The scaling up of agroecology: spreading the hope for food sovereignty and resiliency SOCLA's Rio+20 position paper prepared by Miguel A Altieri, with contributions by (original) (raw)
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Agroecology Scaling Up for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency
The Green Revolution not only failed to ensure safe and abundant food production for all people, but it was launched under the assumptions that abundant water and cheap energy to fuel modern agriculture would always be available and that climate would be stable and not change. In some of the major grain production areas the rate of increase in cereal yields is declining as actual crop yields approach a ceiling for maximal yield potential. Due to lack of ecological regulation mechanisms , monocultures are heavily dependent on pesticides. In the past 50 years the use of pesticides has increased dramatically worldwide and now amounts to some 2.6 million tons of pesticides per year with an annual value in the global market of more than US$ 25 billion. Today there are about one billion hungry people in the planet, but hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity due to lack of production. The world already produces enough food to feed nine to ten billion people, the population peak expected by 2050. There is no doubt that humanity needs an alternative agricultural development paradigm, one that encourages more ecologically, biodiverse, resilient, sustainable and socially just forms of agriculture. The basis for such new systems are the myriad of ecologically based agricultural styles developed by at least 75% of the 1.5 billion smallholders, family farmers and indigenous people on 350 million small farms which account for no less than 50% of the global agricultural output for domestic consumption.
This chapter initially examines general relationships between agricultural activity and environmental change and the level of economic welfare. It then provides a brief account of the historical development of agriculture focusing on its environmental and socioeconomic consequences. The pivotal role of the commencement and evolution of agriculture in economic development is stressed. It is only as a result of agriculture that the current level of the world's population can be sustained. For a considerable amount of time, the world's population has exceeded that which can be sustained by hunting and gathering. A major challenge which agriculture faces in this century is how to increase its production to meet increasing demands for food due to global population increase and rising incomes, and how it can achieve this without causing significant environmental deterioration. Can this be achieved by sustainable agricultural intensification? This is one of the issues discussed. The likely impacts of global change on the level of agricultural production of climate change and the adjustment issues facing agriculture as a result of climate change are major contemporary concerns. The modelling of these aspects is reviewed and some different perspectives are provided to those in the literature, for example, the perspective presented by Mendelsohn and Dinar. The desirability of different types of public policies for responding to the effects of climate change on agriculture are also discussed. Keywords Agricultural adjustment and climate change, agricultural development, agricultural policy and climate change, agricultural production and global warming, agriculture and climate change, sustainable agriculture
As outlined in this chapter, agricultural development has a major ecological and environmental footprint. Nevertheless, agricultural development (together with other biologically based food-supplying industries) is needed to provide enough food for the world's growing level of human population. This chapter begins by discussing the general impacts of agriculture on the environment and the use of natural resources, then considers market failures as influences on the occurrence of agriculture's environmental impacts and its use of natural resources before examining economic factors that affect agricultural sustainability. Subsequently, the implications of agricultural policies for the state of the environment and for the availability of natural resources are outlined.
01-04 "Agriculture in a Global Perspective
In the twenty-first century, it is evident that world agricultural systems will have to supply sufficient food for a population somewhere between 7.5 and 12 billion. Projections for world agriculture in the first half of the twenty-first century very widely, largely depending on assumptions about yield growth. An investigation of the patterns of yield growth for major cereal crops offers evidence that the pattern is logistic, implying that an upper limit to yields is being approached. This pattern is consistent with ecological limits on soil fertility, water availability, and nutrient uptake. It is also evident that current agricultural production is imposing serious strains on ecosystems, with widespread soil degradation, water overdraft and pollution, and ecological impacts such as loss of biodiversity and the proliferation of resistant pest species.