A first question to ask is: what are the problems concerning agriculture and environment in developing countries? Some articles that explain the situation...
"Providing enough food for the world's poor is a continuing challenge. According to a study issued by the International Food Policy Research Institute, by 2020 world population will increase to at least 8 billion. Most of this growth will take place in the developing world and will account for about 85 percent of the increase in demand for cereals and meat. Already, almost 1 billion people live in poverty and suffer chronic hunger-about two-thirds of whom are farmers. The United Nations Population Division has made similar population projections.
The amount of arable land available to meet increased demand from a burgeoning population is limited. Only about 10 percent of the world's land surface is suitable for farming, and soil erosion and overfarming are becoming problems in some areas. With no significant room to expand areas of cultivation, increased demand for food in developing countries will have to be met through improved yields of the most widely grown staple crops at a time when the rapid yield growth that characterized the Green Revolution is beginning to peak.
The lack of arable land also can lead to environmental problems. In many developing countries, for example, biodiversity is threatened because wilderness areas such as tropical rainforests are being converting to farmland to meet the demand of food production. Therefore, farmers need to find new ways to boost production using fewer natural resources."
(http://www.bio.org/foodag/background/developingc.asp)
"The structure of agricultural production in developing countries has radically changed in the last two decades. Since the late 60s and 70s, the World Bank and its various agricultural research institutes have actively promoted the adoption of industrial (high chemical input) agricultural methods such as the Green Revolution ‘miracle’ seeds, promising landfall yields. These high technology methods were expected to benefit all farmers, including the poor. Since yields would increase, incomes were also expected to increase.
However, the heavy dependence on imported inputs could not be sustained economically by developing countries. This was compounded, in the 1970s and 1980s, by the oil crisis and the debt crisis. The economic and financial crisis in developing countries led to the proliferation of loan packages from the international financial institutions. Structural adjustment policies were then introduced as a condition for loans borrowed by countries. Since the 1980s, close to 100 countries have been forced to take on structural adjustment packages. The policies included on the one hand forced liberalization, and on the other, the conversion of domestic agricultural production for exports.
Over the last two decades, the experience of small farmers from Central to South America, Africa and Asia have been strikingly similar. Many have been pressured to switch from diverse traditional polycultures to monocultures for overseas markets. For example, the provision of extension services and credit were often conditioned upon farmers accepting the new technologies in export crops that were promoted. Farmers have been likewise forced to switch to export crops when local prices in staples and traditional crops have plummeted as a result of cheap subsidized imports often from the industrialized countries flooding the local markets. For the majority of small farmers, the process has been one of systematic impoverishment. Many have even been squeezed out of farming altogether. Instead of abating food scarcity, which has always been the reasoning for public investment in agricultural technology and hybrid seeds, food surpluses are increasing on the world market, yet ironically, for those most in need, hunger and food insecurity remains more of a problem. The Green Revolution technical fix focused narrowly on increasing yields is clearly not the answer."
(http://focusweb.org/publications/2001/agriculture_which_way_forward.html)
This article explains the history of post-war agriculture, which includes the advantages and disadvantages of the Green Revolution: http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/issue/history.html.
How can sustainable agriculture benefit developing countries? Well, this article explains it quite well:
"A more sustainable agriculture seeks to make the best use of nature’s goods and services as functional inputs. It does this by integrating natural and regenerative processes, such as nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration and natural enemies of pests into food production processes. It minimises the use of nonrenewable inputs (pesticides and fertilizers) that damage the environment or harm the health of farmers and consumers. It makes better use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, so improving their self-reliance. And it seeks to make productive use of social capital - people’s capacities to work together to solve common
management problems, such as pest, watershed, irrigation, forest and credit management.
Sustainable agriculture technologies and practices must be locally-adapted. They emerge from new configurations of social capital (relations of trust embodied in new social organisations, and new horizontal and vertical partnerships between institutions) and human capital (leadership, ingenuity, management skills and knowledge, capacity to experiment and innovate). Agricultural systems with high social and human capital are able to innovate in the face of uncertainty.
Sustainable agriculture jointly produces food and other goods for farm families and markets, but it also contributes to a range of public goods, such as clean water, wildlife, carbon sequestration in soils, flood protection, landscape quality. It delivers many unique non-food functions that cannot be produced by other sectors (eg on-farm biodiversity, groundwater recharge, urban to rural migration, social cohesion).
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The central issues are, therefore, i) the extent to which farmers can improve food production with cheap, low-cost, locally-available technologies and inputs, and ii) whether they can do this without causing further environmental damage."
