Sustainability vs. food security: A sterile debate.

In recent decades, the debate centered on the environmental cost of feeding the now more than nine billion people has intensified, because ensuring food security for an ever-growing population inevitably impacts the environment. This is a bill saddled with the agricultural sector, which is required to produce ever more while simultaneously being required to pollute ever less.

For more than 10,000 years, to ensure food production, agriculture has necessarily altered the world's ecology in various ways, whether through the modification of the plant species we feed on, through the invasion of ecological systems in order to expand the agricultural and livestock frontier, and, since the second half of the 20th century, through the introduction of agrochemicals that improve productivity but whose indiscriminate use contaminates soil and water.

Today we understand that, to achieve more efficient agricultural production, all domesticated plants and animals have had to be genetically manipulated by humans, either empirically or through the development and application of technical and scientific knowledge. We also know today that productivity depends not so much on the expansion of the agricultural frontier as on the introduction of more efficient processes, and that many of these processes can be replaced with good practices that reduce or eliminate negative impacts.

So far, humanity has managed to sustain sufficient food production (economic and social access for all is another story), but we must also recognize that rising demand for food jeopardizes the fragile balance between productivity and sustainability.

Increased agricultural production and the conservation of diverse ecosystems are not mutually exclusive objectives. To achieve this, it is necessary to recognize that respecting protected areas, safeguarding forests and jungles, and avoiding the contamination of soils, rivers, and seas are ultimately necessary actions for sustainable development—development that guarantees food production in the present and in the future, reducing and, if possible, eliminating the negative impact of agricultural activities on the environment, in other words, achieving the necessary balance between these two areas.

If this balance is maintained, we will be able to produce food for current demand and ensure sufficient supplies for future generations. While it is true that this is only possible with the participation of all stakeholders, it is also true that it must begin with state action, through public policies and, where appropriate, regulatory and legal frameworks for environmental and agricultural matters. From the outset, authorities from both sectors should work in absolute coordination, shifting unilateral positions toward a shared vision. We must recognize that what exists today is imperfect competition between the institutions responsible for both issues.

Nor can we ignore the pressures exerted by different sectors of society. On the one hand, there are environmental groups that advocate for halting extensive agriculture and livestock farming and the uncontrolled capture of fish in rivers and seas, as well as poor agricultural practices, but who ultimately deny the advances that allow us to produce the food that the population consumes. On the other hand, there are producers of all kinds, who throughout the production chain pressure to continue offering a wide variety of foods, and consumers, who also pressure to obtain them; that is, often at the expense of sustainable development.

Both positions, taken to extremes, are unrealistic and unsustainable. Hence the importance of public policies and political decisions aimed at preventing such extremes from escalating and seeking sensible, intermediate positions that allow for a balance between the two objectives: food security and sustainable development.

The only activity that, to date, allows us to transform natural resources into food is agriculture. For this to be sustainable and, at the same time, more efficient, we will need to introduce far-reaching improvements in production systems, allowing for increased production in areas already designated for this purpose, preserving soil health and using less water per unit produced, among other measures. To achieve this, we will need to leverage applied science in agriculture.

Scientific innovations and developments have shown that we can produce all the food we need if we use the tools available to us today, which are even more necessary in countries with food shortages, like ours.

The good traditional agricultural practices applied by our farmers, combined with the advances offered by artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, the bioeconomy, and biotechnology, including the powerful CRISPR-Cas tool, will allow Mexican agriculture to respond to the challenge posed by our reality: producing more to guarantee food security while maintaining the balance of ecosystems. This challenge is real; the choice of choosing one path or another is not.

To overcome this challenge, a policy is needed that entails the acceptance and regulated use of scientific and technological advances, unhindered by mere ideological positions, which translate into overregulation or prohibitions of tools that would help us solve our food dependency problems. For example, allowing access to various advances in biotechnology applied to agriculture while following the biosafety guidelines the country already has.