Currently it appears not to happen, I think the following basic things will always be important to achieve sustainable agriculture:
1. There is a limit to how much we can focus energy before the cost benefit ratio become problematic and we reach the point where we start to generate waste. This varies from place to place of course. So for the vast majority of space we need fairly low input cost, yet high "knowledge" farming.
2. We need to focus our efforts on determining what we want to achieve in terms of nutrition and health. What it is we believe we must achieve in terms of food, are we going to basically focus on kilojoules, or do we look at what we need for health - i.e. diversity of nutrition. These health issues were ingrained in traditional food cultures, so we really need to explore those cultures and bring it into the present scientifically. In this regard smallholders can be more productive than industrialized farming, if you look holistically at nutrition, instead of kilojoules.
3. When you increase soil carbon in an ecosystems approach, you tend to need to focus less on mineral soil nutrients. This ties in with the lower intensity farming aspects.
This means we need to integrate our human development patterns and obviously ownership patterns with the natural patterns and cycles in the world. And i believe one of the key aspects of this will be marketing the benefits of lower intensity farming and improve access to markets.
Agreed the devil is in the details, but globally our vision for health via nutrition requires a rethink as per the Tanzanian representative. We seem to be aiming for a much reduced food diversity in the face of enormous barrage of "lifestyle" diseases.
This is an important discussion.
Currently it appears not to happen, I think the following basic things will always be important to achieve sustainable agriculture:
1. There is a limit to how much we can focus energy before the cost benefit ratio become problematic and we reach the point where we start to generate waste. This varies from place to place of course. So for the vast majority of space we need fairly low input cost, yet high "knowledge" farming.
2. We need to focus our efforts on determining what we want to achieve in terms of nutrition and health. What it is we believe we must achieve in terms of food, are we going to basically focus on kilojoules, or do we look at what we need for health - i.e. diversity of nutrition. These health issues were ingrained in traditional food cultures, so we really need to explore those cultures and bring it into the present scientifically. In this regard smallholders can be more productive than industrialized farming, if you look holistically at nutrition, instead of kilojoules.
3. When you increase soil carbon in an ecosystems approach, you tend to need to focus less on mineral soil nutrients. This ties in with the lower intensity farming aspects.
This means we need to integrate our human development patterns and obviously ownership patterns with the natural patterns and cycles in the world. And i believe one of the key aspects of this will be marketing the benefits of lower intensity farming and improve access to markets.
Agreed the devil is in the details, but globally our vision for health via nutrition requires a rethink as per the Tanzanian representative. We seem to be aiming for a much reduced food diversity in the face of enormous barrage of "lifestyle" diseases.