Targets to increase food production: One Health implications

摘要

There is an unprecedented pressure being placed on the planet to sustain population growth (1) which brings associated challenges. When examining land use and trade off of ecosystem services (i.e. the outputs of the ecosystem from which people derive benefits), there is a balance to be struck in relation to food production and infectious disease mediation (2). The effects on land use and ecosystem services are likely to include increased pressures of agricultural intensification through stocking density of food-producing animals, maximisation of crop yields, and the replacement of semi-natural habitats with agricultural systems that almost exclusively focus on producing food while ignoring other ecosystem services, for example, infectious disease mediation, protection of biodiversity, or climate change regulation. It has been proposed that intensive food production systems that reduce biodiversity may facilitate the emergence and proliferation of zoonotic infections with a number of examples outlined by Jones et al. (3) including pathogenic Escherichia coli and Cryptosporidium parvum. The biodiversity dilution hypothesis appears to be context and zoonotic dependent as there is no consistent pattern across all pathogens and parasites (4, 5). However, the association of agricultural intensification, in conjunction with environmental change, with zoonotic disease emergence appears to be consistent (3). The balance between food production and infectious disease mediation, as ecosystem services, within the One Health paradigm merits further discussion in the context of the pressures on current and future agricultural production systems.