Plants are essential food for all living organisms, including man, to survive. In the Ecosystems section, we saw they are the basis of the food pyramid. Farming began 7-8,000 years ago, when men stopped living a nomadic life, began to live in stable communities, and started to produce food by selecting the plants that were fittest for periodical sowing and harvesting.

During the last century, the farming techniques have developed so much as to increase crops by almost five times. The increase in the availability of food has been, however, very different in the different countries and regions of the world. In developing countries, over 800 million people still suffer from hunger or malnutrition, while in industrialised countries more and more people are overeating or overweight. In both cases, this food imbalance negatively affects both human health and productivity. In fact, natural products have maintained their market share and are expected to even increase it over the next few decades. These products have the great advantage of being renewable: unlike modern plastics and man-made fibres, which are produced from non-renewable resources (oil, coal), they are not bound to disappear. A cotton plantation grows all over again every year, as well as a forest can renew itself, though more slowly, after the trees have been cut.

Agricultural development

The flora is an essential asset for man, since it is a renewable resource and a source of basic products for the agricultural world and for several industrial and commercial sectors. As for many other resources, though, to be able to exploit them as efficiently as he could, man had to apply work and technology to plants and lands. The result was the development of farming. The basic role of farming is to produce more and more food and raw materials (wood and fibres).

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Herbs and medicine

Herb-based medicine (phytotherapy) is the oldest and most natural treatment for the body. It involves the use of plants or parts of plants fit to treat specific ailments. Even now, all over the world, most drugs are made of vegetal substances and many synthetic products are prepared by reproducing in the laboratory environment the active agents contained in plants. The last few years have seen the spreading of “flower therapy” for the treatment of stress, eating disorders, anxiety and sleeplessness.

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Natural and synthetic fibres

Plants are for man a source of important raw materials: textile fibres, cellulose (to make paper) and wood. Thirty years ago, the experts were convinced such resources would disappear, since they would not have been able to withstand competition from man-made materials. In fact, natural products have maintained their market share and are expected to even increase it over the next few decades. These products have the great advantage of being renewable: unlike modern plastics and man-made fibres, which are produced from non-renewable resources (oil, coal), they are not bound to disappear.

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Deforestation

Farming also means exploitation of forests. There are many reasons for deforestation: timber trade, exploitation of ore deposits, urbanisation and use of land as farmland or pasture. Unfortunately, for many poor countries, high-quality wood from the forests is one of the few assets available to develop their economy. And often we see indiscriminate deforestation being carried out, which causes huge damages to the environment and to mankind. For a sustainable use of the forestry resources, all the advantages and drawbacks should at least be assessed before pulling down a forest.

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Destructive fires

Along with deforestation for the use of wood by man, fires are one of the biggest causes of the disappearance of the forestry. The reasons of these fires are mainly arson (wilful fires), negligence (wilful fires) and natural factors (lightning and others). The rate at which a wood burns depends on many factors: the type of undergrowth, the flammability and combustion speed of the wooden biomass of the wood, the climatic conditions (for instance, in our country, as well as in all the Mediterranean countries, the summer season is the one most at risk), and others.

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The death of forests

Man can damage forests either directly, through deforestation and fires, or indirectly, through some of his productive activities. Depletion is actually a crisis event of forest environments in temperate areas, whose causes are due to atmospheric pollution, especially the effect of acid rains, the removal or degradation of the woodland due to the uncontrolled development of tourist activities.

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Preserving forests

The awareness of the importance of protecting the flora, the numerous and complex plant world, has grown over the last century. In particular, man has understood that vegetal biodiversity (i.e. the differences existing among the many vegetal species) is probably one of the greatest resources that mankind has been given by nature. So far, the scientists have classed over 250 thousand species of moss, ferns, conifers and blooming plants. 

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In the light of the current food crisis, to increase agricultural productivity on a global scale, it’s possible to expand total cultivated land, but the areas which are currently available are less and less: in Asia, for example, arable land is already all employed. In any case, the extension of arable land would allow for an increase of agricultural production by only 20% and would cause a more substantial environmental impact of the use of natural resources. As an alternative, it would be possible to intensify production itself, introducing even more invasive techniques than those currently adopted but this would lead to an increase in production which wouldn’t be higher than 10%. The most substantial contribution to the increase in the availability of agricultural products, instead, seems to come from the improvement of biotechnologies which would determine a 70% increase in global agricultural production.

Biotechnologies, as defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, don’t concern only Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) but to a range of products as vaccines, improved varieties, micopropagated plants (virus-free). Application of technologies to agriculture must aim to resolve famine and poverty problems in developing countries, allowing to increase the production of local small farmers and must conform to strict criteria related to biosecurity, that is men’s health, biodiversity preservation and ecological sustainability. Brazil, India and China, the countries with greatest population growth, are currently achieving cutting edge results in the field of agricultural biotechnologies. Among developing countries (DCs), instead, 23 countries are capable of applying biotechnologies through development projects; 14 develop and apply some biotechnologies. Thanks to the introduction of varieties of cultivations which give high returns, chemical products and new irrigation techniques, the so-called “green revolution” in the ‘60s and ‘70s has increased crops yields and has helped millions of people to fight famine and poverty. Today, though, many small farmers can’t move beyond subsistence agriculture and every day more than 854 million people, according to the latest FAO estimates, don’t have enough to eat. Billions of people suffer of trace elements deficiencies, a form of insidious malnutrition caused by unbalanced nutrition. And in the following thirty years there will be two billion people in the world which will need to be fed –whereas natural resources on which agriculture depends become more and more frail.

For or against GMOs

The use of biotechnologies in agriculture, the “genetic revolution”, can answer these problems? There are two schools of thought addressing this issue which, in the last decades, have been holding discussions over this topic at a global level. Man-made “genetic modification” dates back to ancient times and can probably be led back to when our ancestors started using micro-organisms to make bread, wine and cheese.

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GMOs against famine

FAO, the United Nations organization for food and agriculture, highlights the need to ensure that potential benefits of biotechnology applied to agriculture are shared among everybody and not only some chosen people. Farmers and poor consumers in developing countries could gain great benefits; so far, though, except in a few cases, with regards to the development of the “biotech” sector problems of poor seem to be ignored in favour of multinational companies.

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Patenting of living organisms

In many countries the law allows to patent GM seeds thus transforming them in a product owned by a company. Companies which sell “GMO-pesticide” to farmers gain profits in three different stages: selling pesticides, selling transgenic crops resistant to pesticides and applying patent royalties, which causes an extra charge in comparison to traditional seeds. 

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Sustainable agriculture was established in response to environmental problems caused by the “green revolution” and other production methods having high environmental impacts (intense use of water, pesticides and chemical fertilizers). The world movement in support of sustainable agriculture has been defined “the true green revolution” precisely to highlight the contrast between these two production methods. Farming sustainably means promoting biodiversity, preserving the environment, preferring local productions, ensuring the respect of human rights of workers, safeguarding communities and guaranteeing economical sustainability of the agricultural system without leaving small farmers behind. One of the solutions adopted to control environmental impacts of modern agricultural production and thus to make agriculture more sustainable is the return to traditional methods of crop growing used in the past as, for example, biological agriculture or conservation agriculture. At the same time, the merge between traditional knowledge and new philosophies, from a sustainable perspective, has given birth to new techniques as integrated agriculture and biodynamic agriculture.

Biological agriculture

Various methods of sustainable farming can be undertaken, and organic farming is one of them: it’s a production method defined and disciplined by the common CEE 2092/91 Regulation and, at an international level, by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements – IFOAM. The organic production method respects the environment as it doesn’t resort to synthetic chemical products, as pesticides and fertilizers, but on the contrary, uses products of natural origin against parasites (sulphur, copper, plant extracts) and uses natural compost to fertilize soil.

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Integrated agriculture

Integrated agriculture aims to guarantee the smallest environmental impact as possible, preserve biodiversity and reduce risks for the health of agricultural workers and consumers, minimizing the use of synthetic chemical substances (as pesticides and fertilizers) and favouring, as an alternative, natural products. This type of agriculture employs a system of integrated fight that envisages the use of various instruments wisely mixed to fight parasite attacks.

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Conservation agriculture

Conservation agriculture consists in a set of agronomic practices allowing better soil management, limiting negative effects over its composition and structure, content of its organic matter and erosion process and resulting degradation. Conservation agriculture is characterised by some techniques as, for example, direct seeding in soil that hasn’t been ploughed or has been ploughed the least possible and avoiding burning crop residues or ploughing them in the soil.

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Biodynamic agriculture

Biodynamic agriculture is inspired by R. Steiner’s “anthroposophy” and is based on the premise that a farming company is truly an independent living organism inserted in a bigger living cosmic organism that influences it. Cosmic rhythms influence planting calendars, growing and gathering. The more employed techniques are crop rotation, biodynamic preparations, composting, non-destructive soil ploughing and quality fertilizing through the use of “green manures” and biodynamic compost fertilizing.

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