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7. This unprecedented growth in food production has been achieved partly by an extension of the production base: larger cropped areas, more livestock, more fishing vessels, and so on. But most of it is due to a phenomenal rise in productivity. Population increases have meant a decline in the area of cropped land in most of the world in per capita terms. And as the availability of arable land has declined, planners and farmers have focused on increasing productivity. In the past 35 years this has been achieved by:
- using new seed varieties designed to maximize yields, facilitate multiple cropping, and resist disease:
- applying more chemical fertilizers, the consumption of which rose more than ninefold[1];
- using more pesticides and similar chemicals, the use of which increased thirty-two-fold[2]; and
- increasing irrigated area, which more than doubled.[3]
8. Global statistics mask substantial regional differences. (See Box 5–1.) The impacts of new technology have been uneven, and in some respects the agricultural technology gap has widened. For instance, average African foodgrain productivity declined in relation to European productivity from roughly one-half to about one-fifth over the past 35 years. Even in Asia, where new technology has spread rapidly, productivity in relation to.European levels dropped.[4] Similar 'technology gaps' have emerged between regions within countries.
9. The past few decades have seen the emergence of three broad types of food production systems. 'Industrial agriculture', capital– and input-intensive and usually large-scale, is dominant in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and in some small areas in developing countries. 'Green Revolution agriculture' is found in uniform, resource-rich, often flat and irrigated areas in the agricultural heartlands of some developing countries. It is more widespread in Asia but is also found in parts of Latin America and North Africa. Though initially the new technologies may have favoured large farmers, they are today accessible to a growing number of small producers. 'Resource-poor agriculture' relies on uncertain rain rather than irrigation and is usually found in developing regions difficult to farm – drylands, highlands, and forests – with fragile soils. This includes most of sub-Saharan Africa and the remoter areas of Asia and Latin America. Here, per capita production has been declining and hunger is a critical problem. But today, all three systems of food production display signs of crises that endanger their growth.
II. SIGNS OF CRISIS
10. Agricultural policies in practically all countries have focused on output growth. Despite this, it has proved far more difficult to raise world agricultural output by a consistent 3 per cent a year in the mid-1980s than it was in the mid-195Os. Moreover, production records have been offset by the appearance
- ↑ L.R. Brown, 'Sustaining World Agriculture,' in Brown et al., State of the World 1987 (London: W.W. Norton, 1987).
- ↑ A. Gear (ed.), The Organic Food Guide (Essex: 1983).
- ↑ USSR Committee for the International Hydrological Decade, World Water Balance and Water Resources of the Earth (Paris: UNESCO, 1978).
- ↑ FAO, Yearbook of Food and Aricultural Statistics 1951 and Production Yearbook 1984, op. cit.
