The term ‘sustainable intensification’ began to gain real currency following a report by the UK’s Royal Society, Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture. The thrust of the argument is that the old ways of increasing global food production – bring more land under the plough and adopt the high input, high output technologies of the green revolution – will not work in the 21st century.
It is said that bringing more land into use will have more negative impacts than positive. It will accelerating climate change, loss of biodiversity, social dislocation of people living on the land. Likewise, the high input high output model of the green revolution is said to result in unsustainable pressure on water and soils and a model of farming that is heavily reliant on the extravagent and ultimately unsustainble use of fossil fuels. What’s more, this approach has had significant negative externalities in terms of pollution and loss of wildlife habitats.… Read the rest