Dr Anjani Ganase continues to advocate different indicators for a thriving economy. In the Wellbeing Economy, human and environmental health are one and the same.
We need new political thinking and vision for well-being in Trinidad and Tobago. While I mentioned the Doughnut Economy in last week’s article, there are several new economic models that focus on human social well-being and environmental health rather than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth.
Another example, the Wellbeing Economy stipulates that human and environmental well-being go hand in hand with the foundational values of fairness, participation, nature, purpose and dignity.
One example where well-being economics should be applied is in agriculture and food security. On island nations, such as TT, our land is limited and there must be clear management of its use to sustain our water and natural resources, and healthy agricultural practices for food security. Our land resource must continue to be viable in the future and be resilient to any future disturbance be it disease or climate change.
[caption id="attachment_1148673" align="alignnone" width="640"] Mango Graham - Photo by Anjani Ganase[/caption]
Unmanaged land clearing results in habitat and biodiversity loss with negative implications in the form or flooding and erosion, loss of watershed functions and loss of agricultural products. For island ecosystems, regeneration is a difficult path especially when native populations (plants, animals) have already been lost.
Fertilised food
Today, the world’s food systems are mass produced and industrialised. The revolution of modern-day agriculture and the use of synthetic fertilisers had enormous benefits for human populations by significantly increasing crop yields by 30-50 per cent and reducing global hunger. Synthetic nutrient (nitrate-based) fertilisers are industrially made through the Haber Bosch process assisted by natural gas. It is a downstream product of oil and gas in TT.
[caption id="attachment_1148681" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Northern Range forest is the principal watershed in Trinidad. - Photo by Anjani Ganase[/caption]
However, fertilisers can have devastating impacts on our environment: polluting waterways, rivers, and enriching the surrounding seas with destructive consequences to marine food webs. The use of fertilisers on monocultures also degrades the soil quality in the long term and increases fertiliser dependency, a vicious cycle.
Modern-day agriculture contributes to 25 per cent of greenhouse gases, it consumes over 70 per cent of the world’s freshwater supply and contributes to 90 per cent of deforestation. As the world’s population surpasses eight billion, expected to exceed ten billion by 2080, there is an urgent need to make agriculture more environmentally friendly, sustainable and resilient. Resilience is a big concern with respect to climate change. So is the advent of new diseases, especially considering that most of our grain supplies have very low genetic variations making them vulnerab
