Description Details
Foreword It was agriculture that enabled human beings to become producers rather than hunters and gatherers, and in doing so to settle into communities. From these earliest settlements have developed the elaborate and complex societies of today. During all these millennia, we have tended to take agriculture for granted. This is unfortunate, and unfair by all those - farm men and women in the fields, scientists in their laboratories, and policy makers in parliaments and elsewhere, for instance - who have contributed to the development of agriculture; an enterprise that is as significant as it is exciting. The history of modern agriculture which has made possible the greatest leap in well-being that the human family has yet experienced, has seen the integration of research-based knowledge with traditional wisdom to bring about great improvements in agricultural varieties, farming techniques and management practices. The consequence of that “marriage” has been undreamed of increases of food productivity which served as the center of concentric circles of progress. Understanding that process and, more important, the substance that mad...

Table of Contents Details
Table of Contents List of Boxes ix Acknowledgments xi List of Acronyms xii Forward by Ismail Serageldin xiii To The Reader xv Chapter 1. NATURAL RESOURCES 1 Concern 1 The Underlying Resources 3 Land and Soil 3 Water 7 Atmosphere 12 Biodiversity 15 Forests 17 Management of Natural Resources 19 Chapter 2. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE 23 The Development of Modern Agriculture 23 Population and Food 27 Future Food Demand 30 The Agricultural Environment 34 Irrigation Potential 36 Poverty 37 Investment 39 Sustainable Food Production 42 Sustainability and Image 45 People and Agriculture 47 Towards an Alternative Approach 51 Chapter 3. UNDERSTANDING AND EDUCATION: ENVIRONMENTAL EMPATHY 55 Awareness 55 Bread Baskets of the World 58 The Global Need 59 The Imperative of Education 60 Public Environmental Education 63 Changes in Agricultural Education 66 Information or Knowledge 70 Chapter 4. HIGHER EDUCATION IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES 75 Note: Page numbers may differ in e-version Why Higher Education? 75 6 The Alternative - “The Noble Savage” 79 Universities in LDCs 80 Natural Resource Management Education 82 Issues in Environmental Educat...