Issues for More Sustainable Soil System Management 363to be evaluated with both data and with sensitivity to the variability and surprises
inherent in the biological realm.
3.2 Applicability to commercial agriculture
The impetus for most of the work that is reported in Part III [of Biological
Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems] was to identify agricultural production prac-
tices and systems that could benefit particularly the kind of impoverished, food-
insecure rural households for whom Sanchez’s ‘second paradigm’ was explicitly
formulated. The needs and opportunities of these fellow citizens of the world have
motivated most of the work of the editorial group throughout our lifetimes, as it
has the research and practice of most of the contributors. However, what has been
learned about biological approaches to enhancing soil system fertility and sustain-
ability is similarly relevant, with appropriate modifications, to large-scale farmers
practising industrialized agriculture.
High-input farming systems are of limited benefit for a majority of the world’s
current farmers who have low incomes and are often isolated, relating to ‘the mar-
ket’ intermittently and seldom on very favourable terms because they lack infor-
mation, bargaining power, and the essential infrastructure and institutions
necessary for effective market participation. Modes of production that reduce their
dependence on capital inputs and thus lower costs of production give them more
opportunity to engage in market exchanges on terms that benefit them.
The vision for second-paradigm agriculture is not perpetual subsistence cultiva-
tion. Instead, it points toward various kinds of intensification that are more remu-
nerative as well as environmentally benign, toward what Conway (1999) has dubbed
‘the doubly green revolution’. Recently, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has called
for ‘a uniquely African “green revolution” for the 21st century’ (Annan, 2004). We
expect that this will depend heavily on the kinds of innovations discussed in this
book. When looking for good examples of productive new approaches for Part III [of
Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems], it was gratifying to see that more
than half of the chapters written were based entirely or in large part on work going
on in Africa. This is an encouraging statistic. Moreover, for small-scale farmers the
increases in profitability accompanying more biologically based production methods
can be even greater than the changes in output, so the socioeconomic benefits from
these methods can be more than the agronomic and environmental ones.
Larger commercial farmers are, at the same time, experiencing cost-price
squeezes that are eroding the profitability even of large-scale operations. The glo-
balization of commodity markets is making even big producers subject to the
vagaries of the market. These larger producers are supported by over $1 billion
day–1 of governmental subsidies, meaning that taxpayers in the richer countries are
encouraging and paying for these inefficiencies. They also have serious negative
externalities for small-scale producers in poorer countries.
As global climatic influences become more variable and extreme, the vagaries of
weather further complicate those of market forces. The more capital that farmers have