Hearings
About the WCFSD
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Hon. Chancellor, Mr. President, Dean McLaughlin, Graduates, Invited guests,
It is a great honor for me to be chosen for this distinguished award. Personally it is a matter of great pride and encouragement. But more important it is a public acknowledgement by a renowned academic institution that the world's forest situation needs our urgent attention.
Why has the University of Guelph with no forest school and no obligatory forest related courses, chosen to reward efforts in finding solutions to the forest crisis? To me it makes a lot of sense that you have.
We tend to think of forests as primarily a source of wood. But they have many other functions as well. Forests are the Earth's largest terrestrial ecosystem. They form the largest habitat of plants and animals on land. They are crucial for the supply of water and indeed for the Earth's climate. They sustain a body of genetic information that defines the survival of various forms of life. So, of course forests have everything to do with your areas of agriculture and environmental related sciences.
You who are graduating from this great university today have chosen a profession that make you the new custodians of how the earth's land are being divided between different uses, how natural resources are being managed and how food is being produced. It is a challenging task.
Not only are the forests, vital as they are for their ecological and other services, disappearing by the millions of hectares every year. We are also witnessing a population increase among the poor that is historically unparalleled in numbers and an equally rapid increase in consumption among the rich. At the same time we are losing productive land at an alarming speed. If today is a typical day in the life of Mother Earth, during the last 24 hours we have lost 11 000 hectares of arable land while the world's population has grown by 210 000 more people.
Even if the numbers are bigger than ever before, the trend as such is not new. During the century leading up to 1874, when the University of Guelph was founded, the world's population doubled, and consumption among the few rich soared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. But the world is full now. Today's population and consumption growth is far more difficult to handle. The options open to us for further exploitation are progressively limited: "We are", as a UN report put it recently, " nudging humanity to the outer limits of what the Earth can stand".
Thus, a question that you must have been wrestling with as much as I have is this: with shrinking natural resources, a growing number of people in the South and growing per capita consumption in the North, how do we satisfy the increase in human needs and demands, and how to we prioritize among them, if that is at all possible?
The so called Green Revolution was the response of the sixties and seventies. It averted a looming food crisis in China, India and South East Asia and laid the foundation for the rapid economic growth in parts of the Asian continent. It enabled farmers to grow more food on less land and thus not only saved millions of people from starvation but also saved millions of hectares of forest from being converted to croplands. It was built on a science-based ability to modify the environment in order to create better conditions for crops and livestock than nature alone could offer. With all its environmental shortcomings it was one of the most impressive achievements of our times.
Still, yours will have to be an even better one, an "Evergreen Revolution" (M.S. Swaminathan). There is less land to expand on. We have learned that there are limits to the use of technology by itself to solve the problem of food security. Protection of the environment counts, so does the demand for a fair distribution of resources and gender equality. The paradigms have changed from sustainable yield targets for each commodity to an integrated approach known as sustainable development. Neither agriculture, nor forestry or any other sector can develop in isolation. Emphasis must move to people's total social and economic situation, and to the entire landscape and the integrity of its functions.
There are no short cuts. You can no longer expand agriculture into forest land as we used to. Nor can you leave it to the affluent North to feed the less fortunate South because people earning 2 dollars or less per day cannot afford to pay for imported food. Thus, your Evergreen Revolution will have to be able to produce food where people live, at affordable prices and with a minimum or no damage done to the environment.
I believe that there are ways of achieving this. Those who started the old Green Revolution are full of ideas on how you should plan your Revolution to avoid the mistake they made, and still be able to produce more food. The forest sector will have to do the same thing: intensify wood production on secondary forests and forest plantations in order to meet future demand without further loss of biodiverse primary forests. One key element, of forest policies as well as in agriculture, is making use of the hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded land left behind by poor forest management and unsustainable agricultural practices.
The technology is there and you will all be contributing to new inventions. But sometimes step back and ask yourselves how we ended up in a situation where there is competition between human needs for a stable biosphere and an equally demanding need for food. Does this not have something to do with the way we live, how we produce and how we consume? Have we got our priorities all wrong? Does it have something to do with the way we organize our economic and political systems? Does it have something to do with lack of political will?
I think it does and I think that you are the only ones that can change this and put us on the right track. You represent a new generation with new ideas. You have values that make you see beyond your immediate personal and short-term interest.
We all put a lot of trust in you, and we wish you the very best in your future careers.