Reducing agricultural footprint

Description

Reducing agricultural footprint involves implementing practices and technologies that minimize land, water, and resource use while decreasing pollution and biodiversity loss. Essential actions include adopting precision farming, improving soil health, optimizing irrigation, reducing chemical inputs, and promoting agroecological methods. These strategies aim to increase efficiency, restore ecosystems, and ensure food security, directly addressing issues such as habitat destruction, water scarcity, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional agriculture.

Context

Many of the developed countries depend on exploiting the land of "distant elsewheres", mostly in the South, to grow their agricultural inputs and other foods. For example, the Netherlands depends not just on the produce from its own two million hectares, but on an additional 15-16 million hectares in other countries; it then exports a sizeable amount of its agricultural produce (being the third largest agricultural exporter with 10% of the world's agricultural exports).