CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This article shows that both the energy performance and the greenhouse gases emissions of agriculture, which are closely linked, suffered a significant worldwide change during the last five decades. Despite differences in estimation methods, the reviewed articles showed that energy-use intensity and energy-use efficiency of developing and developed countries radically differed. In the case of Argentina, agriculture expanded at the expense of natural forests and rangelands; but, at the same time, the energy productivity per hectare increased as a consequence of the increasing use of energy-depending inputs and the introduction of modern management practices. Although the consumption of fossil energy increased, there was a noticeable improvement of its efficiency. Results show that 0.91, 0.62 and 0.56 GJ were used in average to get 1 GJ of product during the decades of 1960, 1980 and 2000, respectively. Together with land use change, the increasing use of fossil energy by agriculture in Argentina during that period represented an increase in GHG emissions from around 0.98 to 2.44 Mg of CO2-eq per hectare. However, the energy use intensity of the Argentine agriculture is still considerably lower (9.00 GJ ha-1 year-1), and its energy use efficiency higher (0.56 Gj GJ-1) in comparison with figures (>100.00 GJ ha-1 year-1 and >1.00 Gj GJ-1, respectively) provided by countries producing under more intensive schemes. Although it is unlikely that these differences can decisively affect the current figures of GHG emissions at the global scale, the evidence shows that Argentina and other middle-income countries pursued (perhaps unintentionally) a technological trajectory that enabled a minimization of GHG emissions per unit of food-energy production. Beyond speculations, this fact seems to be relevant in a world that will increasingly be threatened by the expanding food demand of a growing human population.