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FAO
Director-General appeals for second Green Revolution: vVast
effort needed to feed billions and safeguard the environment |
Rome, Italy and San Francisco,
California
September 13, 2006
FAO
Director-General Jacques Diouf today called for a second
Green Revolution to feed the world’s growing population
while preserving natural resources and the environment.
Addressing a meeting of the World Affairs Council of
Northern California in San Francisco, Dr Diouf said: “In
the next few decades, a major international effort is
needed to feed the world when the population soars from
six to nine billion. We might call it a second Green
Revolution.”
The San Francisco-based World Affairs Council of
Northern California, which has 10 000 members, is one of
the United States’ leading non-governmental fora for
discussion and debate of international affairs.
The original Green Revolution of the Fifties and Sixties
doubled world food production by bringing the power of
science to agriculture, but “relied on the lavish use of
inputs such as water, fertilizer and pesticides,” Dr
Diouf said.
“The task ahead may well prove harder,” he continued.
“We not only need to grow an extra one billion tonnes of
cereals a year by 2050 - within the lifetimes of our
children and grandchildren – but do so from a
diminishing resource base of land and water in many of
the world’s regions, and in an environment increasingly
threatened by global warming and climate change.”
FAO, as the United Nations specialized agency for food
and agriculture, looked set to have a fundamental role
in helping bring about such a revolution, Dr Diouf said.
The place to start was at village level and in
developing countries themselves, he added.
“Investing in agriculture is usually low in the order of
priorities of politicians, typically more interested in
short-term returns,” Dr Diouf said. “But we can no
longer afford such neglect – our future depends on it.”
Concrete signs
“However… there are concrete signs towards this
direction at both national and international levels. For
example, African leaders have decided to raise the share
of their national budgets allocated to food and
agriculture to 10%. The World Bank’s declining trend in
lending for agriculture and rural development is now
reversing,” Dr Diouf observed.
Dr Diouf noted that 100 million people faced forced
migration as a consequence of advancing desertification
and soil degradation while water reserves had started to
run low in key grain production areas such as India and
China.
“The new Green Revolution will be less about introducing
new, high-performance varieties of wheat or rice,
important as they are, and much more about making wiser
and more efficient use of the natural resources
available to us,” Dr Diouf said.
For example, tests organized by FAO in a number of
developing countries since 2000 had shown that yield
increases of up to 30 percent could be achieved through
Integrated Crop Management (ICM), or improved crop
management techniques.
“It may sound incredible but we actually can save water
and grow more food at the same time,” the
Director-General added.
The key to increasing production while safeguarding
natural resources lay in environmentally sustainable
agricultural development, he said, adding:
“We must face the fact that the destinies of developing
and developed countries are intertwined in a globalized
world. Crucial challenges clearly lie ahead, and FAO
will continue to spare no effort in helping to meet
them.”
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