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Agriculture is facing three major problems and

choices:
1.Ecology/Technology: Which technology to base
the future of world agriculture on? As the
chemical-based model is faltering, the private
sector and global establishment are looking to
genetic engineering as the way ahead. But all
the signs are that ecological farming is
superior, not only for the environment, but
also for gains in productivity and farmers
incomes. It has not been given the chance to
prove itself. It should be.


2. The global economic framework: The
economic environment has turned
extremely bad for developing countries
small farmers.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World
Bank structural adjustment has put
pressure on poor countries to liberalise
food imports and abandon subsidies and
government marketing boards.
Commodity prices have slumped.
The World Trade Organization
(WTO) Agreement on Agriculture
(AoA) enables rich countries to
raise their subsidies and set up
astonishingly high tariffs, while
punishing developing countries
(which cannot increase their
subsidies, and which have to
liberalise their imports further).


All three issues have to be resolved,
and in an integrated way, if sustainable
agriculture is to be realised. Otherwise
there will be an absolute catastrophe,
especially if the wrong choices are made.
The debate over sustainable agriculture has gone
beyond the health and environmental benefits
that it could bring in place of conventional
industrial agriculture. For one thing, conventional
industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on oil,
which is running out; it is getting increasingly
unproductive as the soil is eroded and depleted.
Climate change will force us to adopt sustainable,
low input agriculture to ameliorate its worst
consequences, and to genuinely feed the world.
Biophysical (the long-term effects of
various practices on soil properties and
processes essential for crop productivity)
Socio-economic (the long-term ability of
farmers to obtain inputs and manage
resources such as labor).
The physical aspects of sustainability
are partly understood.

Practices that can
cause long-term damage to soil include
excessive tillage (leading to erosion ) and
irrigation without adequate drainage
(leading to salinization). Long-term
experiments have provided some of the
best data on how various practices affect
soil properties essential to sustainability.
Altieri, Miguel A. (1995) Agroecology: The science of
sustainable agriculture. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Although air and sunlight are available
everywhere on Earth, crops also depend on
soil nutrients and the availability of water.
When farmers grow and harvest crops, they
remove some of these nutrients from the
soil. Without replenishment, land suffers
from nutrient depletion and becomes either
unusable or suffers from reduced yields.
Sustainable agriculture depends on
replenishing the soil while minimizing
the use of non-renewable resources,
such as natural gas (used in converting
atmospheric nitrogen into synthetic
fertilizer), or mineral (e.g., phosphate).

Socioeconomic aspects of sustainability
are also partly understood. Regarding less
concentrated farming, the best known analysis
is Netting's study on smallholder systems
through history.
Sustainable agriculture was also addressed by
the 1990 farm bill.

Netting, Robert McC. (1993) Smallholders, Householders: Farm
Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture.
Stanford Univ. Press, Palo Alto.