Agriculture Green Development: a model for China and the world

Abstract

Realizing sustainable development has become a global priority. This holds, in particular, for agriculture. Recently, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Nineteenth National People’s Congress has delivered a national strategy for sustainable development in China—realizing green development. The overall objective of Agriculture Green Development (AGD) is to coordinate “green” with “development” to realize the transformation of current agriculture with high resource consumption and high environmental costs into a green agriculture and countryside with high productivity, high resource use efficiency and low environmental impact. This is a formidable task, requiring joint efforts of government, farmers, industry, educators and researchers. The innovative concept for AGD will focus on reconstructing the whole crop-animal production and food production-consumption system, with the emphasis on high thresholds for environmental standards and food quality as well as enhanced human well-being. This paper addresses the significance, challenges, framework, pathways and potential solutions for realizing AGD in China, and highlights the potential changes that will lead to a more sustainable agriculture in the future. Proposals include interdisciplinary innovations, whole food chain improvement and regional solutions. The implementation of AGD in China will provide important implications for the countries in developmental transition, and contribute to global sustainable development.

Keywords

Agriculture Green Development / food security / interdisciplinary innovations / resource use efficiency / sustainable development / sustainable intensification / whole industry chain

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the Project of Beijing’s Top-Precision-Advanced Disciplines, the CSC-AGD PhD Program from China Scholarship Council (CSC), and the Key Consulting Project of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jianbo Shen, Qichao Zhu, Xiaoqiang Jiao, Hao Ying, Hongliang Wang, Xin Wen, Wen Xu, Tingyu Li, Wenfeng Cong, Xuejun Liu, Yong Hou, Zhenling Cui, Oene Oenema, William J. Davies, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2019. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)