Agro-ecology is key to food security

De Schutter challenges the widely held view that food production needs to be scaled up to feed a growing population, saying that such a strategy overlooks climate change as well as how food is produced, by whom and for whom.

Agro-ecology provides an opportunity to tie together the food security and climate change agendas. Climate change is already affecting the global food supply, creating food shortages and famine, De Schutter says. This has increased food prices world-wide, and discussions about a substantial increase in food production are "driving a flood of interest and investment back into agriculture - particularly the 'under-exploited' farmlands of the developing world," he adds.

"What is desperately needed is a change of agricultural paradigm," argues De Schutter. Instead of scaling up industrial solutions which can be detrimental to the environment. SciDev.net reports that De Schutter recommends that developing countries adopt agro-ecological farming methods already available as a model of land use and food production. He outlines encouraging practices being rolled out in Durban, a city at the "forefront of a revolution in peri-urban sustainable agriculture," and in Madagascar, where they have tripled rice production.

Read the full article on www.scidev.net.