New inputs

Unless we look anew at agriculture in terms of the balances between wider benefits and impacts and link this to current and future societal drivers, we will continue to pay lip service to the concept of sustainability without ever developing ways to achieve it, they argue. Part of the problem in facing the future is the remarkable past achievements. In recent decades there has been a huge growth in agricultural production, with increases in food supplies across many regions of the world since the beginning of the 1960s. In one of the papers, Jules Pretty, at the University of Essex, writes that, since then, aggregate world food production has grown 145 per cent. In Africa it rose by 140 per cent, in Latin America by almost 200 per cent and in Asia by 280 per cent. The greatest increases have been in China, where a five-fold increase occurred, mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. In industrialized countries, production started from a higher base; yet still doubled in the US over 40 years and grew by 68 per cent in Western Europe. Over the same period, world population has grown from three billion to more than six billion, imposing an increasing impact of the human footprint on the Earth as consumption patterns change. Although per capita agricultural production has outpaced population growth for each person today, there is an additional 25 per cent more food compared with 1960. But these figures also mask regional differences. While Africa has increased production overall, per capita figures reveal that the continent is producing 10 per cent less today compared with 1960. Concern about sustainability in agricultural systems centre on the need to develop technologies and practices that do not have adverse effects on environmental goods and services, are accessible to and effective for farmers, and lead to improvements in food productivity, in contrast to many recent agricultural developments. Many researchers now believe that urgent new approaches are needed that will integrate biological and ecological processes into food production, minimize the use of those non-renewable inputs that cause harm to the environment or to the health of farmers and consumers. There is also concern to make productive use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, to substitute human capital for costly external inputs, and make productive use of people's capacities to work together to solve common agricultural and natural resource problems, such as for pest, …