ecosystems). Many family-based farms had to give up and still are giving up, not because they do not want to live on the land any longer, but because they can’t make their living there. Therefore options have to be improved to diversify agriculture and land use and thus the farming community, somehow intensifies them on the knowledge and labor side. While on the other hand, the move to cities in other parts of the world has to be managed in such a way that it helps to fulfill the expectations people have when making such a move. To sum it up, I think it would be good for the global development if we have a move back to the landscape which also is back to nature in richer countries and increase the option for people in the global South within agriculture as well as within cities.
MS: But the difference between rich nations and poor nations is that in the latter the majority are small farmers. Are you saying poor nations should follow a different path than rich nations followed? It sounds like you’re saying people should stay small farmers.
I’m saying more people in the Northern hemisphere should work on the land, e.g in organic farming. That doesn’t mean poor farmers. In some places you might have increased farm size. In the end it’s all about how you produce food for the people and in a way that’s sustainable. We have to see if we can produce more food on our land as opposed to importing from other countries.
MS: But if you’re going to produce more food on German land, then you’re going to need to intensify, right?
That’s right – but intensification as defined in the early part of this interview – which would go together with changes in preferred diets and also lifestyles – those which move away from the input intensification side which causes a wide range of other problems like with chemicals, as said earlier.
MS: But what’s the problem, exactly? If the Philippines wants to produce more food and take the pressure off of natural areas, it’s going to have to intensify agriculture, no?
If we take the Philippines as an example, it is worth considering an approach that combines intensification on the side of the input but also on the side of knowledge and labor. Some simple recipes – i.e. with low input of knowledge - which are advocated by larger businesses, simply do not work. Let’s take the example of insecticide application in irrigated rice. There is overwhelming evidence that in these agroecosystems the balance between pests and natural enemies prevents major pest outbreaks; such outbreaks are particularly severe when insecticides are used against these pests; due to the disturbance of the system. The application kills most insects and the pests recover first and quickly and can grow in an enemy-free space which leads to the destruction of large parts of your harvest. In the end your harvest would have been at least the same and often even higher as without insecticides and in addition the risk for your own as well as the health of the environment is drastically reduced. This was the content of one of the larger research projects I had coordinated in the last decade – and already was the topic of my Ph.D. thesis back in the 1990ies.