Agriculture and Environment
Avtar Singh Bimbraw*
Senior Agronomist (Retd.), Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India
*Corresponding Author: Avtar Singh Bimbraw, Senior Agronomist (Retd.), Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India.
Published: July 03, 2024
Abstract
A major threat for the agriculture is to feed ever increasing global population, simultaneously need for decreasing the environmental effect and conserving natural resources for the coming generations. Agriculture impacts on environment negatively and positively. But the negative impacts are so serious as pollution and deterioration in soil, water, and air. The agriculture has also beneficially effect on environment as carbon sequestering in food crops and soils or reducing flood threats by following some sustainable farming practices. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development checking relationship among the environment and agriculture recognized policies for agriculture, which are beneficial to reduce the harmful effects on environment while increasing the beneficial impacts and gives the direction to enhance policy consistence of the agricultural sector for the environmental production.
The improvement has observed in agriculture’s effect on the environment but there is required to do more. In the present years, there was recorded some positive signals in the agriculture sector of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries is able of touching of environmental threats. The developments made at the level of growers; in especially, growers in several developed countries have made considerable improvements in the management of nutrients, chemicals, energy and water, so their efficient use of area. Farmers have also shown significant interest in practicing several environmentally sustainable methods like conservation agriculture practices, advanced preservation methods of manure or soil testing. Need to be done by policymakers; these developments are not sufficient, but need to do more with vital role for policymakers. Nitrogen intakes are enhancing in many advanced nations but reduction recorded in farmland birds, the greater involvement of agriculture sector in water use and deterioration as compared to make uses of other.
To consider these long-pending issues, more efforts and co-operation are required among growers, person of formulating policies, and agricultural food chain. Furthermore, the existing two policies threats are certifying World Food Security for increasing population while enhancing environmental performance will need improving the inputs efficiency of agriculture and environment, raising land management practices, decreasing pollution burden, cut down the destruction of biodiversity, and buildup policies, which restrict the subsidies in agriculture, which cause harm to the environment. The observing and estimating the production of farming and environment that assists to direct the policy selection for the future. To aid the nations increase agriculture production sustainability, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has developed recommendations as to buildup cost-oriented agricultural- environmental policies, check water problems for farming, deal with risks of climate change, and conservation of biodiversity and buildup contribution of ecosystem for agriculture. They have also built out the awareness about possible environmental effect of farming policies by recognizing likely policy improperly adjusted and how address in combination of production and inability of maintain progress aims. Meanwhile, that is dubious to be suitable actions related to the environment of agriculture like conditions of different regions and people’s requirements vary among the nations, policy formulators delivers the thorough knowledge and ability to estimate, the relations among policies and output according to assess and get suitable environmental output on the cost oriented bases. To help this approach and governments evaluation related to policies in progress are suitable to enhance production and minimize environmental damage, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development developed indicators more specifically, the agri-environmental database of indicators to be used to give a picture related to the present state and swing in conditions of agriculture environment, which need policy reactions; emphasize in which areas appear a new environmental risks; compare change in growth over period and among nations, particularly to help policy formulators in achieving environmental goals, level of disaster and quality standards, which are developed by governments or global accords, and evaluation and estimating of policies of agriculture and project development in coming years.
The global population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of food supply is linear according to the Malthusian growth model. However, the projected global food demand for population of 9.3 (FAO) -9.7 (United Nations Population Division) billion may increase from 60 -70% (FAO) by 2050. The consideration of above in view, there is need to produce maximum to feed the increasing population with the minimum use of inputs keeping in mind limited resources, cost of inputs and environment safety. In 2019, it was reported about 22 % global GHGs emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use. This comes mostly from agriculture (Crops and livestocks). Therefore, the researcher have to strengthening the work on conservation practices, precision practices, minimum use of nutrients, chemicals, energy, water as indoor vertical farming, hydroponic, aeroponics practices, laser farming, farm automation, minichrosome technology, water management technology-drip, sprinkler, regenerative farming and also use farm management software, Internet things in farming (IOT), Geographic information system (GIS), Artificial intelligence machine learning and data science for resource use efficiency, sustainability, productivity, profitability and quality of agricultural produce.