ABSTRACT
Since the early part of the twentieth century, food production has kept pace with our exponentially growing population, due to signicant advances in agricultural technology. These “green revolution” innovations included the development of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation systems, and mechanized farm processes, along with monoculture planting of high-yielding, hybrid crop varieties that ourish with intensive nutrient and water supplements. Green revolution advances have miraculously allowed us to more than double grain yield with only a ~9% increase in land area over the last 50 years (Godfray et al. 2010). This accomplishment, one of civilization’s most signicant, was recognized by the international community with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 to Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist from Iowa. Yet, decades later, the real-world outcomes and unforeseen trade-offs of this important transition in world history have become abundantly clear. Despite current global production of enough food to feed every human ~2700 kcal per day, one in six children still remains hungry due to complex and interrelated social forces that create recalcitrant barriers to food security, one of humanity’s most “wicked problems” (WHO 2012, Rittel and Webber 1973). Agriculture has transformed over one-third of Earth’s ice-free land area, triggering losses of species in forests, grasslands, and wetlands (Foley et al. 2011)—which is by far the most signicant and irreversible human signature on Earth. Our food system contributes over one-third annually of the human-produced greenhouse gas emissions that are changing our climate, double the amount generated by all transportation sources combined (in CO2-equivalents; ITF 2010, Vermeulen et al. 2012). Copious fertilizer use-one of the very reasons the green revolution was a success in terms of food production-is now known to cause widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and coastal ecosystems that support some of our most important sheries (Smith 2003). And more than a thousand different types of agricultural pesticides are in circulation worldwide, some of which threaten the health of humans and other animals that share the planet with us, as these compounds help to combat insects and disease organisms that take advantage of hectares of identical plants in monoculture (WHO 2010).
