TY - JOUR T1 - Nine questions most often asked about global agricultural sustainability JF - Journal of Soil and Water Conservation SP - 460 LP - 462 VL - 45 IS - 4 AU - Robert O. Blake Y1 - 1990/07/01 UR - http://www.jswconline.org/content/45/4/460.abstract N2 - 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 … ER -