New Strategy to Reconcile the Needs of Increasing China's Food Production Through Agricultural Intensification and Protection of Environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sustainable agriculture should differ its focuses and dimensions for different countries. For those countries, such as China, where self-sufficiency in food production is always a foremost target, sustainability may be defined as meeting current production goals through intensive agriculture, without compromising the resources and environment, by means of reducing the reliance on external inputs and the negative impacts. Chinese Ecological Agriculture (CEA), an innovative approach of implementing simultaneously ecological and economic principles, encourages more ecologically-designed agricultural systems that reintegrate quintessence of traditional Chinese agriculture's knowledge and add new ecological knowledge into the intensification process. Such a new strategy has already been expressed itself be valuable to meet the challenges Chinese agriculture is faced, in terms of resources shortage, environmental degradation and inadequate rural employment.