For decades, the rural development and poverty alleviation agenda in sub-Saharan Africa has emphasised support for smallholder farming and little else. Foreign large-scale miners and other industrial operators have complied, establishing agriculture-support services and programs for communities...

Proceedings of the 2012 Parliamentary Conference, with Sir John Beddington; Professor Jonathon Foley; Dr Derek Byerlee; Dr Frank Rijsberman and others

In a little over a decade, the global population is expected to reach 8 billion. The task of feeding this growing population will become harder with rising natural resource constraints, declining or stagnant crop productivity, more frequent extreme weather events, and climate change. These...

The production of food from marine and freshwaters is undergoing a profound revolution—from hunting to farming or from fishing to aquaculture. Fishing and aquaculture exploit and alter the biodiversity on which they are based, each in different but convergent ways. Fishing harvests a much...

Australia's isolation from other continents over millions of years led to the evolution of many species that exist nowhere else, so called ‘endemic’ species. Of the ten megadiverse countries in the world, we are the only one that is labelled as ‘developed’ so have a global leadership...

As much as seventy times more water is needed to grow food than for domestic use. Severely waterscarce countries such as Egypt do not have enough water to grow their own food and need to import food from elsewhere. Countries like the USA, Australia, China, India, Mexico and Turkey have made...

Biosecurity is the management of risks to the economy, the environment and the community of pests and diseases entering, emerging, establishing or spreading. In Australia, biosecurity services are delivered by government and industry in partnership with farmers and the wider community as a...

ASEAN is host to seven of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots. Failure of governments and their peoples to protect and conserve the region’s rich biodiversity is one of the greatest threats to the over 500 million people of ASEAN. As in other areas of the developing world, biodiversity...

Biodiversity is the basis for agriculture and for a sustainable future. More than 1.9 million living species have been described; millions more have gone extinct, including major branches of the tree of life. The distribution of this biological diversity is variable in space and time, although it...

Aquaculture is one of the most rapidly developing sectors of global food production, contributing significantly to socio-economic development by providing food security and export earnings from high-value products. The importance of the industry to the expanding world population is underscored...