Land Sparing and Sharing

How will the demands of growing populations for food be met?  Many believe that a modern agricultural system is required to meet the demand, but does a modern mechanized agricultural system have to be incompatible with the environment? When thinking about land-use patterns and the environment, development of modern intensive agriculture often equals lower environmental quality.  Intense agriculture can have negative external effects away from the farmland, e.g. dead zones, erosion deforestation, water contamination, algae blooms, and loss of biodiversity (Ewers et al., 2009), but does it have to be this way? What if it is possible to have high yield agriculture while reducing pressures on forest through requiring less land through increase production (Gutiérrez-Vélez et al., 2011). It is a challenge to combine efficient agricultural land-use with biodiversity conservation (Tscharntke et al, 2012), but two land systems processes being studied with potential for a win-win scenario is the concepts of Land Sparing and Land Sharing.

Land sharing and sparing are two types of land-use practices that focus on efficiently of agricultural land-use in order to have more land available for nature. Through intensification it is possible to reduce or eliminate the conversion of new cropland area that would otherwise be required to grow food.   The major difference between the two models is in the mix of land uses. In the land-sparing model the land-uses of agriculture and wild are segregated, while in land sharing the land-uses overlap (Phalan et al., 2011).  Land sharing is also known as wildlife friendly production, which is farming that happens within the wildlife fragmented in the habitat. Land sparing can be associated with the idea of nature preserves and conservation areas.

Satellite observations have shown evidence that it is possible to achieve the dual objectives of forest conservation and agricultural production (Macedo et al., 2011). In many ways these two models of land development are working to increase efficiency of production.  Land is an input into agricultural production like fertilizers and water, and using it more effectively can lead to high yields per acre, allowing for a great supply of land and reducing the demand on wild lands for conversion. In many ways through intensification the luxury of sparing or sharing land-use with the nature occurs.

Land sparing and sharing may not occur or is not perfect (Ewers et al., 2009). This is due to prices of goods decreasing with increase production, which will lead to an increased demand. To further complicate the land trends, high agricultural subsidies over-ride many land sparing activities that would otherwise occur (Ewers et al., 2009).  This is evident through history, as croplands have increased despite the advancement in crop yields.  Some of it is due to government subsidies are stimulating overproduction, because food production is often seen as national security.

Land-use policies are not the only solution and may not be as effective as other social solutions at eliminating world hunger. World hunger is linked to poverty not production, so many argue that solutions in production will not lead to the end of hunger, but broader social reforms are needed. Production levels do not necessarily have to increase, but reforms that prevent waste in the system and make food access more equitable can have a bigger impact.

Works Cited

Ewers, R. M., Scharlemann, J. P., Balmford, A., & Green, R. E. (2009). Do increases in agricultural yield spare land for nature?. Global Change Biology,15(7), 1716-1726.

Gutiérrez-Vélez, V. H., DeFries, R., Pinedo-Vásquez, M., Uriarte, M., Padoch, C., Baethgen, W., ... & Lim, Y. (2011). High-yield oil palm expansion spares land at the expense of forests in the Peruvian Amazon. Environmental Research Letters, 6(4), 044029.

Macedo, M. N., DeFries, R. S., Morton, D. C., Stickler, C. M., Galford, G. L., & Shimabukuro, Y. E. (2012). Decoupling of deforestation and soy production in the southern Amazon during the late 2000s. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(4), 1341-1346.

Phalan, B., Onial, M., Balmford, A., & Green, R. E. (2011). Reconciling food production and biodiversity conservation: land sharing and land sparing compared. Science, 333(6047), 1289-1291.

Tscharntke, T., Clough, Y., Wanger, T. C., Jackson, L., Motzke, I., Perfecto, I., ... & Whitbread, A. (2012). Global food security, biodiversity conservation and the future of agricultural intensification. Biological Conservation, 151(1), 53-59.