1.1 Background
Since its development around 12,000 years ago, agriculture, the very basis of civilization, has undergone many radical changes, but arguably the most notable of these was the ‘Green Revolution’ of the mid-20th century. During and preceding this period, the world’s most populous countries were on the brink of or experiencing outright famine. India relied on unprecedented levels of food aid from the United States and other developed countries to avoid mass starvation, while China’s tragic Great Famine took the lives of some 30 million people. Throughout the 1960s, many academics predicted an imminent human die-off due to overpopulation. Miraculously, this was avoided. The Green Revolution that saved countless lives involved the engineering and distribution of new, high-yield varieties of staple crops, extraordinary use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, mechanization, monocropping, and a vast expansion of irrigation – a global transition to industrial agriculture. The world marvelled as average cereal yields saw an increase of 175% and the volume of world agricultural production more than tripled. Finally escaping the specter of starvation, Asia’s economic growth exploded, and the global population grew from 3 billion in 1960 to its current figure of nearly 8 billion. It is hard to overstate the importance of the advances in agricultural technology made in the 1950s-1960s to the foundation of the world in which we live today.
Unfortunately, the fertilizers, pesticides, water for irrigation, and energy to power the staggering amount of machinery that the world’s food systems now rely on come from often wildly unsustainable sources, with often wildly detrimental environmental impacts, and scientists and organizations around the world have been warning us of this for years. It won’t be sufficient to just make our current production sustainable – estimates are that food production will need to increase from the current 8.4 billion tons to almost 13.5 billion tons a year to feed the world’s booming population. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations notes that achieving a level of agricultural production to provide for a projected 9.3 billion people by 2050, from an already seriously depleted natural resource base, will be impossible without profound changes in our food and agriculture systems.