Representatives from over 150 national governments have backed plans to push for greater biodiversity in world farming.

At a meeting being held last week in Cancun, Mexico, representatives from 167 countries gave “unprecedented recognition” to efforts to protect biodiversity in farmed landscapes, which experts maintain is necessary to create long-term sustainable farm systems that can deal with pests, disease, the effects of climate change and the demands placed on the land by humans, and have a minimal effect on fragile habitats of wild plants and animals that are currently under threat.

The Cancun meeting was part of the UN Biodiversity Conference; the Conference Declaration stresses that there is a need for cross-border action to protect biodiversity, and that the public, private and third sectors all have a part to play in this. The conference was intended to outline strategies for implementing the UN’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, with a focus on farming and other land-based industries.

Maria Helena Semedo, the Deputy Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said, "This is a turning point. The agriculture sectors and biodiversity have often been regarded as separate and even conflicting concerns, yet they are inextricably connected. Agriculture is by nature a major user of biodiversity, but it also has the potential to contribute to its protection.

"Now that the international community has demonstrated its commitment to link both, we can really start building bridges, breaking down silos and tackling global challenges in a more concerted and coherent manner.”

At the meeting, the UN unveiled a new ‘biodiversity platform’ that will allow government ministries of agriculture, forestry, fisheries and environment to share experiences and adopt policies that benefit biodiversity. The FAO said the aim is to have government departments and industries working across traditional sectors to achieve its biodiversity goals.

The biodiversity crisis is very real; in the UK, the most recent State of Nature Report, which looked at the fortunes of almost 10,000 species and was published earlier this year, showed the UK’s wild plant and animal species are seriously threatened. Of 8,000 species that were assessed using ‘Red List’ criteria, 15% are already extinct or are threatened with extinction in Britain. Of 218 countries whose biodiversity has been thoroughly assessed, the UK is ranked 189, way down at the bottom of the scale.

Worldwide, human activity is driving the sixth major extinction event in the planet’s history (referred to as the Holocene Extinction), in which species are dying out between 100 and 1,000 times faster than the natural background rate. There has been a decline of 38% of terrestrial species and 36% of marine species since 1970. This extinction event is affecting the whole of humanity, but farmers - especially smaller farmers - will fell its effects most acutely.

Friends of the Earth (FoE), which sent a delegation to the Cancun meeting, said that since the UN’s first Convention on Biodiversity in 1992, world leaders have put their faith in “False solutions” which have done little to ease the strain on the natural world.

Although the UN celebrated the conclusion of its conference last week, on Tuesday FoE’s delegation said they were “highly disappointed” by the outcome of the meetings, which lasted almost two weeks. Friends of the Earth said that the systems that lie behind biodiversity loss were not challenged during the talks, adding, “Neither the logic of economic growth without limits, nor the logic of the model of extractive and predatory production have been questioned.”
 
They said the conclusion of the conference failed to live up to its laudable central theme of ‘mainstreaming of biodiversity in all sectors,’ making sure these sectors take biodiversity into account when making decisions that can impact on it. The final agreement won’t impose action to compel the land-based sectors to act within planetary boundaries, and Friends of the Earth said business interests within these sectors had too much influence in the final text on mainstreaming, meaning there is no mention of their responsibility for the biodiversity crisis in the text, just their potential for reducing impacts.

FoE said the private sector is gaining more and more influence in the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and complained that, as a result, agriculture-specific solutions continued to be high-tech and focused on proprietary technologies, like agrochemicals and GM crops. FoE said, “Calling these technologies ‘sustainable" does not make them so’ and called for community forest governance, agroecology and the strengthening of collective rights as key elements to reverse the crisis.