Who is responsible for farming’s impact on the environment

Subject : Environment

Section: Agri and SD

Introduction:

The expansion of international trade has created global supply chains, directly linking consumers to geographically distant impacts, including carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, soil degradation and labour-rights issues – all of which have local, regional, and global relevance.
Due to its vast size and consumer market, India is a global anchor of the trade in agricultural products.

Food-based impact accounting:

Large land areas in India are used to service the international demand for food products, which puts pressure on national soil and water resources.
Similarly, India’s vast consumer market means that large amounts of land, even outside its borders, are used to satisfy domestic demand, which led to an increase in the environmental pressure in the exporting countries.
Measuring impacts and allocating responsibility is based on a production-based accounting method: it measures impacts in the place where the products are produced. But, there are concerns about its limitations in managing ‘leaks’, fixing accountability, and ensuring equity and justice among producers and consumers.
Another alternative is consumption-based accounting.

Consumption-based accounting:

It accounts for impact at the point of consumption, attributing all the social and environmental impacts that occurred during production and trade to the final products and to the eventual consumers.
This approach calls to adopt sustainable consumption practices as a form of environmental action.
It highlights the responsibility of industrialised states to mitigate the impact of climate change and the rights of developing economies to not carry an excessive burden.
This is an extension of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities that make up global climate governance.

What is the demand perspective?

Developed countries are the largest consumers so they are responsible for any consequences that occur during the production process.
It also includes the issue of equity and justice surrounding the issue of historical responsibility.
Studies suggest that developing economies like India have contributed only 23% of global cumulative emissions and are responsible for about 20-40% of the global average temperature rise since the preindustrial era.

Benefits of environmental action?

The European Commission recently initiated steps to ensure products consumed in the European Union have not contributed to deforestation in their country of origin.
India has a unique position in this regard, as India is a major consumer as well as a major producer of agricultural products.