Inadequate farm crop diversity

Monocultures are highly unstable and unsustainable systems that spread not because they produce more food but because they produce more control.

1. The mindset that assumes that monocultures are essential for solving problems of scarcity underlies programmes such as World Bank-financed schemes that replace diverse natural forests with pine or eucalyptus plantations, and turn diversified farms into monocultures of "miracle" wheat or rice.

1. Mechanized agriculture has made broadscale farming of single crops very efficient. The advantages for disease and pest management afforded by small-scale intermixed crops have been offset by chemical pesticides.

1. Loss of biodiversity in rural areas
2. Intensive farming
3. Insufficient diversification
4. Dependence of countries on export of limited range of raw materials
5. Crop vulnerability

1. Overdependence on few crop species
2. Inadequate crop rotation
3. Orphan crops

1. Threatened agricultural wildlife habitats
2. Subsistence agricultural income level in rural communities
3. Soil degradation
4. Shortfalls in agricultural crop production
5. Destruction of the countryside
6. Degradation of agricultural land by cash crops
7. Declining breeds of cultivated plants
8. Vulnerability of world genetic resources

1. Insufficient farm experiments
2. Inappropriate modernization of agriculture
3. Inappropriate cash crop policy

1. Technological monoculture
2. Stagnated development of agricultural production
3. Non-diversification in subsistence fishing economies

1. Increasing crop diversity
2. Exploiting global biological resources for new foods
3. Expanding research on plant genetic resources
4. Enriching cultivated plant's genetic diversity with wild relatives

1. Insufficiency
2. Inadequacy
3. Diversity