New report has good news about sustainable farming

Mark Bittman at the New York Times writes about a new report from the United Nations that debunks the conventional wisdom that it isn’t possible to feed the world’s population using sustainable agriculture practices.  Noting the toll that conventional or industrial agriculture takes on the Earth’s resources, report author Olivier de Schutter says that in the short term, sustainable agriculture (what he calls “agro-ecology” helps:

small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological destruction.