Towards a truly green revolution for food security

The increase in prices underlying the 2007-2008 food crisis and the new food price spikes in 2011 have exposed the presence of serious threats to the sustainability of the global food system and its capacity to provide adequate and affordable access to food. Meeting the challenge of expanding food production to feed the world population over the coming decades requires a major transformation in agriculture. The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s helped boost agricultural productivity worldwide, but did not conduce to a sustainable management of natural resources, nor to food security for many of the world’s poor. The world now needs a truly green revolution in agriculture—one conducive to the kind of technological innovation that aims to radically improve the productivity of small farm holdings through environmentally sustainable natural resource management embedded in broader developmental agricultural support measures.

Related Subject(s): Environment and Climate Change