Sustainable survival

All living organisms are driven by two motivating forces: to reproduce themselves and to survive. Survival depends largely on protection from their enemies and having access to sufficient food. Consequently, for countless millennia the developmental history of hominids has to do with their search for sustenance and survival: an uneven progression from hunting and gathering to crop cultivation and livestock husbandry, the discovery and devising of biotechnologies by which to increase, protect, preserve and transform natural and cultivated biological species and materials into food, fibre and other goods of personal, domestic or commercial utility.

History records that agriculture has progressed as much through empirical perception as from scientific intention. In today's world, intensive large-scale highly mechanised production systems exist together with simple labour intensive subsistence systems where a few crops and farm animals survive on less than a half-hectare of land. Some nations and regions, which for many centuries were prosperous, maintained efficient profitable agricultural systems and produced well in excess of their needs, subsequently lost or forsook their agricultural capabilities and descended into a state of food insufficiency.

To be sustainable, agriculture requires a complex of critical resources, not least human skills and experience, and the dedicated political will of governments and those who legislate each nation's priorities. Libya and Nigeria are two nations where the discovery of oil has led to gross neglect of agriculture. In other ecologies, changes in weather patterns or excessive exploitation of natural resources and depredation of ecosystems have together degraded once fertile lands into near deserts.