Why’s it so important?

Why is agricultural biodiversity so important?

Next time you sit down to eat dinner — or lunch, or breakfast — you’ll be eating the answer. Without biodiversity, Earth’s plants and animals would eventually become extinct. And without the food that is produced by those plants and animals, we humans would quickly starve. We would become extinct, too.

This section of theWeb site seeks to explain why diversity is so important to the continued growth of the foods we eat, and why it’s so necessary that agricultural diversity be protected.

Agriculture itself is important also simply because of the amount of Earth’s space and resources that are devoted to it. On the globe on which humans live, there are some 13.1 billion hectares of land that is not covered with ice. Of this total, United Nations agencies have estimated that 11 percent is devoted to raising crops. Twenty-four percent is in pasture; 31 percent in forest, and the remainder is classified as “other.” Slightly more than half the cultivated land is in developing countries, slightly less than half in the developed world. (Note: Words and phrases in red bold italics are defined in the Glossary. There's a link to the Measurements and conversions page on the Site Map.)

Not all of that cultivated land is in top-notch shape. The United Nations classifies almost 20 percent of the agricultural land as “moderately degraded” and another 6 percent “strongly degraded.”

The UN defines “strongly degraded” as land in which the biotic functions — the functions performed by living organisms — are destroyed and the land’s potential for production is either zero or reversible only at great cost. Agriculture, which is the process of growing crops (farming), is a major cause of that degradation.

Of course, without agriculture, Earth’s people wouldn’t have enough to eat. As we'll see in this and other sections of this site, biodiversity involves many tradeoffs.

But what does biodiversity have to do with all this talk of agriculture and food? Click here to see.

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