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Agriculture is a unique industry riddled with contradictions, including the tendency of governments to subsidize wealthier-than-average farmers in industrial countries and tax poorer-than-average farmers in poor countries. One result is multi-generation farmers in industrial countries who aim to keep land wealth within the family and the out-migration of young people from rural areas of developing countries seeking opportunities in cities at home or abroad.

Agriculture produces essential food and fiber, but there are growing questions about its environmental sustainability because of its heavy use of fresh water and land. Sustainable agriculture is usually defined as an effort to integrate three goals: environmental stewardship, farm profitability, and viable rural communities.

Sustainable farming practices are often sub-divided into biophysical and socioeconomic. For example, sustainable biophysical farming practices assure the health of the soil by avoiding erosion and maintaining fertility and minimize water use with appropriate crops and irrigation practices that do not result in the accumulation of salts.

Sustainable socioeconomic factors ensure that food is produced in ways that minimize negative externalities, such as air and water pollution, that minimize use of nonrenewable energy resources, and that provide sufficient incomes for farmers and farm workers. Many analyses compare current farming practices to the alternatives, often showing that alternatives could reduce the need for nonrenewable energy, migrant labor, or scarce water.

The World Bank's World Development Report for 2008 was devoted to agriculture. The three-part, 11-chapter report explores agriculture's role in economic development, policies that affect food production and trade, and implementing changes to assist the various types of farmers while promoting community development.

Chapter 8 deals with sustainability. It begins with the observation that production of cereals (grains) doubled in the quarter century between 1970 and 1995 on the same land area, largely by intensifying production practices with improved seeds, fertilizers and chemicals, and irrigation under the umbrella of the green revolution. The resource degradation associated with some of this intensive production ranges from groundwater depletion to pollution of air, soil, and water.

The drivers or causes of environmental degradation range from trade (Chinese demand for soybeans that leads to deforestation in the Amazon) to poverty and population pressures that encourage farming in areas not well suited for crop production as in sub-Saharan Africa. After environmental degradation occurs, it is often the poor and women who are most adversely affected, since they have the fewest resources to adapt and are most dependent on common property resources. Rising numbers of poor people are accelerating environmental degradation in much of Africa and Asia, where many farms are too small to support rising numbers of people.

The report recommends major changes in intensive farming systems that rely on irrigation. Charging farmers for the water they use would provide incentives to use less and could have beneficial side effects such as less salinization of land (irrigated lands are 20 percent of farm land in developing countries, but they produce 40 percent of the value of developing country farm output). In arid areas that are not irrigated, growing populations will have to find alternative sources of income to avoid degrading fragile lands.

The irrigation challenge is troubling. Irrigation was a key to the green revolution, but the water used to double crop output was accumulated over centuries, and may be gone within decades at current rates of overexploitation. Groundwater is often treated as a common property resource, and is being withdrawn at unsustainable rates in both the Middle East and South Asia. Furthermore, ground water is sometimes being polluted with industrial and agricultural pollutants or saltwater intrusion, increasing demands on dwindling supplies of fresh water that must be pumped from deeper depths as water levels fall.

In the Nile valley, where farmers' use of water is often measured by how many hours they can pump rather than how much water they are allowed, there is often excess irrigation and water logging of soil. In more arid areas of Asia such as Pakistan, salinization is a growing problem in fields that lack drainage systems. Misguided policies contribute to such degradation, as when subsidized energy costs for farmers encourage them to pump water from ever-deeper wells.

Without fundamental changes in how water is managed, yields could start falling. During the 1950s and 1960s, development assistance focused on constructing dams and irrigation systems. Today's advice is adaptive water management, meaning continuous monitoring of ecosystems so that policies can change if needed, which requires both good data and governance. Kazakhstan's restoration of dams and embankments on the Syr Darya river after 1999 is credited with restoring the Aral Sea, which had shrunk and turned saline as more water was diverted to produce cotton.

The report's major water recommendation is to create efficient water markets so that water is used wisely, that is, not growing rice the Punjab region (rice is grown in summer and wheat in winter) or reducing cotton production in the Aral Sea basin. The World Bank recounts a handful of success stories that highlight changes in water policy in the context of overall policy changes. However, enacting policies that improve water management while protecting the rights of especially poor women farmers is a major challenge.

The chapter reviews the side effects of the fertilizers and chemicals used in "high-input" farming. However, implementing the recommendations to substitute integrated pest management for chemicals and to use geographic information systems so that fertilizers and chemicals can be targeted more precisely, requiring less use, assumes support for computers, satellites, and education of farmers on how to use new IPM and GIS systems. The chapter optimistically points to a growing demand for organic produce to conclude that farmers may have economic incentives to learn and invest in alternatives to high-input farming systems that accelerate environmental degradation.

The sustainability chapter next turns to what it calls less-favored agricultural areas that account for over half of the farm land in developing countries and a third of the rural population in developing countries. Many of the farming systems in such areas are low input, in part because, for instance, soils may not be fertile or water may not be available. The expansion of low-input farming into environmentally sensitive areas because of rising populations hastens degradation.

For low-input farming in sensitive areas, the report recommends policies that reduce poverty and preserve the environment. However, the specific recommendations do not promise quick returns. For example, supporting R&D to increase farm production and profitability in environmentally sensitive regions could take decades to reap results, by which time degradation could be much worse. Farmer-managed irrigation systems, subsidies to plant trees, and conservation farming are cited as successful examples of increasing profitability and reversing degradation, but the report acknowledges that successes often depend on unique circumstances and may not be replicable or scalable.

The chapter concludes with a plea to consider paying farmers for environmental stewardship, following the lead of the EU, which has begun to switch the justification of farm subsidies from production to environmental protection. However, farmers in many developing countries are taxed by governments that charge high prices for inputs such as fertilizers and offer low prices for crops? switching from taxing to subsidizing agriculture would take money that most developing country governments to not have.

World Bank. 2008. Agriculture for Development. www.worldbank.org/wdr2008