Sourced from: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38699&Cr=food&Cr1=production
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently announced the launch of a major new initiative intended to produce more food for a growing world population in an environmentally sustainable way.
FAO’s call for sustainable crop production intensification, more than half a century after the Green Revolution of the 1960s, is contained in a new book, Save and Grow, published by FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.
Green Revolution technology saved an estimated one billion people from famine and produced more than enough food for a world population that doubled from three to six billion between 1960 and 2000.
The new approach calls for targeting mainly smallholder farmers in developing countries. Helping low-income farm families in developing countries – some 2.5 billion people – economize on cost of production and build healthy agro-ecosystems will enable them to maximize yields and invest the savings in their health and education.
The agency has noted that there is no option but to further intensify crop production in order to feed a world population projected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050.
To eradicate hunger and meet demand by 2050, food production needs to increase by 70 per cent in the world and 100 per cent in developing countries, it adds.
Other techniques developed by FAO and its partners over the past several years as part of the Save and Grow toolkit include precision irrigation, which delivers more crop for the drop, and “precision placement” of fertilizers, which can double the amount of nutrients absorbed by plants.
The new approach also draws partly on conservation agriculture (CA) techniques which do away with or minimize ploughing and tilling, thus preserving soil structure and health.
“Such methods help adapt crops to climate change and not only help grow more food but also contribute to reducing crops’ water needs by 30 per cent and energy costs by up to 60 per cent,” notes FAO.
The new approach, the agency also points out, will require significant support to farmers so they can learn the new practices and technologies, while governments will also need to strengthen national plant-breeding programmes and overall domestic and foreign investments to the agriculture sector need to be increased.
