Invited Key Note, AGRO2010, Montpellier, France, Aug/Sept 2010 Multiple drivers of change – a challenge for cropping systems designers and managers Holger Meinke* and Paul C. Struik Centre for Crop Systems Analysis, Wageningen University, Netherlands, *holger.meinke@wur.nl Rates of global changes are accelerating. For instance, global populations and per capita income continue to grow, increasing the demand for plant-based products. Global changes also put increased pressure on natural resources resulting in agriculture competing with other sectors for inputs such as land and water, while the size of the environmental footprint of agriculture remains of concern. These trends led to the catch-cry ‘we need to produce more with less’. We explore some of the multiple dimensions of these global drivers of change and argue that this catch-cry is an unhelpful over-simplification of a complex issue. In fact ‘producing more with more, but smarter’ is often more productive and sustainable. Background Global changes in the form of population growth, urbanisation, industrialisation, climate variability and change have dramatic impacts on agriculture, particularly on cropping systems. The demand for food and other plant-based products is projected to rapidly outpace increases in supply (e.g. von Grebmer et al., 2008). Further, agricultural production systems are also competing with alternative users for important production factors, namely land, water, labour and energy. These resource constraints also create internal competition within cropping systems as alternative crops could be produced with these resources: food versus feed versus fibre versus fuel; usually the crop wins for which the highest purchasing power exists. Historically cropping systems emerged as a consequence of often unforeseeable interactions between farmers, communities, market forces, governments, rural industries or businesses. Increasingly these players are trying to purposefully design these systems through targeted infrastructure investments, a trend that started on a large scale in the 20th century with the building of large, multi-purpose dams (e.g. the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the Three Gorges Dam in China), irrigations schemes (e.g. the Ord river irrigation scheme in Australia) or land reclamation projects (e.g. the Dutch Flevopolders). More recently, set-aside policies by the EU and US were rapidly superseeded by the sudden awareness of the importance of plant production triggered by the global food and energy crisis of 2007/2008. This accelerated a new trend: foreign investments in land resources regarded as ‘underexploited’, particularly (but not only) in Africa. In a recent IFPRI report, von Braun and Meinzen-Dick (2009) stressed that these shifting power relations can endanger the livelihoods of the poor, if win-win solutions for smallholder farmers and investors are not pro-actively sought. Global drivers of change also interact strongly with local circumstances (e.g. soil fertility, water availability or socio-economic conditions), resulting in often intractable scale interactions (Wilbanks and Kates, 1999). In such situations, simplistic slogans such as ‘we need to produce more with less’ can become counterproductive as they are exploited by special interest groups and ideologically coloured production principles that might not necessarily be in the best interest of farmers or civil society (Giller et al., 2009). Discussions A recent IFPRI report estimates that by 2025, water scarcity could cause annual global losses of 350 million tons of food production - slightly more than the entire current US grain crop - if urgent measures are not taken now (www.ifpri.org/media/water_summaries.htm ). Hence, we must achieve substantial productivity gains in terms of production per unit of water. Similarly, Asia, which accounts for 91% of global rice production, will be unable to satisfy the increasing demand for rice due to limited arable land. Hence, we must achieve substantial productivity gains in terms of production per unit of land. In Africa, on the other hand, crop production is severely limited by a lack of nutrients, even in semi-arid regions (Giller et al., 2006). Hence, we must achieve substantial productivity gains in terms of production per unit of applied nutrients. In other words: we must simultaneously improve the various eco-efficiencies of these