A
new book from the stables of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has
shown that eco-system-based farming has come of age, through the adoption of
Save and Grow initiative, reports NaijaAgroNet.
The
new FAO book launched Wednesday
in Rome, takes a close look at how the world's major cereals maize, rice and
wheat - which together account for an estimated 42.5 per cent of human calories
and 37 per cent of our protein - can be grown in ways that respect and even
leverage natural ecosystems.
Drawing
on case studies from around the planet, the new book illustrates how the
"Save and Grow" approach to agriculture advocated by FAO is already
being successfully employed to produce staple grains, pointing the way to a
more sustainable future for farming and offering practical guidance on how the
world can pursue its new sustainable development agenda.
"International
commitments to eradicate poverty and tackle climate change require a paradigm
shift towards a more sustainable and inclusive agriculture able to produce
higher yields over the longer term," said FAO Director-General José
Graziano da Silva.
The
two recent landmark global agreements, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - which
require eradicating hunger and putting terrestrial ecosystems on a sound
footing by 2030 - and the Paris Climate Change Agreement (COP21), only
underscore the need for inclusive innovation in food systems, he adds.
While
the world's cereal harvests may be at record levels today, their productive
base is increasingly precarious amid signs of groundwater depletion,
environmental pollution, loss of biodiversity and other woes marking the end of
the Green Revolution model. Meanwhile, global food production will need to grow
by 60 percent - mostly on existing arable land and in the face of climate
change - to feed the future population in 2050, making it all the
more urgent for the smallholders who grow the majority of the world's crops to
be enabled to do so more efficiently and in ways that don't further increase
humanity's ecological debt.
Save
and Grow is a broad-based approach to environmentally friendly, sustainable
agriculture aimed at intensifying production, protecting and enhancing
agriculture's natural resource base and reducing reliance on chemical inputs by
tapping into the Earth's natural ecosystem processes, and to increase farmers'
gross income. As such it is an approach intrinsically crafted to
contribute to the SDGs and foster resilience to climate change.
Viable
Save and Grow practices range from growing shade trees that shed their leaves
when adjacent maize crops most need sunlight, as tried with success in Malawi and Zambia, to scrapping tillage and
leaving crop residues as soil surface mulch, a method applied on a massive
scale by wheat farmers on the Kazakhstani steppe and
increasingly by innovative slash-and-mulch practices adopted by farmers in
the highlands of Central and South America.
The
time has now come for ideas that have proven themselves in farmers' fields to
be upscaled in more ambitious national programmes, FAO Director General José
Graziano da Silva says in the foreword to Save and Grow in Practice in
Practice: A Guide to Sustainable Cereal Production, a
book he described as "a contribution to creating the world we
want."
Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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