10.1 Emerging Challenges for Sustainable Agriculture

In the recent past, agricultural development policies have been remarkably successful at emphasizing external inputs as the means to increase food production. This has led to growth in global consumption of pesticides, inorganic fertilizer, animal feed-stuffs, and tractors and other machinery. These external inputs have, however, raised the issue of environmental concern. The basic challenge for sustainable agriculture is to make better use of internal resources. This can be done by minimizing the external inputs used, by regenerating internal resources more effectively, or by combinations of both at optimum level.

Figure 12: Natural resource Conservation Activity

Evidence is now emerging that regenerative and resource-conserving technologies and practices can bring both environmental and economic benefits for farmers, communities, and nations. They have made use of resource-conserving technologies such as integrated pest management, soil and water conservation, nutrient recycling, multiple cropping, water harvesting, and waste recycling. In all, there has been action by groups and communities at the local level, with farmers becoming experts at managing farms as ecosystems and at collectively managing the watersheds or other resource units of which their farms form a part. However, the challenges in this respect are that most policies still actively encourage use of high level of external inputs and technologies
  • Sustainability and Levels of Action
A necessary condition for sustainable agriculture is that large numbers of farming households must be motivated to participate in resource management. The success of sustainable agriculture therefore depends not just on the motivations, skills, and knowledge of individual farmers, but on action taken by groups or communities as a whole. This makes the task more challenging.
« Previous | Next »

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License

This Learning Resource was Created by the Regional MSc AICM Program at the Haramaya University RDAE Department with Support of AgShare Project.