A cross-discipline research institute with a focus on sustainability will hold a debate next month with the aim of exploring the future of agriculture. Faced with a multitude of problems, which risk increasing poverty and impacting on several global regions’ ability to produce food, including water shortages, urbanisation, climate change and soil erosion, researchers at the NIReS Institute will investigate two proposed solutions.

In the face of challenges to food security, the 2011 UK Government Foresight report on ‘The Future of Food and Farming’ recommended turning to Sustainable Intensification as the way forward for food production in order to meet the challenges of global food demands and climate change. Sustainable intensification means driving up yields and intensifying production whilst reducing impact on the environment.

However, critics have said that sustainable intensification is currently poorly defined and some, including the UN Conferences on Trade and Development, feel that the approach will propagate the type of farming that relies on costly, polluting and non-renewable external inputs.

Instead, the way to ensure sustainability and maintain food production may lie in adopting a flexible approach and championing ‘regenerative’ agricultural systems that continuously recreate the resources they use as well as achieving higher productivity and profitability of the system (not necessarily of individual products) with minimal external inputs.

The debate, to be held next month at Newcastle University, will feature Jonathon Porritt, a long time environmental campaigner, former director of Friends of the Earth and co-chair of the Green Party and John Atkin, Chief Operating Officer at Syngenta, prior to which he was Head of Sandoz Agro Northern Europe.

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