Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices.pdfVIP

insight review articles NATURE | VOL 418 | 8 AUGUST 2002 | /nature 671 T he benefits of agriculture have been immense. Before the dawn of agriculture, the hunter–gatherer lifestyle supported about 4 million people globally 1 . Modern agriculture now feeds 6,000 million people. Global cereal production has doubled in the past 40 years (Fig. 1a), mainly from the increased yields resulting from greater inputs of fertilizer, water and pesticides, new crop strains, and other technologies of the ‘Green Revolution’ 2–4 . This has increased the global per capita food supply 2 , reducing hunger, improv