Notes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 204

through checks with secondary data, and by critical review by external reviewers
and experts. We rejected cases from the database on several grounds:

where there was no obvious sustainable agriculture link;

where participation was for direct material incentives (there are doubts that
ensuing improvements persist after such incentives end);

where there was heavy or sole reliance on fossil-fuel derived inputs for
improvement, or on their targeted use alone (this is not necessarily to negate
these projects, but to indicate that they are not the focus of this research);

where the data provided in the questionnaire have been too weak; and

where findings were unsubstantiated by the verification process.

However, we undoubtedly missed many novel, interesting and globally relevant
projects/initiatives. We therefore present conservative estimates of what has been
achieved, over what area, and by how many farmers. See Pretty and Hine, 2001.
7 The largest country representations in the 208 project dataset are India
(23 projects/initiatives); Uganda (20); Kenya (17); Tanzania (10); China (8);
the Philippines (7); Malawi (6); Honduras, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Burkina Faso
and Ethiopia (5); and Bangladesh (4). The projects and initiatives range very
widely in scale - from 10 households on 5 hectares in one project in Chile to
200,000 farmers on 10.5 million hectares in southern Brazil.
8 The total arable land comprises some 1600 million hectares in 1995/
1997, of which 388 million hectares are in industrialized countries, 267 million
hectares in transition countries, and 960 million hectares in developing countries
(see FAO, 2000a).
9 We found some 8.64 million small farmers practising sustainable farming
on 8.33 million hectares, and 349,000 larger farmers in Argentina, Brazil and
Paraguay farming with zero-tillage methods on 21 million hectares.
10

Sustainable agriculture projects/initiatives -
crop yield changes (89 projects)

7.0

6.0

5.0

maize
sorghum/millet
beans/soya/peas/groundnut
rice
wheat
potato/sweet pot/cassava
cotton
vegetables
no change

4.0

3.0

2.0

1.0

0.0

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000

yields before/without project (kg/ha)

Source: Pretty and Hine, 2001; Pretty et al, 2002

Figure 4.1 Sustainable Agriculture Projects/Initiatives - Crop-Yield Changes
(89 Projects)