Food security is back on the global agenda. With the recent food crisis, public attention has returned to issues of availability and affordability, particularly for the urban and rural poor. Responses to the accelerating changes in food stocks and prices in recent months ranged from interventions at the policy level to calls for longer term strategies, including greater...
Rising fertilizer prices and misperceptions about environmental degradation in intensive agriculture have stimulated claims that so-called “low-input” technologies relying on organic nutrient sources may provide a more sustainable means of producing food crops and increasing farmers’ income. However, the sole use of organic technologies would likely perpetuate food...
As we grapple with the world rice crisis, I think of Alexander Humboldt, Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Richard Spruce. These extraordinary naturalists wove their exceptional powers of observation into the bases of the modern sciences of biogeography, meteorology, geology, tropical biology, and evolution. Their wide interests and insight contributed...
In the late 1960s, newly developed, high-yielding rice varieties launched the Asian Green Revolution, which rapidly pushed up yields and allowed rice production to keep pace with population growth. In the Philippines, as in many other countries, widespread use of pesticides expanded in step with the new varieties. This was largely due to concerns that crop losses from...
