Food for All - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 84

What is happening to food production? We found that sustainable
agriculture has led to an average 93 per cent increase in per hectare food
production. The relative yield increases are greater at lower yields,
indicating greater benefits for poor farmers and for those who have not
benefited from the recent decades of modern agricultural development. 10
The increases are quite remarkable, as most agriculturalists would be
satisfied with any technology that can increase annual productivity by even
1 or 2 per cent. It is worth restating: these projects are seeing close to a
doubling of per hectare productivity over several years, and this still
underestimates the additional benefits of intensive food production in
small patches of home gardens or fish ponds.
We also calculated the increase in food production for those projects
with reliable data on yields, area and numbers of farmers. In the 80
projects with less than 5-hectare farms where cereals were the main staples,
4.5 million farmers on 3.5 million hectares increased household food
production by more than 1.5 tonnes per year, an increase of 73 per cent.
In the 14 projects with potato, sweet potato and cassava as the main
staples, the 146,000 farmers increased household food production by 17
tonnes per year, an increase of 150 per cent. In the projects in southern
Latin America with a larger farm size (an average of 90 hectares per farm),
farm production increased by 150 tonnes per year, an increase of 46 per
cent.
These aggregate figures understate the benefits of increased diversity
in the diet, as well as increased quantity. Most of these agricultural
sustainability initiatives have seen increases in farm diversity. In many cases,
this translates into increased diversity of food consumed by the household,
including fish protein from rice fields or fish ponds, milk and animal
products from dairy cows, poultry and pigs kept in the home garden, and
vegetables and fruit from home gardens and farm micro-environments.
Although these initiatives are reporting significant increases in food
production, some as yield improvements, and some as increases in crop-
ping intensity or diversity of produce, few are reporting surpluses of food
being sold to local markets. This is because of a significant elasticity of
consumption amongst rural households experiencing any degree of food
insecurity. As production increases, so also does domestic consumption,
with direct benefit, in particular, for women's and children's health. In
short, rural people are eating more food and a greater diversity of food,
and this does not show up in the international statistics.
I acknowledge that all of this may sound too good to be true for those
who would disbelieve these advances. Many still believe that food production
and nature must be separated, that agroecological approaches offer only
marginal opportunities to increase food production, and that industrialized