Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
pendent - synthetic fertilizer, tillage, soya cropping, processing, transport, and factory
farms. The extensive emissions relate to just two activities, grazing and organic agriculture,
which are not intrinsically dependent upon fossil fuels, and have been carried out since
long before fossil fuels were discovered. In short, the intensive emissions are representat-
ive of an industrial fossil fuel economy, while the extensive emissions are the survivors of
a pre-industrial non-fossil economy (and perhaps forerunners of a post-industrial one).
What is strange is that the emissions of the extensive systems are twice as high as the
emissions of the intensive, which is not what one would expect, since industrial systems
are known to generate higher emissions than pre-industrial systems. It could be that the
extensive emissions are higher because there are more emissions are higher because there
are more extensive farmers, or because they produce more food, in which case we ought to
be told. It is certainly the case that the extensive emissions are inflated by the inclusion of
Amazon deforestation which is mostly attributed to 'extensive' beef farmers (even though
many of these have been pushed into the forest by the spread of intensive agriculture). But
another possibility is that the reductionist approach taken by the FAO fails to take account
of the full basket of emissions generated by each system. The average intensive farmer in
the US or Europe emits far more emissions than the average 'poor livestock holder extract-
ing a marginal livelihood', and this is no doubt true of most industrial farmers in Brazil or
India as well, so how come this isn't reflected in the FAO's figures?
The reason is that there is a bias in the FAO's figure which leads them to focus on bio-
clearly the provenance of different gases: under the 'End Use Activity' column, everything
from 'Oil Gas Extraction, Refining and Processing' upwards is fossil-fuel based, ie dug out
of the ground and, after use, dumped in the atmosphere - and as yet there is no easy way
to put them back where they came from. All these activities, which can be said to represent
'industrial ' emissions, generate CO
2
, though oil and gas extraction also gives off signific-
ant amounts of methane; and in total they represent 62 per cent of all GHG emissions.
The 38 per cent of emissions which lie below 'Oil and Gas Extraction' are not fossil-fuel
based; half of these are LULUCF carbon dioxide emissions (mostly caused by deforest-
ation) while the rest consist of the majority of the methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
These represent fluxes that occur above ground; they form part of the biosphere's life cycle,
circulating between the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil and terrestrial biomass at different
speeds.
60
The biospheric emissions from nitrous oxide, methane and CO
2
are common to both ex-
tensive and intensive systems, but they are more associated with the former, because ru-
minants generate methane and as high fibre eaters they are better adapted for grazing. The
fossil fuel emissions are almost entirely associated with intensive agriculture. Extensive
