Page 134 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Life cycle assessment and agriculture: challenges and prospects

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in its projection for agriculture 121
going forward to 2030 and 2050, suggests there could be a major food crisis looming: ‘If no
corrective action is taken, the target set by the World Food Summit in 1996 (that of halving the
number of undernourished people by 2015) is not going to be met’ (FAO 2008). An implication
for LCA is that sustainability metrics that already have human health endpoints may need to
incorporate effects of global supply chain on access to food, shelter and other basic needs.
Extending the debate further into the realm of social context, LCA studies need to inform
and be informed by social factors. For example, even where LCA suggests that lower overall
impacts may arise from a particular application of organic farming, this conclusion combined
with a growing interest in organic and other less intensive agriculture may not be enough to
change practice effectively and quickly. Habits, perception and social practice are linked to
norms, values capacities, institutional frameworks and infrastructure, and a systemic focus on
short-term production creates a blind spot over the need for long-term maintenance and stew-
ardship (Hill 1998). The need for LCA in agriculture is perhaps greater than in other sectors,
given the complexity, variability and lack of previous attention, and new LCA will be most
effective in driving change when it is linked to applied socioeconomic assessment and research
techniques to support policy development.
Economics also often dominates the ‘gap’ between LCA-based environmental optimisation
and reality. The example of LCA of maize farming and corn chips production neatly illustrates
a significant problem likely to be applicable across many agricultural systems; a significant
contribution to the total greenhouse gas impacts occur before the farm gate where the economic
value is low and the returns marginal, whereas most of the value addition occurs beyond the
farm gate. Hence, in non-vertically integrated production systems, there is a mismatch between
the capacity of the economic unit to respond to the need to reduce agricultural impact and the
impact itself. Due to this economic situation and a range of other institutional and structural
factors, the innovation capacity among agricultural producers is typically lower than in the
‘value-adding’ food processing industries.
In a future economic system where there is more attempt to internalise environmental
impacts (e.g. through carbon trading or taxes), economic decisions may be made increasingly
along LCA lines. The local implications could be socially and economically severe. For example,
in Victoria, which is a significant exporter of dairy products high in embodied greenhouse gas
emissions, there is an effective and significant export of greenhouse gases taking place.
Economic forces may lead to a reshaping of this pattern, heralding a climate-optimised system
of farming that is centred around rural carbon management rather than food production.
Key questions are: what is the limiting factor in the future world? Is it land, or greenhouse
gas emissions or water? In Australia it is probably the latter two, but this may vary from region
to region. LCA must therefore develop in order to be geographically and locationally specific
enough to provide the appropriate answers to the appropriate (limiting) questions of environ-
mental capacity and burden, and become increasingly sophisticated in linking to social, cultural
and economic issues and the appropriate methods by which these are valued and described.
Given the dynamics and importance of agriculture and its impacts on the environment,
there is a clear role for LCA in both ‘conventional’ and ‘new’ agriculture, providing as it does a
powerful framework for assessing which of the many uses of biomass/crops lead to maximum
benefits to society in terms of functionality and displacement of unsustainable practices.
However, it is also clear that the bio-economy is not going to replace the fossil-based economy
on a one-to-one ratio. Sharing the world’s renewable production capacity among all human
needs and wants is going to require restructuring the way we consume products and services,
with implications beyond agriculture.

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