FOOD FOR THOUGHT
hen this writer cut his teeth in
conservation 25 years ago, saving
the world’s birds seemed to be all
about stopping deforestation. Yet
even then, seeds were being sown, literally, for a
longer-term pressure. The purpose of chopping
down rainforests was not merely to harvest
valuable timber. It was to create land on which
to produce food. Fast-forward to 2018, and our
State of the World’s Birds report emphasises
that agriculture is now unequivocally the worst
thing happening to the world’s 1,469 globally
threatened bird species. Humans’ collective
appetite is already swinging a wrecking ball
through the planet’s birdlife. With a projected
three billion additional stomachs to feed by
2100, catastrophe seems inevitable. Or is it?
W
The figures certainly make grim reading.
Three-quarters of globally threatened birds
are imperiled by agriculture, way more than
any other pressure, including logging. We
now cultivate six times more land than three
centuries ago – roughly 40% of available
terrain. And there’s trouble ahead. According
to the World Resources Institute (WRI), we will
need to close a ‘food gap’ of 70% to meet the
expected demand for calories in 2050. Worse
still, as countries urbanise and people become
wealthier, we demand more resource-intensive
foods, notably meat and dairy.
“From a biodiversity perspective, the problem
of agriculture is two-fold”, says Tris Allinson,
Editor-In-Chief, State of the World’s Birds. First,
natural habitats are cleared to make way for
livestock or the plough: “This is particularly true
in the tropics. It isn’t just about feeding local
jul-sep 2018 • birdlife
people. The boom in export commodities such
as soya is largely to blame.” The second issue
concerns the unsustainable ways in which we
farm: “Worldwide, we are witnessing the ever-
increasing intensification of farming practices.”
Allinson expresses particular concern about
pesticides, which kill off the insects on which
so many birds depend and – if the unforeseen
harm caused by neonicotinoids to North
America’s White-crowned Sparrow Zonotrichia
leucophrys is anything to go by [see page 16]
– may have far-reaching repercussions that we
cannot yet comprehend.
Harvest field, Poland
Photo Mariusz Szczygiel
2
Ortolan Bunting
Emberiza hortulana
Photo Sergey Pisarevskiy
4
Common Whitethroat
Sylvia communis
Photo Andreas Trepte
0
Agriculture hasn’t come out of nowhere as a
threat to the world’s birds. As long ago as 1962,
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring presaged the loss
of birds and nature from agricultural pestic ides.
In Red List terms, alarm bells were ringing
stridently by 2004, when agricultural expansion
constituted a higher proportion of threats (57%)
affecting Near Threatened bird species than it
did for species in higher categories of threat.
This alerted conservationists that agricultural
pressures were set to become increasingly
important. “Agriculture has long been the driving
force behind habitat loss, and intensification has
spurred declines in European birds for decades”,
says Allinson.
Ariel Brunner, BirdLife Europe’s Senior Head
of Policy, is even more direct. “Farming is the
biggest crisis for biodiversity in the European
Union (EU). Farmland birds are doing far worse
than any other group.” Continent-wide data
collated by the European Bird Census Council
demonstrate that overall populations of
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