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Agriculture's
future
| Over 70 percent of
the world’s poorest people depend on agriculture <<
Back [ Symposia]
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A lecture given on
World Food Day 2005 sponsored by Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Basel Switzerland
About the Symposium:
The recently released Millennium ecosystem assessment
(MA) provides ample proof that in meeting current demands
for food and other provisioning, serious and unsustainable
damage has been done to the majority of the world’s
ecosystems. Agriculture is seen both as one of the principal
activities causing this damage and as the main means
for developing better and more sustainable land and
water use systems.
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization,
the International Food Policy Research Institute and
the MA tell us that the demand for the full range of
ecosystem services will rise and possibly double over
the next generation. Additionally, over 70 percent of
the world’s poorest people depend on agriculture and
other landscape management for their livelihoods; many
studies have shown that investment in productive agriculture
is one of the most efficient ways to reduce poverty
and bring benefits directly to poor people.
The challenge is:
Agriculture will have to deliver more food and other
ecosystem services for more people using less land and
water resources and causing less ecosystem degradation.
Despite this clear need to increase production, deliver
new products and improve the productivity and efficiency
of agriculture there is disagreement over how best and
where this might be done.
» Who will decide?
» What have we learnt?
» What are the options?
» What do we need to know?
» Where should these issues be discussed and resolved?
University of Essex’s Jules Pretty and Senior Syngenta
Fellow Paul Hendley look at each of these questions
– from perspectives of civil society, non-government
environmental organizations and agri-industry, respectively.
Followed by questions from the floor.
watch
the videos online
Hosted by the Syngenta Foundation. |
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