Despite a sense that the international climate change negotiations, convened in Bonn, Germany this week, are grinding forward at a painfully slow pace, there is a momentum to the process that makes adding new ideas very difficult. It took several years of behind the scenes technical work and at least two years of carefully planned campaigning to get the deforestation issue substantively on the table. While we know that agriculture can make a vital contribution to addressing climate change, it lags behind the forest discussion and effectively including it in the Copenhagen deal at this late date will be no easy thing.

The Food and Agriculture Organization summed up the complex agricultural and climate change interplay during a presentation at the climate negotiations last week. While trying to solve climate change, global population is still growing, though it will hopefully peak in the middle of the century at about 9 billion. As we strive to meet the Millennium Development Goals, affluence will also increase. The combination of population growth and the increase in wealth will require food production to increase 70%, with even larger increases for meat and milk. Meat consumption per capita in the developing world will still be low compared to the US, but one third of arable land is currently used for meat production, either as pasture or to grow feed crops, so growth will have a significant impact. Demand for bioenergy in many forms (some more efficient than others) will increase as we decarbonize the global economy. We will be trying to preserve the remaining standing tropical forests, despite increasing consumption of paper and wood products, agricultural pressures and bioenergy needs as diverse as charcoal for cookstoves and palm oil for cars. As if all this pressure on a finite land base and stretched water supply wasn't enough, climate change will damage productivity. We've already seen Australia and California's production hurt by their long term droughts, and the projections for Africa through 2030 are devastating. Climate change will even steal land right out from under farmers. For example, the IPCC warns that one meter of sea level rise will flood 100,000 hectares of cultivated land and aquaculture in the Mekong River delta.

We face a complex set of problems in agriculture aside from solving climate change, but there's also a significant link to greenhouse gasses themselves. Analysis by FAO reports that forestry and agriculture together contribute 35% of the human released greenhouse gasses each year. This includes carbon dioxide released through logging and plowing, methane from livestock production and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from nitrogen based fertilizers, as well as fossil fuel use during production. Thankfully, agriculture can be a big part of the solution [PDF].

Emissions can be reduced through changes in farming practices and improvements in efficiency, but most importantly we can store carbon in the soil of our pastureland and cropland, picking up some of the slack from our fossil fuel emissions. Getting agriculture right is crucial to solving a whole set of 21st century challenges.

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