UN report: Farmers must be enlisted in agroecological-innovation efforts

Participants in the international Bellagio conference on sustainable agriculture in April of this year include, faculty members from Cornell, Norman Uphoff (front row at far left); Alison Power (front row, fourth from right); Alice Pell (back row, fourth from right); and Erick Fernandes (back row, sixth from right). Photo courtesy Bellagio Study and Conference Center

By Olivia Vent

Farm families living on the edge in the developing world don't need to be food-deficient or as poor as they are today, according to a report from a conference organized by Norman Uphoff, director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD).

Representatives from other universities, international agricultural research centers, non-governmental organizations, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank issued a report, Alternatives to Conventional Modern Agriculture for Meeting World Food Needs in the Next Century, in early October about the springtime conference on Sustainable Agriculture. Along with Uphoff, the conference was also organized by Miguel Altieri, of the University of California, Berkeley, and it was hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation at its conference center in Bellagio, Italy.

"What we wanted to achieve at Bellagio was a better understanding of which agroecologically based systems of agriculture can be expected to make major contributions to world food supply in the future," said Uphoff. "If these systems are simply greener than modern practices, they will not be able to help meet global food security needs."

In 30 to 50 years, farmers around the world will need to produce twice as much food as they do now. The success of capital-intensive agriculture, with its reliance on mechanization and fossil fuels for both power and agrochemicals, has created a presumption in governments, research institutions and donor agencies, that "more of the same" is the best, and may be the only strategy for increasing world food production.

However, an estimated one billion people -- one-sixth of the world's population, and a much greater percentage of the poor -- live and work under conditions where their farming, herding or fishing operations cannot benefit much from mainstream modern agricultural technologies.

Even in some of the world's better-endowed areas, the sustainability of industrial agriculture is now in doubt. Water depletion and soil erosion have already emerged as serious problems, according to the report. For example, falling water tables in the Indian Punjab, North China plains, and in the Great Plains on this continent could shut down "thirsty" production practices in the decades ahead. Moreover, mainstream modern agriculture has sometimes become a threat to the environment where chemical dependence and large-scale monoculture prevail.

Conference participants looked at a wide range of agricultural technologies and practices, devised often under unfavorable conditions, throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. They found that where local ideas and resources were combined with agroecological principles and scientific knowledge, the innovations led to considerably increased yields and income, as well as enhanced land and water conservation. A number of the technologies increased production well beyond subsistence, potentially contributing to food security and the ability to feed growing urban populations. Other benefits included access to a more diverse diet and greater empowerment of rural people.

The reports says that such grassroots technologies will not achieve national scope and impact without supportive policies and institutional arrangements. From an economic point of view, directing policy and infrastructure investments toward so-called marginal areas is justified by growing evidence that the returns-to-investment are proportionately higher on average than in the more advantaged areas, provided the investments are not too scattered or sporadic.

The case studies presented at the conference demonstrated that rural people can be enlisted in a more knowledge-intensive agricultural modernization and that their capabilities have been historically underestimated. "The technologies of the post-Green Revolution era will require extensive contributions from social and biological scientists," said Uphoff. "But they are likely to be better adapted to local conditions and to be more widely adopted if the knowledge and experience of farmers is the starting point for making innovations."