Conclusions |
This publication reports on the progress in developing and developed countries towards sustainable use of land and water in agricultural systems, and assesses the extent to which such projects/initiatives had improved food production. These are a self-selecting set, as we specifically set out to find out what could be achieved with sustainable agriculture, rather than analyse what was being achieved in a typical agricultural project. We rejected cases: i) where there was no obvious sustainable agriculture link; ii) where payments were used to encourage farmer participation (there are doubts that ensuing improvements persist after such incentives); iii) where there was heavy reliance on fossil-fuel derived inputs, or only on their targeted use (this is not to negate these technologies, but to indicate that they were not the focus of this research); iv) where the data provided was too weak or the findings unsubstantiated.
This is the largest known survey of sustainable agriculture in developing countries. There were 45 projects in Latin America, 63 in Asia and 100 in Africa. In these 208 projects/initiatives, some 8.98 million farmers have adopted sustainable agriculture practices and technologies on 28.92 million hectares. As there are some 960 million hectares of land under cultivation (arable and permanent crops) in Africa, Asia and Latin America, sustainable agriculture is present on at least three percent of this land (total arable land comprises some 1 600 million hectares in 1995/97, of which 388 million ha are in industrialised countries, 267 million ha in transition countries, and 960 million ha in developing countries: FAO, 2000).
The largest country representations in the 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. Most of the farmers in the projects surveyed are small farmers. Of farms in the total dataset, 50 percent are in projects with a mean area per farmer of less than one ha, and 90 percent of less than or equal to 2 hectares. There are 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 2.59 million hectares. Most of this sustainable agriculture has emerged in the past decade. Using project records, we estimate that the area a decade ago was between 100 000-500 000 hectares.
These cases demonstrate that improvements in food production are occurring through one or more of five different mechanisms:
1. intensification of a single component of farm system (with little change to the rest of the farm) - such as home garden intensification with vegetables and/or tree crops, vegetables on rice bunds, and introduction of fish ponds or a dairy cow;
2. addition of a new productive element to a farm system, such as fish or shrimps in paddy rice, or agroforestry, which provides a boost to total farm food production and/or income, but which do not necessarily affect cereal productivity;
3. better use of natural capital to increase total farm production, especially water (by water harvesting and irrigation scheduling), and land (by reclamation of degraded land), so leading to additional new dryland crops and/or increased supply of additional water for irrigated crops (so increasing cropping intensity);
4. improvements in per hectare yields of staples through introduction of new regenerative elements into farm systems (e.g. legumes, integrated pest management);
5. improvements in per hectare yields through introduction of new and locally-appropriate crop varieties and animal breeds.
Thus a successful sustainable agriculture project may be substantially improving domestic food consumption or increasing local food barters or sales through home gardens or fish in rice fields, or better water management, without necessarily affecting the per hectare yields of cereals. In the dataset, the most common mechanisms were yield improvements with regenerative technologies or new seeds/breeds, occurring in 60 percent of the projects, by 56 percent of the farmers and over 89 percent of the area.
Home garden intensification occurred in 20 percent of projects, but given its small scale only accounted for 0.7 percent of area. Better use of land and water, giving rise to increased cropping intensity, occurred in 14 percent of projects, with 31 percent of farmers and 8 percent of the area. The incorporation of new productive elements into farm systems, mainly fish and shrimps in paddy rice, occurred in 4 percent of projects, and accounted for the smallest proportion of farmers and area.
As mechanisms 4 and 5 were the most common, we analysed these in greater detail. The dataset contains 89 projects (139 entries of crop x projects combinations) with reliable data on per hectare yield changes with mechanisms 4 and 5. These cases illustrate that sustainable agriculture has led to an average 93 percent increase in per hectare food production through mechanisms 4 and 5 above. The relative yield increases are greater at lower yields, indicating greater benefits for poor farmers, and for those missed by the recent decades of modern agricultural development.
