Student Education News

Engaging with policy makers to rethink concepts of sustainability for agriculture

Professor Tim Benton has been appointed to the post of UK Global Food Security Champion.

Research carried out into optimising land use for agricultural production has led to a unique appointment for one of the Professors in the Faculty of Biological Sciences. Professor Tim Benton has been appointed to the post of UK Global Food Security Champion, a Government and cross Research Council initiative.

The challenge for the future is how we can grow food production, in the face of rapidly increasing demand, without it damaging the environment. The conceptual model we have been exploring is the relative merits of specialising agricultural production in smaller areas of land, producing more food per unit area, but leaving land that can be dedicated to the environment. The conclusions of our studies indicated that a landscape which has areas that are optimized for food production, and areas that are allocated for production of ecosystem services (land sparing), results in greater food production and greater ecosystem services than if the land is farmed extensively over the whole area (land sharing). Thus, organic farming for example, by using much more land, could be viewed as less beneficial to wildlife than a mixture of conventional farming and land managed specifically for nature. Further research has also highlighted the importance of thinking about sustainability on a landscape scale – conservation of populations of animals and plants requires thinking and planning across the landscape, because it is at this scale, not the farm scale, that many ecological processes happen. A key advance in thinking is not how to make each farm more wildlife friendly in itself, but how to make the landscape as a whole better for producing both food and wildlife.

Professor Benton is now engaging with a wide range of policy makers and key opinion formers from UK and overseas governments, with stakeholder groups (such as farming and conservation groups) and has presented the "sustainable agriculture in sustainable landscapes" work at high level meetings in the UK Parliament, as well as think-tanks like Chatham House and intergovernmental meetings such as the Rio+20 summit. The impact of the work is rapidly developing, but is informing both UK policy development and feeding into, for example, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

30th October 2012