Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Kyoto Protocol and its flexible mechanisms, i.e. the Clean
Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation have renewed the
interest in the role of agriculture in mitigation. Storage of carbon in
forests and the use of biofuel crops may reduce net emissions of
greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and mitigate global warming.
However, the storage capacity is small compared to the tremendous
quantities of emissions from burning fossil fuels. Moreover,
reforestation requires land with alternative uses in e.g. food production,
implying that it may adversely affect world food supply. Costs of carbon
sequestration differ widely across the world, from a few dollars per ton in
developing countries, to several hundreds of dollars per ton in developed
countries.
The experience with energy crops in agriculture is still very limited
and most of what is known owes more to traditional agricultural
techniques. Nevertheless, some studies have indicated that the potential
replacement of fossil fuel by energy crops in the tropics alone can be as
high as 150 to 510 Tg (150-510 Mt) C/year. In temperate zones, C offsets
could be as high as 80 to 490 Tg C/year. Agro-forestry systems, where
trees are grown in combination with food or feed could offset 10 to 50 Tg
C/year in temperate zones and between 50 to 200 Tg C/year in tropical
regions (Woods and Hall 1994).
3 . SCOPE OF THE TOPIC
The chapters of this topic have been prepared for the conference
'Sustainable Energy: Challenges for agriculture and implications for land
use' at Wageningen University, The Netherlands (May, 17-19, 2000). The
purpose of this topic is to reflect the current state of the art in research on
the role of agriculture in energy consumption and energy production. The
approaches used in the various chapters in this topic are retrospective and
prospective, i.e. both past and future energy use and production are dealt
with. Although the central focus of this topic is on economic issues related
to energy use and production by agriculture, the topic also includes results
of multidisciplinary research.
The first section of this topic focuses on the efficiency and
intensity of energy use in agriculture. In Chapter 2, de Koeijer, Wossink,
Smit and Janssens investigate the relation between management and energy
efficiency for a sample of Dutch cash crop farmers. The results in their
chapter suggest that there is considerable scope for improvement of
technical efficiency at the farm and crop levels. Furthermore, results show
that farmers are more efficiently using indirect energy if they know their
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