On this page: case stories illustrating key issues in the future of food
- Agriculture is about much more than increasing yields
- The future of agriculture lies in agroecological farming and triple-bottom line business practices
- Reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is dangerous and not sustainable
- Food security and reducing poverty depends on protecting smallholders’ access to and control over resources
- Fair local, regional and global trading regimes can build local economies, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods
- Strengthening the resilience of agricultural systems improves capacity to respond to environmental crises
- Better governance mechanisms, accommodating democratic participation by a wide range of stakeholders, are essential
- Additional stories and resources
Key Issues with case stories
1. Agriculture is about much more than increasing yields: it requires integration of social, cultural, political and environmental knowledge , including farmers’ knowledge. In Brazil, for example, Belo Horizonte’s award-winning participatory Food Security Program (PDF) links urban consumers to small-scale farmers, achieving dramatic decreases in infant mortality, improved health and nutrition of schoolchildren; increased profits and income stability for small-scale and organic farmers; and advances in both rural and urban social sustainability.
2. The future of agriculture lies in agroecological farming and triple-bottom line business practices. For example, a large project in ecological pest management is transforming small farms in eastern Africa, spreading the approach in farmer-to-farmer field schools: "Push-Pull" in Kenya (PDF). In Benin (PDF), conversion to organic cotton offers rural communities good health, stable income and environmental recovery, in contrast to acute pesticide poisonings, market vulnerability and indebtedness suffered by industrial cotton farmers.
3. Reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is dangerous and not sustainable; short-term technical fixes do not address complex challenges. The extractive approach and methods of industrial agriculture have exhausted and degraded the natural resource base on which human survival depends; it is now approaching a dead end. Similarly, much-hyped new technological fixes (GMOs) cannot address complex challenges and are making things worse for the rural poor. Five stories illustrate the problem:
• Destructive algal blooms (PDF) from excessive fertilizer use in the birthplace of the Green Revolution in Mexico.
• Massive overuse of fertilizers in the American Mid-West pollutes the Mississippi river and Gulf of Mexico: plankton production surges and dies back, consuming oxygen, killing marine life and ruining local shrimp production (PDF) and livelihoods of Louisiana fishing communities.
• Devastating effects on the local economy and livelihoods for farmers growing genetically engineered cotton (PDF) in South Africa.
• "Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination." From "Monsanto's Harvest of Fear," Vanity Fair, May 2008. (PDF).
• Toxic Trail (PDF summary), a television documentary broadcast on BBC World, follows the flow of pesticides from Thailand into Cambodia where they threaten human health and the environment. The documentary also looks at how farmers are learning about ecology and discovering how to produce crops with less pesticides, often eliminating these toxic chemicals altogether.
4. Achieving food security and reducing poverty depends on protecting smallholders’ access to and control over resources. Ensuring farmers’ right to operate, and their access to and control over productive resources (land, water, seeds, etc.) and other essentials (infrastructure, credit, markets) achieves far-reaching and long-lasting benefits to local communities and national and regional economies. Community Seed Banks (PDF) in Philippines, for example, give farmers access to and control over seeds and strengthen local seed supply systems, key elements of food sovereignty.
5. Fair local, regional and global trading regimes can build local economies, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods. In Brazil, for example, Café La Selva, a union of 1600 small-scale coffee producers successfully navigates local and international organic coffee markets and returns profits to their own communities, achieving economic and social success.
6. Strengthening the resilience of agricultural systems improves capacity to respond to environmental crises and changing environmental and social conditions. For example, 1,700+ farmers in Mexico measured ecological resilience of conventional and agroecological farming systems and find the latter to be more resistant to hurricane damage (PDF). In the Philippines, the Oray family (PDF) managed to transform its farm from a sugarcane monoculture into an integrated and diversified farm with a variety of animal and plant components, enabling them to survive the collapse of world sugar prices in the mid-1980s, when thousands of seasonal sugar workers lost their jobs and widespread famine resulted.
7. Better governance mechanisms, accommodating democratic participation by a wide range of stakeholders, are essential. One example is Arvari Sansad (PDF), a farmers’ parliament in Rajasthan, India safeguards community efforts to conserve and manage scarce natural resources including water and Indigenous seeds.
Links to additional stories of agriculture solutions and other resources
"Making a killing from hunger: We need to overturn food policy, now!" (PDF) GRAIN, April 2008
Indonesian Farmers Pioneer "Eco-Rice." (PDF)
Africa: Biological control of the cassava mealybug (PDF)
Who Benefits from GM Crops: An analysis of the global performance of GM crops (1996-2006), Friends of the Earth International, January 2007 (PDF of exerpt) Download 98-page full report.
Opinion by Hans Herren, co-chair of the IAASTD and president of the Millennium Institute: Investing in Sustenance.
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