17
Rethinking Agriculture for New
Opportunities
Erick Fernandes, Alice Pell and Norman Uphoff
Over the last 30 years, the creation and exploitation of new genetic potentials of cereal
crops, leading to what is called the Green Revolution, has saved hundreds of millions
of people around the world from extreme hunger and malnutrition, and tens of mil-
lions from starvation. However, these technologies for improving crop yields have not
been maintaining their momentum. The rate of yield increase for cereals worldwide
- around 2.4 per cent in the 1970s and 2 per cent in the 1980s – was only about 1 per
cent in the 1990s. Although the global food production system has performed well in
recent decades, will further support of conventional agricultural research and exten-
sion programmes increase yields sufficiently to meet anticipated demand?
The next doubling of food production will have to be accomplished with less
land per capita and with less water than is available now (Postel, 1996). The gains
needed in the productive use of land and water are so great that both genetic
improvements and changes in management will be required. The world needs
continuing advances on the genetic front; however, food production is more often
limited by environmental conditions and resource constraints than by genetic
potential. Preoccupation with the methods that brought us the Green Revolution
can divert attention from opportunities that can increase food supply without
adversely affecting the environment, which are considered in this book.
Given appropriate research, policies, institutions and support, food produc-
tion could be doubled with the existing genetic bases. Many of the needed advances
in food production could be achieved by developing agricultural systems that cap-
italize more systematically on biological and agroecological dynamics rather than
by relying so much on agrochemicals, mechanical and petrochemical energy and
genetic modification.^1 This will require, however, some rethinking of what consti-
tutes agriculture.
Although it has been argued that agricultural output will decline if ‘modern’
agriculture is not promoted to the maximum (e.g. Avery, 1995), ‘lowtech’
Reprinted from Fernandes E, Pell A and Uphoff N. 2002. Rethinking agriculture for new opportuni-
ties, in Uphoff N (ed) Agroecological Innovations, Earthscan, London, pp21–39.