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“The present paradigm of intensive crop production cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium,” says a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In other words: Big Ag, step aside. It’s not as if the world is being fed particularly well at the moment — and prospects are dimming for chemical agriculture in a resource-restricted, warming world.

The FAO has been very active in attempts to make world agriculture more sustainable. It published an influential 2006 report on animal agriculture’s environmental and climate impact, and it was behind the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development report, which laid out a vision of the future of agriculture in the developing world based on the principles of agro-ecology rather than on chemically intensive industrial agriculture.

Building on that work, the FAO has now published a “policymaker’s guide” for developing-world agriculture called “Save and Grow” that begins like this:

 The Green Revolution in agriculture, which swept much of the developing world during the 1960s, saved an estimated one billion people from famine. Thanks to high-yielding crop varieties, irrigation, agrochemicals and modern management techniques, farmers in developing countries increased food production from 800 million tonnes to more than 2.2 billion tonnes between 1961 and 2000. Intensive crop production helped to reduce the number of undernourished, drive rural development and prevent the destruction of natural ecosystems to make way for extensive farming. Those achievements came at a cost. In many countries, decades of intensive cropping have degraded fertile land and depleted groundwater, provoked pest upsurges, eroded biodiversity, and polluted air, soil and water. As the world population rises to a projected 9.2 billion in 2050, we have no option but to further intensify crop production. But the yield growth rate of major cereals is declining, and farmers face a series of unprecedented, intersecting challenges: increasing competition for land and water, rising fuel and fertilizer prices, and the impact of climate change.