8 Agriculture and Food Systems
And diverse approaches are indeed being developed and extended across many dif-
ferent environments and societies, both in developing and industrialized countries.
The next challenge is to get some of these opportunities reflected in national and
international policies.
What is the best way to increase agricultural productivity in developing coun-
tries that still, despite efforts over several decades, have some 800 million people
short of food? The question is controversial, with widely varying positions about
the types of inputs and technologies likely to be effective. Great technological
progress in the past half century has not been reflected in major reductions in
hunger and poverty in developing countries. However, many novel initiatives have
emerged that are demonstrating that agriculture in poor countries can be greatly
improved. In this fifth paper, Jules Pretty and colleagues evaluate how farmers in
286 projects in 57 countries had improved food crop productivity since the early
to mid-1990s, and at the same time increased both water use efficiency and carbon
sequestration and reduced pesticide use. These initiatives also offer the prospects
of resource-conserving agriculture both reducing adverse effects on the environ-
ment and contributing to climate change mitigation. These 286 recent interven-
tions in 57 poor countries covering 37Mha (3 per cent of the cultivated area in
developing countries) had increased productivity on 12.6 million farms whilst
improving the supply of critical environmental services. The average crop yield
increase was 79 per cent (geometric mean 64 per cent). All crops showed water use
efficiency gains, with the highest in rainfed crops. Potential carbon sequestered
amounted to an average of 0.35t C ha–1 y–1. Of projects with pesticide use data, 77
per cent resulted in a decline in pesticide use by 71 per cent whilst yields grew by
42 per cent. Whilst it is uncertain whether these approaches can meet future food
needs, there are grounds for cautious optimism, particularly as poor farm house-
holds benefit more from their adoption.
Part 3: Diet and Health
Eve Balfour’s classic 1940s book, The Living Soil, is seen by many as a key text in
the establishment of the organic movement. She was both a farmer and a thinker,
and contributed substantially to the national understanding of the connections
between farming systems, and the soil on which they are based, and the effects of
food on health. She asks, ‘what shall I eat that I may be whole?’ The types of foods
and the balance between them fundamentally affects our health, and yet for many
decades in the latter part of the 20th century this seems to have been forgotten. In
this chapter, Balfour draws on a variety of cultures to illustrate how important
diets are to health. The first is the people of the Hunza, now part of the northern
areas of Pakistan. They were healthy people at the time, with all their foods locally
derived. Today, they are more connected to external markets, but still rely on a
variety of healthy foods. Other examples in the chapter draw on analysis of Faroe