The idea that increasing agricultural productivity will free up land for biodiversity and solve global hunger is gaining popularity in Europe and beyond. In Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie argued that “If we can find ways to produce enough food on less cropland we can preserve more habitat for the world’s wildlife.” In December 2022, Dutch MP Nilüfer Gündoğan claimed that thanks to agricultural intensification, “in Europe alone, we could give 75 per cent of our agricultural surface back to nature, without this leading to cold winters, food shortages, economic scarcity.”

Many conservation biologists, however, contested that approach, asserting that biodiversity depends on complex interactions across different land use types. An insect, for example, does not respect artificial boundaries, and its ability to survive is therefore influenced by the biodiversity conditions of both farmed and unfarmed land. Matters are made worse for biodiversity when farmed areas are characterised by monocultures with high pesticide and herbicide use, as is often the case in the land sparing model. In such contexts, local extinctions are more likely to become permanent. A virtuous model would therefore privilege the ecological quality of farmed landscapes over maximising productivity, while also combating the drivers of deforestation.

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This idea is at the basis of agroecology with its political, social, and scientific practices of sustainability. Genuine ecologists should work in this direction instead of promoting a simplistic understanding of the food system.

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