Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
have other unknown consequences for the environment. Thus, there are subtle but
important kinds of trade-offs among energy use, climate change, and food and bio-
fuel production.
Agriculture will need technical, institutional, and policy innovations to achieve
sustainable improvements in productivity, equity, and resilience through advances in
the management of energy, soils, water, livestock, and crops. The evaluation of alter-
native interventions, however, should be sufficiently broad. It is clear that interventions
to address one challenge or threat to sustainable food production must take account of
interrelationships, coevolution, and trade-offs with other challenges and threats.
movIng foRwARd
Science continues to provide innovations capable of making food production more
productive and sustainable. These include innovations in crop improvement to
increase yield potential, improve biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, and make crops
more competitive with weeds. They also include crop and farm system management
innovations such as no till, conservation agriculture, residue management, precision
agriculture, innovative rotations, advanced crop-livestock integration, and on-farm
water harvesting. Some innovations go beyond the farm level and are implemented
at the community level, such as the design and construction of multiple-use water
systems, catchment-level water harvesting and sharing, and even community-level
aquaculture in areas prone to monsoon season flooding. There are also water man-
agement innovations such as conjunctive water use, drip irrigation, treadle pumps,
and so on.
Not all innovations take the form of new technologies. Changes in property rights,
so that farmers have the right to use their own crop residues, are sometimes needed
before conservation agriculture is feasible at the farm level. Collective action in water
system management by water users' groups is usually essential to improving water
productivity in irrigated systems. Effective programs of “payment for environmental
services” begin with institutional innovations for payment targeting and verification.
Finally, policy reform is almost always needed to support and foster institutional
and technical innovation. A good example comes from groundwater depletion—
only water pricing or top-down control of tubewell use can reverse this classic case
of private overuse of a common property resource. Policies can encourage or dis-
courage conservation agriculture, make water availability more or less equitable,
encourage or discourage the user of fertilizers, and increase or decrease marketing
margins through infrastructure development.
The next several chapters describe in more detail the potential of new technical,
institutional, and policy innovations to ensure adequate food for all in the twenty-
first century.
conclusIons And study toPIcs
Several key points have emerged from this chapter:
