To what extent is SI useful? I think, at a spatially confined (community scale) and a rather short time scale. Depending on how flexible/adaptive certain 'intensifications' strategies are, e.g. increasing crop production by using fertilizers, they will solve the local food problem for maybe 5 years. Beyond this scale, I see three major issues arising.

First, I would question whether we really cannot 'switch of demand' - if not by purpose, very likely by accident. So, 'switching of' is maybe not the right picture. What do you think about smoothing our demands for example by aiming at a greater 'saturation-efficiency'? (numbers of full stomachs or healthy humans per square meter for agriculture) This goes into the direction of aiming at a 'fair distribution' which is more a question of will than that of pushing physical limits such as in SI. Do we want to have overweight? Or do we want to drop subventions for EU-overproduction in order to support non-EU agriculture where more people benefit from local food production? (instead of EU-export dumping products).

Second, another strong way to level demand is our preference for high energy goods. If we would assume for just one moment, access to drinking water for all human beings is the most important goal, and truly think that this is something like a human right, can we still afford then to waste water on cotton production where it is not efficiently used or where the products are not really needed to survive? Well, here it becomes obvious that we cannot play off our needs against each other, but one could calculate for example the fair share of land, water, energy to fulfill Maslov's pyramid of needs. I would imagine then that there will be not much fuel left to fly around ...

Third, if we manage globally the distribution of food fairly, without unneccessary competition with other goods, it is still open to manage our demand by the number of people we are. This is definetely not just a question of individual will but more about a societal consensus where and for how long we really want to implement all millenium development goals.

So, in summary, beyond locally applied SI, I would see the matters of food distribution, competition with other goods, and human population dynamics as being at least similar, if not more, important to fill food gaps. It may help to depolarize the discussion when addressing the specific scale where SI is suitable. So what should be sustained and what is intensified.

Would be glad about some follow-up on this topic ...

Sustainable intensification appears to be an unrealistic goal, this because intensification would imply a greater production, which would necessarily mean greater inputs in the form of fertilizers (chemical or organic is immaterial); so when one adds sustainable, is one referring to the potential to continue adding ever higher inputs or the capacity to reap a higher yield in the long term. Presuming the latter goal, it goes without saying that there is no model which one can refer to, because all the 'sustainable intensification' programmes in the past, eg. the Green Revolution in India, have proved to be unsustainable in the long term. Whether we have the conceptual breakthrough to actually increase output without entering a cycle of spiraling inputs is a moot point. However, to my mind, attempting to further burden the land is barking up the wrong tree, as it were. It is the demand and supply side that needs urgent correction. I agree with Romina that overconsumption is undesirable; however, even if that is left the way it is, the changes required would be simple: now that people have discovered that eating too much meat leads to colon cancer, it would not be difficult to effect the reduction in meat consumption in western countries, as, for example, has been successfully implemented for tobacco consumption. This would free up an enormous amount of foodgrain (according to the Gaia Atlas of Planet Management 91984), ONE THIRD of global foodgrain production is fed to livestock in the west, mainly to improve the quality of meat. Besides, India loses over one third of its food grain stock every year because of the lack of storage facilities. Grain is left out in the open, covered with tarpaulins and during the monsoon, naturally it rots. Besides this, vermin destroy a large amount.

As Romina points out, there are lobbies interested in the destruction of food to maintain shortages, to keep prices stable or high, to cater to all sorts of unimaginable practices that people have devised in their attempt to get rich (quick). If we are serious about mitigating global hunger, then it is this we have to look at, not further burdening the land, for even if we manage to increase production, the same lacunae causing the massive loss of food globally will waste the increased production, too. On the other hand, if the lacunae are fixed, we probably don't need to increase food production.

I completely agree with Romina and Peter, the term is tricky. If only a short pic of the whole film is shown, the idea sounds great. But intensification always means more energy, more production of fertilizers (in the nearby or far, anywhere in the Biosphere), a bigger CO2 and energetic footprint... And this is not sostenible in a large term or taken in a broader scale out from our plot. And secondly, again agree with my collegues, the solution it is not a problem of production but rationality in the production, in the eficiency, allocation and trade.

I think the "concept" is useful. This does not mean that the arguments developed by Romina and Peter are wrong, the problem is a different one. If we think about intensification in industrialized countries, I agree with them. If we think about intensification in developing (or poor countries), in cases where the self-consumption of farmers is relevant, the concept is adequate. Let us go back in the history of economic thought to the type of intensification described very clearly by E. Boserup, shortening the fallow periods, is no more sustainable. And this is what happens now in South-Saharan Africa. And there is available technology that can intensify without depleting natural resources. In this context, "sustainable intensification" is a useful concept. Intensification will happen anyway, let try to help in order to make it sustainable.

If "sustainable development" is an oxymoron (Redclift, 2005, Sustainable Development 13: 212-227), then I guess "sustainable intensification" is even worse... I think Brian Czech has a lot of good arguments against such a logic (see, for example, his book "Shoveling the fuel for a runaway train: Errant economists, shameful spenders, and a plan to stop them all" - just the title says everything!).

Just a brief add to this discussion, the following paper might help to shed some light on SI from a broader perspective:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12084/abstract

I agree with the authors that, if the discussion is about food production, not only SI, one has to deal with land scarcity as a whole.

I personally prefer the concept of "ecological intensification of world agriculture" used by Pablo A. Tittonell, Chair of Farming Systems Ecology at Wageningen University. His inaugural lecture, published as "Farming Systems Ecology: Towards ecological intensification of world agriculture", is highly recommended, as it provides concrete examples supporting the transition toward that paradigm of agricultural development.

I agree with Alejandra, about the conceptof "ecological intensification of world agriculture". Basically the challenge would be to increase food (and other resources) per surface unit by optimising ecological processes. Is it so impossible? Probably past developments in agriculture, which gave an overwhelming increase in food production, have been based on different concepts, based on industrialised systems.

As an alternative, the hypohesis of mimicking natural ecosystem in designing farming systems is very promising. (see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13593-011-0027-z#page-1).

Another idea I'v been verifying is the following. Crops are currently addressed as uniform stands of plants , in which theoretically each crop plant is "a copy" (sorry for extreme simplification) of any other. In other words it is commonly assumed that the traits of a single wheat plant are representative of the traits of the whole crop stand. Considering that the VCU protocols for varietal selection and release follow this idea, it is evident how this "homogeneity paradigm" is conditioning all possible innovations. However, from a pure "ecological" point of view, the crop can be addressed as a population of plants, not necessarily phenotypically homogeneous. This opens the path for many innovations which may have been overlooked so far (see http://orgprints.org/6749/1/PhillipsandWolfe[2]_Lit_review.pdf).

Agroforestry is another big issue. All agricultural education and extension from the 1950s on has been organised in separate subjects, (crops, animal production, tree production, forestry). As a consequence, complex systems which gather all these productions in a whole have been understood in very recent times, but they have an incredible potential to optimise ecological processes both in the south of the world (see Torquebiau 2009, L'Agroforesterie, ed. Harmattan) and in the north (Reisner 2007, Target Regions for Silvoarable Agroforestry in Europe, Ecological Engineering) .

In other words, there may be very much to do to increase land productivity without increasing input supply.

Thanks everyone, excellent thoughts. I looked at Pablo's lecture that Alejandra pointed towards and was struck by this quote:

“The model of intensification per unit area or per animal, which is deeply rooted in the mind of scientists from the green revolution generation is now obsolete. We need to think outside the box. Increasing the already high cereal yields in Europe by one ton per ha would have enormous environmental and economic costs, and will have little impact on reducing world hunger. Increasing current cereal yields by one ton per ha in Africa, for instance, which could be easily achieved through agro-ecological intensification would represent a doubling of the current cereal production in that continent, with less environmental and economic costs than further intensificationof European agriculture. And, most importantly, food will be produced where it is urgently needed, and where the surpluses can generate extra income for poor rural households”

But this indicates to me part of the ideological minefield. Ambrogio says he agrees with Alejandra about ecological intensification (as described by Pablo) and that "Basically the challenge would be to increase food (and other resources) per surface unit by optimising ecological processes" (which I can't disagree with in the slightest), but Pablo says such thinking is "now obsolete".

Proponents of SI, as a concept, cite that the "growing yields" is a global thing and SI does not imply the necessity of intensifying further already intensive areas, and I know many SI authors (myself included) would agree with Pablo's quote from "We need to think outside the box" to the end.

One of my colleagues, Daisy Blackhurst, said she didn't like the term SI preferring "intensified sustainably". The concepts "sustainable intensification", "ecological intensification", agro-ecological enhancement of yields all (when one tries to avoid the ideology) are related and almost synonymous...

Another colleague, Tara Garnett, has recently published a great paper pointing out how different framings of the problems in food security lead to different solutions http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652613005064. Her thesis, and echoed by another recent paper by Evan Fraser, is that all framings are needed!

Best wishes all round!

Thank you, Dr. Benton, for further clarifying the situation. I agree entirely with the opinion that European yields hardly need to be increased, while increasing yields from African croplands is both desirable and possible. However, the term to describe this might be 'realization of potential productivity' or something on those lines, rather than SI? SI would imply that African croplands are already yielding their optimum production, and this needs to be intensified sustainably. That is why most of the views above automatically applied the term to croplands of the developed world.

I did notice the contradiction between Ambrogio's underlying argument and Tittonell's critique of "conventional" intensification. I think it may just have been a misinterpretation on Ambrogio's part. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Ambrogio!

I agree with you, Tim, on being wary of ideology as the primary basis of the scientific endeavour. I do believe, however -and this really has to do with thinking "out of the box" in the manner that Tittonell suggests- that we need to address agricultural development in terms of complex socio-ecological systems, and not simple-criterion technical fixes. I sincerely hope that this conviction and aspiration transcends ideology. There is a Quaker saying that a UC Berkeley professor once shared with me: "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness"...all paths to the light!

Gracias Alejandra. There are several ways to "Optimise ecological processes" . Some can be very obsolete. In my last contribution I mentioned some papers/books which provide concrete examples of "thinking out of the box".

In the abstract of Tittonel's lecture there is :

"The model of intensification that is deeply rooted in the mind of scientists from the green revolution generation is obsolete".

Apparently, nothing can be farest from this than what I wrote. But Tim is right: saying just "optimise ecological processes" can be as obsolete as claiming for increasing input supply. More in depth, indeed, it is easy to recognise that many scientists used to aim at optimising ecological processes with the same methodological paradigm of green revolution-based intensification. Opposite innovation goals with the same framework of action? Probably it cannot work.

As an example, much of past agroforestry research&extension was conducted in a very "reductionist" way and, although it aimed at "optimising ecological processes", it resulted in an array of exogenous innovations which, at the moment of farmers adoption, resulted in a failure or in a refusal by farmers. There are many (confidential) reports analysing this in depth. To think out of the box, Dupriez and De Leener (http://publications.cta.int/en/publications/publication/505/) proposed to address agroforestry as 'multi-level agriculture', which is much closer to the way farmers organise their fields by diversifying land use in a vertical direction (herbaceous and woody components) . I had the honour of working with farmers under the guide of one of these authors and.. it works quite better!!

Evolutionary crop breeding is another interesting option, much considered before the green revolution (Suneson 1956 Agronomy Journal 48:188-191), then completely overlooked until very recent years.

Thanks, Ambrogio, for the clarification and for enlightening me on the subject. I have not yet looked into the publications you have referenced, but I obviously need to. I feel that anything that is "optimized" from a strictly biocentric frame of mind will overlook so much of the complexity of living, palpable, humanized natural-social or socio-ecological systems. I think you have experienced this yourself with the farmers you mention above, and I currently am with Andean farmers.

I think the term SI is somehow contradictive in itself since intensification always comes along with higher input of watether is needed labour, energy, fertilizer etc. If it is a real oxymoron or a applicable concept depends on the region where it is applied. In my opinion, a further intensification of agriculture in Europe and North America in a sustainable way is not possible because the cost (input and impact on environment) are already very high. However, SI applied in developing countries with predominantly low-input agriculture might be feasible. I see a great potential in permaculture or 'multi-level agriculture' as a way of sustainable intensification in terms of greater output. Furthermore, holistic mamagement in the sense of Allan Savory looks also promising. I think ecological intensification or agro-ecological enhancement as mentioned before are better terms than SI.

If demand for food is growing (and one can’t just influence the demand with measures of demand side Management, e.g. slowing the "westernization of diets", especially the growing demand for meat and dairy products) there is some need to satisfy demand. A sustainable possibility therefore is to minimize crop losses (closed and dryer granairies, efficient controlling of storage pests etc.), another one the intensification of food processing (e.g. industrialisation with better resource utilization or better household organization). The intensification of agriculture is not automatically the necessary solution in situations of growing demand for food, as stated by Garnett et al.

Up to now the intensification of agriculture is not to be seen as a valid (well defined) concept of sustainability science. Has SI the goal "to increase food production from existing farmland while minimising pressure on the Environment?" (http://www.futureoffood.ox.ac.uk) Or is ist Goal "producing more food with less negative impact'' (http://ccafs.cgiar.org/ compared to the impact of what)? Is it only a reduction of unintended impacts? Is it possible to manage social-ecological systems in an intensified way without increasing their resilience?

Further on I am convinced that a real sustainable intensification is not possible in the old governance patterns of agriculture. SI affords a transformation not only of agricultural production but also of its governance. To define the conditions under which an agricultural intensification might be evaluated as a sustainable one depends from very specific local situations - on the socio-economic side as well as on the physical one.

what we need to achieve from SI is to increase the food production from existing land with minimal impacts on the environment. The cause for all these problems is over-exploitation due to extremely variable and publicity stimulated needs of modern day people. It's true that the demand for food and all other basic things are at an increasing level. But as scientists and social workers it is important to make public aware of the more nutritious and functional foods that they can obtain without disturbing the natural environment. In my opinion it is very important to study the old agricultural practices and study and improve them further. ( eg: Introducing pesticides has seriously damaged the natural biological systems with more produce, but increasing levels of unhealthiness in man). Therefore when you have to think of the amount of money that has to be spent on unhealthy nations rather than increasing food production with quick means it is very wise to use nature friendly traditional ways. And when we talk about sustainability it is essential to start at home and school levels. Without the support of the public SI will be an impossible goal to achieve.

As you point out, the "sustainable part" is really the essential part of the concept. I have a short essay on sustainable development that touches on this issue. Certainly the concept of intensifying agriculture to minimize the overall human footprint is reasonable, but the drivers behind the need for this intensification are the key issues that need to be addressed. This essay may, or may not help, but it is short at least: https://sites.google.com/site/noaaessays/real-sustainability

My answer is YES. To meet the food requirement for increasing population, intensification (increasing yield per ha) and extensification (expanding planting area) of agriculture are only two ways we can choose. Therefore, the full concept should be 'sustainable intensification and extensification, or SIE'. Here, the sustainability is a trade-off between crop yield and other ecological services.

I will add a YES, but from a different perspective. As a farmer and as a researcher, sustainable intensification is difficult to argue against and those who do argue against good business practices. Whether or not one utilizes biological manipulation, every business must want to produce more with less. More income with less labor, less fertilizer, less water - you name it, the idea behind a successful business is to do more than break even, it is to move forward.

Why? Well, you want to send the kids to college, the cost of cars and trucks goes up, the cost of heating fuel and your own food increases … and then someday maybe you want to take a day off, visit the grandkids, retire. If your business model is not one that assumes the ideal of doing more with less, then you are economically stagnant and at risk when others change their pricing. Your buyers may decide to lower what they pay, your suppliers may increase their prices, and thus your costs.

I agree that the "sustainable" should refer to the ecological services and resources we "borrow" as food and fiber producers, but even if that is ignored, sustainability applied simply to the business means you mandate understanding the processes you work with better and better over time in order to optimize them and do more with less. This is Taylorism and Fordism in the business world (and several other things but those are the universal big ones). The idea that you break down each process and see where you can make the most impact. In almost every case, ***IF*** people were doing this, they would notice that our current "typical" system isn't very efficient at all. It suffers from the realities of attempting to apply mechanical realities to natural settings.

The difference between natural and artificial is primarily one of sameness. Natural is not the same from field to field, flower to flower, or inch to inch. Artificial systems can be "made" more generic, but then we would have to make all animals, plants, etc. all the same in order to capitalize on this sameness (keep in mind that humans are animals and we have rejected the mandates of genetic sameness although we still have a LOT of problems with accepting variation).

So whether the "system" is artificial and contrived or natural, the goal for a business to survive remains sustainable intensification. I cannot warm up employees by burning down the factory and expect to have income following the fire. This may sound harsh to the idealist, but we need to face reality in order to be agents of change. Supporting SI is supporting a sound economic and business mentality. It is also needing to rethink the major portion of our agriculture as we have slowly inched our way so far from efficiency that we can't even see the playing field anymore. Each advance that is heralded may be just one more brick laid on an unstable base. Keep adding the bricks and the wall will fall … maybe with you under it.

Unfortunately I have not always time to carefully read all the comments and answers to a given question. I hope that what I say now has not been said before, to contribute something to the answer of the question. But if it has been already said, then it is like to reinforce that same idea.

Increase the growing area does not solve the problem of food production. Actually what Malthus wanted to say in his work as quoted and seldom understood is that increasing the land for cultivation, this increase should be less productive than currently cultivated lands. The more the population grows, more land will be added to unproductive agricultural systems and their performance will be increasingly marginalized. So far the problem solved, increase. And it will increase environmental degradation.

The sustainable intensification should be in the same farmland but with new production systems. For example, we have cultivated shrimp in greenhouse systems far away from the coasts and the results are good and durable (sustainable in Anglo or Hispanic terminology). The bio-intensive systems have also been very successful in the cultivation of vegetables. Higher yields 3 or 4 times that traditional cultures have much less growth or agrochemicals for pest control are used.

There are a few principles that I'm sure everyone is aware of but perhaps could bear repeating:

The FAO statistics on food wastage are horrendous.

Feeding crops to animals for meat production is seriously dumb and very energy intensive. With the advent of peak oil it is also becoming expensive and only economic with substantial subsidies. If it must be done then the most efficient animal to use is the chicken.

There are plenty of grasslands available for careful raising of beef where any other use would be inappropriate (I think someone mentioned Allan Savory in this context)

SI seems only possible within a limited number of ecotopes and there is no fixed recipe. However, restoration of degraded land shows some potential.

The economics of any farming system is becoming increasingly tied to the cost of energy (and water).

There are many ways of measuring sustainability but if you can only measure one parameter, make it soil carbon. Everything revolves around that.

I would argue that the term suggests a contradiction in the same way that sustainable development does. Although neither the term development or intensification necessitate a contradiction with sustainable they are often understood as alluding to growth, again not necessarily a bad thing but this is usually framed as economic growth. Whilst growth, development and intensification can all be understood as a form of progression in non economic ways this really depends on how these terms are used, who by and the context they are used in. All that said I think the framing is less than helpful, it seems to me the issues in the agri-food system that we most need to focus on are not in the sphere of production. Much greater attention needs to be paid to inequalities in the system in the developed and developing world, not just in terms of access but also in terms of power to influence the system and how resources are distributed. The risk in using sustainable intensification is that it tends to position the debate around production and implies a need to produce 'more with less' when in reality the many of the issues could be addressed by addressing the various inequalities in the agri-food system. The term is also likely to be highjacked in the same way sustainable development has been to further the interests of groups/individuals who do not ascribe to principles that can genuinely be called sustainable.

Yes, it is a useful approach. The long term benefit of allocating more land under agriculture will not offset the negative environmental impacts such as land degradation in the future. Besides, several studies showed that most uncultivated marginal lands are characterized by low soil quality. As an alternative, a more promising approach to ensuring food security may be increasing yield from currently cultivated but underutilized land where productivity is below the optimum. Sustainable agricultural intensification - increasing productivity per unit land area - is thus necessary to secure the food supply for the increasing world population. You can get more information if you read outstanding articles by Foley et al. 2005, 2011; Lal 2013; Tilman et al. 2002, 2011.

Apparently from the discussions raised so far, unsustainable intensification will come with an attached cost either ecological and or economic. But more importantly, I think we need to reconsider what happens after the increase in production or yeild. If current estimates of world food production is anything to by, the amount of food produced is sufficient to feed the world if it is well distributed and if loss associated with production and consumption are minimised. This implies that for any sustainable intensification method to be useful, the Value and food supply chain system has to be well strengthened to ensure that leakages are reduced form farm to fork. Or of what is the essence of food produced that end up wasted or lost to the ecosystem or the economics of production. Furthermore, taking it a step further, and considering a typical resource poor small scale farmer in sub-sahara Africa, preaching the gospel of sustainable intensification without any form of compensation for adopting the concept may not achieve the desired result intended. For the concept to be meaningful and adopted by resource-poor farmers, the appropriate framework has to consider working out a form of compensation that would make farmers easily adopt the method.

I wouldn't worry about the discursive rendition of a perfectly good term, sustainable intensification, into an ideological camp, or framing. The term invites a useful critical assessment of any sort of land sparing approach to wildlands conservation. Since much intensification has come from high-input agriculture, it is certainly legitimate to ask if this must always be the case. Does intensification imply unsustainable farm practices? I don't believe this is a logical necessity by any means, but it does beg an important empirical question. A good way to think about it from an historical perspective is perhaps by reference to Boserup's magisterial work on agricultural intensification.

I don't see any contradiction per se in "SI" and it should not be limited solely to agricultural production the primary production unit but extended across all activities and at all levels including optimal use of resources and waste management. To go back to agriculture, small holding often geared towards intensification of the limited land available as illustrated by multistory, mix cropping etc.. though not considered as intensified production but from a biodiversity is considered sustainable.

So I would say "SI" aim to create (1) the awareness and (2) to give thought to matters often considered as irrelevant, uneconomical and sometimes superfluous to set objectives. It is a attempt forcing oneself to see beyond the current activity or project and the need to continually review the production unit even if it is not failing to improve its effectiveness.

Dear colleagues…, very nice and inspiring discussion….

Yes, population growth means demand growth and consequently needs production growth. My opinion, the important issue is not just we choose the way to fulfill the need, either “Intensification” or ”Extensification”. Both, the intensification or extensification can be sustainable and also can be not sustainable.

Basically, agriculture is ‘to grow’ something on earth and we harvest from what actually the earth can serve for us. If we need more than what just the earth can serve, then we start to manipulate the environment to take some things more and consequently we put or release other things more. To manipulate means to interfere the existing (natural) condition, and the balance will be interfered consequently.

Thus, the most important issue to sustain agricultural system is to keep the ‘growing cycle’ sustains. We need to keep the ‘resource cycle’ sustain, we need to keep the ‘energy cycle’ sustain, we need to keep the balance between what we get and what we give or release. Sometimes we want to get more but give less, we demand more than what we actually need.

Finally, I want to say that the key of sustainability is ‘to manage the balance’, and to manage a small or localized system is much easier than a big one. So, agricultural sustainability has to be managed systematically from the smallest and localized ones of the agricultural system itself, and hierarchically sustain to the whole system.

As ‘intensification’ means to grow (get) more without expanding area, it has consequence to ‘force’ the ‘environmental service’ capacity by inputting more materials and energy. Environmental bearing capacity and its over-exploitation become critical factor to be concern. Whereas ‘extensification’ means to open ‘new field’, it has consequence to ‘change’ the previously-existing ecosystem. Environmental suitability and stability become critical factor to be concern.

Whichever we choose, it can be resulting either good or bad result. And, whicever, ‘to manage the balance’ of the ecosystem and environment is very important, and we really need to concern about it since the beginning. I think…….

Regrettably I think we spend most of our efforts on the intensification part of the equation - doing pretty much what ever can be economically justified to increase yield and spend relatively little time doing an honest evaluation of whether those production practices are "sustainable". In most cases I think we are content in defining sustainability as a reduction of impacts on the environment rather the quantifying the whether absolute value of those impacts can be sustained. For example we have doubled the size of the reactive nitrogen pool on the planet. Is that sustainable when only about 50% of that reactive nitrogen can be recovered in plant biomass (and even less ends up as food). If we really want to determine how much water the glass can hold we should measure the size of the glass not how quickly we should be pouring the water into the glass. So the question should be how many people can this planet sustain?

It may look as a contra-intuitive concep becasue intensification may includemore use of inputs. But important concept is to produce more with less. Thus, the measure systhem is what has not been defined. CO2 balace (captured -produced) is probably the best measure. Thus, any measure that increases CO2 balance could be considered sustainable intensification. For instance. Yield in sunflwoers in South Spain have been shown to increase by 30% when the crop is planted in the winter and not in the spring. This yeild increase can represent about 1 Tm/Ha more Carbon captured from the atmosphere. But there are limmitations for this practice. such as weed control, bird damage, etc. Including an appropiate post-emergence herbicide, intead of the usual practice of pre-emergent herbicides may solve the problem. This would be a sustainable intensification practice. Another example you have it in the type of fertilizers farmer can use. In the production of certain fertilizers, the energy needed (CO2 footprint) to produce them can be double. Thus farmers can reduce dramatically their CO2 footprit by changing the fertilizer formulation. Another example is the Non-tillage practices where farmers subtitute 2 or 3 winter labors with tractors by herbicide weed control. Non tillage pranctice have shown to increase organic matter in the soil, preserve biodiversity and improve yields though better soil water management. Thus, yes sustainable intensification is posibble

Last Saturday, the Committee on World Food Security (an intergovernmental body to serve as a forum in the United Nations System for review and follow-up of policies concerning world food security including production and physical and economic access to food) had several hours of debate related to the terms we are considering here. They were negotiating “Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems”. In the end, they agreed on including this text in the agreement: “Integrate traditional and scientific knowledge with best practices and technologies through different approaches which address environmental concerns, including agroecological approaches and sustainable intensification, among others”. What was interesting was that “agroecological approaches” and “sustainable intensification” were seen by most negotiators as different, at the same time as there was a general call for more clarity and definition of the terms. We are exploring these issues more on a "Community of Practice" on ecological intensification, @ http://agrobiodiversityplatform.org/liberation/.

Yes I do agree with many SG friend have pointed out, Sustainable Intensification need of the day. But both sustainability and intensification can not go together. In the sense, protection of resource base for future in pure form is the duty of all of us. Since, demand increasing so rapidly, Intensification comes into the picture which may impure the natural resource base and may taxing on sustainability of ecosystem. However, degraded resources with sustainable adaptive mechanism may provide the scope of production and supply of goods and services. Therefore, talking both concept together may dilute the concept.

Yes...., I do absolutely agree with the sentence: “Integrate traditional and scientific knowledge with best practices and technologies through different approaches which address environmental concerns, including agroecological approaches and sustainable intensification, among others”.

I believe that ‘technology’ is actually a product of an integration of knowledge, tradition and good practice where human-being try to overcome their productivity limitation or problems. Surely, the technology itself can be transferred among others; but to gain an 'optimum success', match-ability with the local tradition, knowledge and environmental conditions are very important to be concerned. So, the sustainability of technology in agriculture and food production system (in this case can be mean: sustainable agriculture, sustainable intensification, sustainable extensivication, sustainable ecology, sustainable development, sustainable investment, sustainable benefit, sustainable co-prosperity, etc) cannot be succeed without such an integrated approaches and considerations. "Community of Practice" sounds good also..!

I think SI is a useful concept (we can see how much discussion has produced!). If we are going to intensificate crop yield, we should put more attention in its sustainibility. When human being interfere in the nature to produce something, we get not only the product we need, but also some "side effects", that usually accumulates with time and finnally could cause seriuous troubles for sustainibility. If we could elliminate that side effects, we can get sustainibility. So, as much as we intensificate our food production, we should intensificate our practices to get sustainibility eliminating side effects.