productivity could decrease as a result of even small local temperature increases (1-2°C).
Further warming could have increasingly negative impacts in all regions. Climate change scenarios suggest that by 2080 the number of undernourished people will increase, mostly in developing countries (see figure 10 ), by up to 170 million above the current level. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modelling indicates that an increased frequency of crop losses due to extreme climate events may overcome any positive effects of moderate temperature increases in temperate regions (Easterling et al. 2007).
In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where some of the poorest people live and farm, the scenarios of climate change’s impacts on agriculture present a dire picture. Recent studies confirm that Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate change because of multiple abiotic and biotic stresses and the continent’s low adaptive capacities (IPCC 2007b). Yields in Central and South Asia could decrease up to 30 per cent by the mid-21st century (IPCC 2007a). In drier areas of Latin America, climate change is expected to lead to salinity and desertification of some agricultural land, reducing the productivity of some important crops and animal husbandry (IPCC 2007a).
Share of ODA for agriculture Percent
15 20
10
1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2003 2007 Figure 11: Share of overseas development
0 5
assistance for agriculture (1979–2007) Source: Based on OECD (2010). The agricultural sector includes forestry and fishing, although they are separately identifiable in the data from 1996 onwards. Private funding is not covered. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/38/44116307.pdf
2.2 Opportunities
Many opportunities exist for promoting green agriculture. They include increased awareness by governments, donor interest in supporting agriculture development in low income countries, growing interest of private investors in sustainable agriculture and increasing consumer demand for sustainably produced food.
Government awareness Governments, particularly in developed countries, have become increasingly aware of the need to promote more environmentally sustainable agriculture. Since the mid- 1980s, OECD countries have introduced a large number of policy measures addressing environmental issues in agriculture. Some of these are specific to the agriculture sector, including the practice of linking general support to environmental conditions; others are included in broader national environmental programmes. The result is that the environmental performance of agriculture has begun to improve in OECD countries.
The proportion of global arable land dedicated to organic crops has increased from a negligible amount in 1990 to around to 2 per cent in 2010, and as much as 6 per cent in some countries. The extent of soil erosion and the intensity of air pollution have fallen; the amount of land assigned to agriculture has decreased even as production has increased, and there have been improvements in the efficiency of input use (fertilisers, pesticides, energy, and water) since 1990. However, subsidies for farm-fuel have continued to be a disincentive to greater energy efficiency (OECD 2008).
Donor support for agriculture development Agriculture-related Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), which has fallen steadily over the past 30 years, began to pick up in 2006 as the current food crisis escalated. In 2009, at the G8 summit in Italy, wealthy nations pledged US$ 20 billion for developing-country agriculture. However, there is a pressing need to ensure that these investments, as Ban Ki-moon put it, “breathe new life into agriculture, one which permits sustainable