Agriculture at the center of sustainable development

Emergence of modern agriculture:

Today, we're going to look at how modern agriculture has emerged. And to do this we have to understand history and we have to essentially go through 10,000 years of history in a very rapid sequence, just to at least cover the major stages. Agriculture refers broadly to the cultivation of animals, plants and other life forms for the production of food, fiber, biofuels, raw materials, drugs, and other things including agriculture and agro-forestry. So many things that humans need and always needed from the early beginnings of the emergence of man. We believe that agriculture as we know it today, evolved somewhere 10,000 years ago or earlier at the end perhaps of the last ice age and it probably evolved in at least 10 or 11 different world regions in different ways.

That was because humans started to settle, and they needed more food. And also, in a warmer climate it was possible to grow things and they learned how to use irrigation, they learned how to cultivate crops, and domesticate animals. So very rapidly, instead of hunting and gathering foods they were able to grow it and agriculture became, really, the basis for stable food supply and therefore also was an essential backbone of the rising civilizations and their growing population.

So then, of course, over many thousands of years, it kept evolving as humans also acquired more knowledge. But there were subsequent stages that triggered what we now would describe as revolutions, and largely driven also through technology innovations. And one of the major ones of that happened in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century in conjunction with what we describe often as the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Europe, but later also in North America. So farmers and also some entrepreneurial land owners and later scientists, did a lot to improve farming practices where they learned how to enclose fields to keep animals in there, they also started to invent new tools for tillage.

They introduced crops from the New World that we didn't know in Europe, for example, potatoes. They experimented with crop rotations and also selective animal breeding for further improvement. So around the end of the 18th century, we had about 800 million people living on earth at that stage. And then following this the real Industrial Revolution in Europe triggered massive improvement in farming practices, because all of a sudden, machines were available that enabled to the the cultivation of crops or also the better management of animals along with that. So we had the first seed drills with steam powered machines, threshers or even steam-powered plows in the field, and later the first tractors came into the picture. But also at the same time, particularly in the 19th century, our body of scientific knowledge increased hugely. So people understood much more about soils, the importance of nutrients, plant nutrients, the essential plant nutrients as we call them nowadays.

Manure and its value and how to manage it, crop rotations and first efforts were also made in selective crop breeding. And there was also a change in the food systems at that time because more people worked in factories and they also needed to consume more calories and also that led them to transport systems and some more processing storage solutions because people living in cities needed that food as opposed to people living in the countryside. So the whole marketing side of things, but also shifting diets started or already in that stage in the 19th century. That process continued in the first half of the 20th century. So many more technology advancements. People invented the first synthetic nitrogen fertilizers through the Haber and Bosch industries. The first pesticides were invented. The first hybrid maize varieties were invented in the 1940s in the U.S. So many new ways of farming were enabled through these innovations.

Now in 1960, we had reached three billion people living on earth and most industrial countries had been quite successful. They had achieved sustained food surpluses by that time, or shortly after that. They essentially had eliminated the threat of starvation. But in the other part of the world, particularly in the Global South, there was massive concern that we were at the brink of a global famine. 60% of the population in developing countries were chronically undernourished. Poverty was widespread, over 20%. It was generally thought that there was a time bomb ticking. It was thought that India for example was on the brink of another mass famine. There was a lot of concern of this kind, which then triggered also among a number of visionary people the need, the desire to do something about this. And it triggered what we now know as the Green Revolution, which started out with the invention of a new generation of high-yielding wheat and rice varieties.

Initialized first by Norman Borlaug who worked since the 1940s in wheat improvement, breeding in Mexico, but then also spilling over into Asia. In the early 1960s the first modern rice variety, IR8 was created by breeders at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. These varieties had in common, that they had a much higher yield potential than the traditional varieties. And they were also much shorter in growth duration so you could grow two or three crops a year. They were responsive to additional inputs, so you could apply fertilizer which further increased the yield.