Feeding the Planet / Nourrir la planète

Climate changes, loss of biological diversity, water scarcity and desertification, unequal development and poverty, food safety and world hunger: these are some of the global issues looming before us. There's no doubt that the final issue, hunger, is the most urgent: will our planet be able to feed all of humanity in the near future? The Green Revolution, which was introduced on a world scale after World War II, made it easy to ignore the threat of hunger. But the Green Revolution also encouraged overpopulation; it ravaged the environment in many places; it created inequalities in the sharing of the planet's wealth, and these inequalities have made the threats we must face in the coming decades even greater than those the world had to confront in the early twentieth century. Michel Griffon traces the history of the Green Revolution and reviews its positive and negative results in every part of the world. Above all, he examines the innovative solutions that we must put into practice in order to stimulate development everywhere and to reconcile ecology with fairness.Michel Griffon is an agronomist and economist specialising in development problems, and in their social, ecological and environmental aspects. He is a consultant in sustainable development for the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD).