12 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
droughts. These measures were imposed on farmers, who were then monitored
closely to ensure their compliance. In some countries, this meant the compulsory
resettlement of many people to new villages.
This has been the style for many soil conservation programmes. Technologies
known to work under certain conditions are widely used or recommended, and
backed up by local and national policies that give powers to the state to execute
specified improvements on farmers’ fields and to allocate the costs of these improve-
ments between the farmers and the state. In many places, provisions have been
made for compulsory treatment of the fields of farmers refusing land treatment.
This has led to increased alienation with, for example, people uprooting planta-
tions and destroying fencing and conservation measures. The quantitative achieve-
ments of conventional soil conservation programmes can appear impressive.
Throughout the world, terraces have been built, trees planted and farmers trained
on a massive scale. Yet these results have often been short-lived, tending to occur
only within project boundaries and before project completion. If performance is
measured over long periods, the results have been extraordinarily poor for the
amount of effort and money expended: technologies have neither persisted nor
spread independently into non-project areas.
In the second paper, Erick Fernandes and colleagues summarize the types of
transitions effected by the Green Revolution, and then set out a vision for agricul-
ture centred on field-culture, with sensitivities towards patterns in space and time.
Monocultures are often erroneously seen as real agriculture, yet it is polycultures
that have long offered rural people opportunities to maintain on-farm diversity of
products and their functions. Multifunctional systems with many components are
more resilient and meet many needs compared with mono-functional systems.
This chapter sets out four ideas that need revising: that pest control always needs
pesticides, that soil fertility constraints always need chemical fertilizers, that solv-
ing water problems needs new irrigation, and that raising productivity only needs
genetic and breeding approaches. There are many productive opportunities that
can arise by adopting more biological and people-centred approaches to agricul-
tural development and its sustainability.
The third paper is the second of two chapters from Li Wenhua’s 2001 book on
agroecological farming systems in China. This long chapter contains considerable
detail on integrated farming systems at different scales from homestead gardens,
eco-villages, eco-counties and forest shelterbelts. All contain many significant
innovations of relevance to many systems elsewhere in the world. Most rural fam-
ilies in China have very small amounts of land, on average 0.02ha per household,
and so their approaches need to be intensive, make effective use of all resources,
and above all produce enough food. Of particular importance are the sections on
eco-villages and eco-counties. Both represent geographically integrated efforts of
what is called ecological engineering in China.
The benefits of integrated systems for local people and the environment can be
substantial – more income from the vegetables, better and more diverse food, reduced
costs for fertilizers, reduced workload for women, and better living conditions in the