ABSTRACT
Although long practised intuitively by subsistence farmers (Vanlauwe et al., 2010; Heijting et al., 2011), precision agriculture (PA) came of age in the 1990s as a technically driven means to improve industrialized agriculture. It promised benefits to both farmers and society through increasing production efficiency while improving stewardship of the environment (Srinivasan, 2006). These principles are central to the recent resurgence of interest in eco-efficiency (Keating et al., 2010), driven by global food price spikes overlying progressive concern about the degradation of agroecosystems worldwide. These drivers have refocused global concern on the dual aims of improving food security while protecting the environment (Godfray et al., 2010; Mueller et al., 2012). This makes it a particularly appropriate time to take stock of the relevance of the principles of PA for agricultural improvement in developing countries.
