Excerpt
AGRICULTURAL sustainability is not a new or innovative A development concept for feeding the world's people. On the contrary, agricultural sustainability has been around as long as people and civilizations have relied on agriculture for their livelihood. Recently, however, achieving agricultural sustainability in developing countries has taken on an urgent context as frightening new elements have entered the picture of global food security: vast and growing degradation of the world's natural resource base and increasing pressures on those resources from booming population growth.
The challenge these pressures pose to global agriculture is great: the world will have 40 percent more people to feed within the next two decades—on a land area rapidly diminishing because of erosion, waterlogging, salinization, and loss of fertility. Never before have the prospects for feeding the world been so problematic and so urgent.
The global transition to agricultural sustainability promises to be a long and difficult process, in part because many people have yet to grasp an overriding sense of the importance, or what sustainability means, whose problem it is, and how it can be …
Footnotes
Robert O. Blake is chairman of the Committee on Agricultural Sustainability for Developing Countries and senior fellow of World Resources Institute, 1709 New York Avenue. N.W., Washington, DC. 20006.
- Copyright 1990 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
This article requires a subscription to view the full text. If you have a subscription you may use the login form below to view the article. Access to this article can also be purchased.