Agriculture biodiversity and food security: two sides of a coin

  Available online: http://www.bdresearch.org.bd/home/attachments/article/267/Research_Report_on_Agr [...]

Biodiversity underpins the agriculture productivity. Agricultural biodiversity includes all components of biodiversity – at genetic, species and ecosystem levels – that are relevant to food and agriculture and that support the ecosystems in which agriculture occurs. Therefore, its maintenance is essential for the production of food and other agricultural goods and the benefits these provide to humanity, including food security, nutrition and livelihoods. Recent worldwide food crisis has raised the issue of food security to an urgent basis. Many are arguing that worldwide economic meltdown might cause the crisis. However, some other finds a causal relationship between agriculture biodiversity loss and food shortage. The current study anchors on the issue of indiscriminate agriculture biodiversity loss and its impacts on food security. Bangladesh is considered as one of the fertile deltas in the world. Along with favourable climatic condition the country is also endowed with highly productive native crop varieties. Nevertheless, the study has shown that lack of proper use of agriculture biodiversity and practice of so called modern agriculture systems that are based on hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides without paying much attention to the native varieties are responsible for recent food crisis in agrarian Bangladesh. Finally, the study suggests that replacing current mechanised agriculture production systems to sustainable production methods such as mixed farming systems, organic agriculture, integrated pest management, use of organic fertilisers, crop rotation, recycling crop and animal wastes, no-till or minimum tillage agriculture, inter or multi-cropping, use of cover crops would be viable options to attain food security for all.

Language(s): English

Tags: Environment and landscape ; Biodiversity ; Food Safety ; Bangladesh Add tag