The Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority has unveiled a new agricultural development plan targeted at enhancing the efficiency of sustainable farming. This step was recently taken by the developed nation after the recent COP 26 held at Glasgow, UK as part of the Sustainable Agriculture Policy Action agenda of Cop26.
According to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs, and chairman of the board of directors of ADAFSA, “The comprehensive plan for agricultural sustainability supports the UAE’s Net-Zero by 2050 strategic Initiative, and is in line with global trends to promote climate-smart agriculture and the food production”.
He also told the reporters,” The climate neutrality initiative contributes to promoting sustainable development and supports innovation, technology localisation, the development of modern farming techniques, food security, and the conservation of natural resources”.
By switching to smart agriculture the UAE wants to take down two birds with one stone that is they want to decrease the emissions as well as reduce their reliance on water while farming. However, achieving a massive reduction of emissions by just switching to Sustainable agriculture is like trying to put out a fire with a cup of water.
To put the facts straight in 2020 only 1.366 % of UAE’s Population is in the agriculture sector which would mean that the emissions from their agricultural sector are way lower than from the emissions from agricultural superpowers like India and Brazil. Secondly according to the Statistics from statista.com, In 2020 though UAE emitted 15.9 metric tonnes of Co2 per capita it is still way more compared to India 1.77 metric tonnes or even China’s 7.41 metric tonnes.
And this is not just related to the United Arab Emirates many of the developed nations emit a higher amount of Co2 and other Greenhouse Gases compared to many of the developing nations and even the underdeveloped nations.
Hence they should more or less bring changes that can totally change the whole lifestyle of their citizens to reduce their carbon footprint as they hold a bigger responsibility and have the means to fulfill it when it comes to carbon footprints compared to the developing nations.
And although policies that affect 1% of their nations looks good on paper and is actually a worthy effort towards achieving net-zero. It won’t help much in the long run if they don’t implement policies that cover a wider part of their population.
