Introduction: Farming the Garden of Eden

Abstract

The second part of this special issue on agroindustrialization, development and the environment is a policy forum based on an article from The Economist news magazine on the current and prospective environmental pressures induced by changes in agricultural technology. Global demand for food and other agricultural products will inevitably grow considerably over the course of this century, due to growth in both population and incomes. At the same time, farming’s share of the economically active population will fall sharply, necessitating increased commercialization of agriculture so as to increase productivity to meet the growing demands of urban and non-agricultural rural consumers. Yet there is little room to expand agricultural production beyond lands currently cultivated or in pasture without incurring additional economic and environmental costs. Nor is there a great surplus of water with which to irrigate more crops. Meanwhile, current farming practices are leading to alarming rates of soils degradation and inorganic and organic water pollution. The pressing question thus facing future agroindustrialization and development is how best to stimulate increased agricultural production to satisfy burgeoning commercial consumer demand without further degrading the natural environment. The resulting debate over such expansion is concerned with three distinct technological developments available today: 1 ‘Green Revolution’ methods of agricultural intensification based on irrigation, use of inorganic fertilizers, increasingly precise machinery, and chemical pesticides; 2 so-called ‘agroecological’ approaches based on traditional methods of intercropping, fallows and rotations, agroforestry, crop-livestock integration, green manure cover crops, and integrated pest management; and 3 genetically engineered cultivars designed to increase resistance to pests and drought and to increase yields, or some combination of these three means. The conflict is not merely one over science, it is also about distributional politics. For some, the debate revolves around scales of production, with advocates for peasant farmers commonly objecting to Green Revolution methods for which there appear to be minimum efficient scales of operation. In other circles, the contest is over