A vital part of accomplishing sustainability goals is agriculture. Regenerative agriculture integrates and solves two of the biggest challenges the world is now facing: the need to provide an adequate supply of nutritious food and repair ecosystems that have been affected by human activities. By using excellent techniques, it may achieve the goal of feeding the world's population without harming the soils and instead help restore and maintain their productivity.
The core tenets of regenerative agriculture focus on resource conservation and include techniques like direct seeding, using crop waste as natural fertiliser, cover crops, integrating pest and nutrient management, crop rotation, and integrating agriculture with forestry and livestock. If these concepts are put into place, agriculture will stop using fossil fuels as a source of energy for irrigation, ploughing fields, or the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides.
In the Caribbean, soil quality, climate change, and agriculture are all interconnected. In order to produce abundant harvests, healthy soil is necessary, yet droughts, floods, and storms all have a detrimental impact on the quality of soil and crops. The cost of inactivity on climate change, according to the St. Lucian government, is expected to reach 12.1% of GDP by 2025, 24.5% by 2050, and 49.1% by 2100.
Moreover, deforestation, excessive grassing, and activities like gold and bauxite mining in the Caribbean regions have all contributed to the soil's detrimental impacts. The region's widespread use of traditional agricultural practices, including tilling, deep root removal, slash-and-burn farming, and indiscriminate use of synthetic fertilisers, is also harmful and has severely degraded the soil.
Given that the Caribbean is being disproportionately affected by climate change and unsafe methods of using agro-methods, achieving regenerative agriculture objectives will reduce atmospheric carbon, directly help farmers, increase food and water security, and have a largely beneficial influence on state economies.
As a result, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and the government collaborated with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to build capacity, resilience, and mobilise resources to deal with natural disasters.
The all-around approach, which is provided by protecting organisations, namely shows how good soil affects climate change and decreases natural disasters by absorbing CO2.
Enhancing soil carbon levels offers a significant potential to buck present global patterns of atmospheric CO2 buildup since soil can hold onto carbon for longer and sequester it more than the atmosphere and plants combined.
Regenerating land into a resource that is both socially and environmentally responsible is one of the main goals of regenerative agriculture in the Caribbean too. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), more than 14% of the world's 2 billion hectares of degraded land are located in Latin America and the Caribbean. These areas make up more than one-fifth of the region's woods and farmland.
Thus, locals might switch to widely accessible and affordable organic management techniques, such as organic farming, regular grazing animal rotation, integrating trees, forage, and domesticated animal grazing, planting perennial crops, and agroforestry.
The Caribbean region offers significant promise for improving the diverse range of soil types found there as well as for restoring damaged areas. Regenerative agriculture may successfully achieve carbon neutrality for the area while enhancing food security, minimising negative effects on water supplies, and providing healthy soils, which require less water to produce the same amount of food.
Market leaders have made regenerative agriculture a priority. These initiatives are becoming more prevalent throughout the Caribbean. Companies like Sol Simple, Guayaki, and Rizoma Agro are leading the way in the region's successful regenerative models in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and they have created methodologies and certifications to help guide regenerative practices like the Regenerative Organic Certification and Savory Institute's EOV. Millions of tonnes of carbon have been removed from the atmosphere thanks to the Face Rio Bravo initiative and the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project. A sand mining business in Barbados called Walker's Reserve is being transformed into an integrated, regenerative food system.
Regenerative agriculture is rapidly advancing in the Caribbean area owing to the voluntary efforts of multinational businesses to protect the environment, the efforts of the government, and the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. Locals now have more access to clean water, overall poverty has decreased by 27%, islands have objectives to stop land degradation, and domestic and international corporate capital is becoming more interested in investing in land management.