Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water.
The authors suggested that warming of the ocean surface due to human-induced climate change may have reduced vertical mixing of the water column, thereby reducing the supply of nutrients from deeper waters to the surface – in effect the input of fertiliser had lessened with effects upon phytoplankton growth.
Instead, they prescribe regular inputs of organic fertilisers (e.g. manure and composts), use of legume crops in rotation (to increase soil N levels), and application of preventative and non-chemical crop protection methods (e.g. the use of crop rotation, more resistant/tolerant varieties, mechanical and flame weeding, and biological disease and pest control products).
The issue of credit to farmers for purchase of farm inputs like fertilisers must be addressed.
You get maximum inputs of oil-based fertilisers and pesticides with minimum labour – which leads us to monoculture, because complexity is impossible without skilled husbandry.
The World Bank has said the agriculture sector is unlikely to achieve high rates of growth because of limited use of inputs, such as fertilisers, lack of irrigation systems and low levels of mechanisation.
"The flood-tolerant, drought-tolerant varieties developed by IRRI require a high amount of input of chemical fertiliser and pesticides that are not affordable by the majority of poor farmers.
- Lack of availability of inputs-seeds, fertilisers, pesticides.
And though farmers might choose to increase yields later, their choice would depend partly on food prices rising more than prices of inputs such as fertilisers, which they may not (in 2007-08 fertiliser prices rose much more than food prices).
Improved varieties of seed are estimated to have boosted yields by 21-43%, independently of fertilisers and other inputs.
Indeed, in America farm output is rising but the use of fertilisers and other inputs has been cut back.
