The Green Revolutions new avatar
JOHANNESBURG, 25 March 2010 (IRIN): The Green Revolution has a new avatar: transformed Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D), and food experts hope it will provide the panacea for (universalmiddel mod) hunger.
In the 1970s, when half the worlds population was hungry, governments, global institutions and agricultural experts brought about the Green Revolution with the help of technology that provided high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat.
Within four years, countries like India moved from being food-aid dependent to food secure.
– We are facing a crisis of a similar scale and the world needs to come to-gether again to take action with the help of biotechnology, said Uma Lele, a retired senior advi-ser to the World Bank. And also the lead author of a comprehensive assessment report on AR4D, which will provide the backdrop to a critical three-day meeting on agriculture starting on 28 March in France.
The report, “Transforming Agricultural Research for Development”, will be presented at the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), requested by the G8 group of industrialized countries to identify future food production needs and a course of action.
During the assessment 2.000 experts were consulted, including national research organizations across the world. The report hopes to focus attention on the critical need to revive agriculture.
– Everyone in agriculture and food security has been talking about AR4D as the way forward. We (Lele and three other agriculture experts) were asked to unpack it for the meeting, Lele noted.
What does AR4D mean?
The aim of AR4D is to achieve sustainable food and income security for all food producers and consumers, especially the poor, using the same resources – land, labour, water – available within the constraints of climate change and an expanding population.
The sustainable system will seek to reduce negative environmental impacts, but cannot be “defined by silver bullets” (patentløsninger) like a particular technology or practice, because “there are no standard blue-prints” and many of the options used in the last five decades did not work.
– We need to produce food for a growing population on the same piece of land, said Eugene Terry, one of the authors and a plant pathologist who was the first director-general of the West Africa Rice Development Association.
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