ducing turnover and alleviating many problems relating to seasonal migration (FAO, 2002).
•   There are environmental benefits.  Contamination of ground and surface waters by synthetic fertilizers, es­pecially nitrate leaching, and pesticides are avoided and sedimentation of waterways from erosion is reduced (FAO, 2002). Calculations on comparative energy use in OECD countries indicate that energy consumption on organic farms is 64% that of conventional farms (FAO, 2002). In a three-year comparative study on organic and conventional strawberry production in China, 98% of the energy inputs in the organic systems were from renewable sources, such as animal manure and biogas, whereas 70% of the energy inputs into the conventional system were nonrenewable, such as electricity, chemical fertilizers and pesticides (FAO, 2002).
•   Organic agriculture also makes a positive contribution to dealing with climate change: "Organic agriculture may not only enable ecosystems to better adjust to the effects of climate change but also offer a major potential to reduce emissions of agricultural greenhouse gases. Moreover, mixed farming and the diversity of organic crop rotations are protecting the fragile soil surface and may even counteract climate change by restoring the organic matter content. The carbon sink idea of the Kyoto Protocol may therefore partly be accomplished efficiently by organic agriculture" (FAO, 2002).
•   Organic agriculture can be considered more flexible, es­pecially when labor is more readily available and high inorganic inputs or mechanization are limited.

The expansion or benefits of organic agriculture, especially on the need to meet increased food demand, raises major doubts:
•   Available technology cannot greatly increase the pro­ductivity of organic agriculture because it is constrained by nutrient supply. Agriculture of any type is an extrac­tive activity that cannot retain high fertility and pro­ductivity without  replacing nutrients exported with the products or lost from the site during production. Although high-yielding crops can be produced organi­cally, this is achieved, once natural fertility has been ex­ploited, only by bringing in nutrients from other areas, as plant remains or animal feces, or by accumulating them in situ in long fallows, as in slash-and-burn farm­ing. The consequence, not evident to most consumers and overlooked by many proponents, is that a much greater land area than is immediately apparent is in­volved in successful organic production. In contrast, crops can be grown more frequently and often repeat­edly with fertilizers on the same land, as in the examples of intensive rice and rice-wheat systems.
•   It is the shortage of land that will restrict the contri­bution that organic agriculture can make to the world food supply. Organic agriculture was the norm at the beginning of the 1900s, when the world population was 1.5 billion. Now there is not enough land or organic matter to support the crop production needed for the present, let alone the anticipated world population.
•   Adoption of organic agriculture rates are less than 0.1% of arable and permanent agricultural land in nearly all

developing economies in Asia and the Pacific, suggest­ing that most farmers do not believe organic agriculture can produce food at competitive costs (FAO, 2005). Sometimes production costs per unit of land in organic agriculture are lower than in conventional agriculture. Usually they are higher, which means organic farming is profitable only if the produce can be sold at higher prices. Indeed, prices for organic output are higher, but in developing countries this higher price consigns such produce to niche markets.
•   Organic agriculture cannot be the solution to food production for a heavily populated planet. Poor house­holds benefit from greater yields by adopting improved practices. Yield gains from a low base are usually the greatest, but productivity of these systems is probably insufficient to meet future food demand. Nevertheless, the principles of organic agriculture will remain as an important  contributor  to   safe   and  environmentally friendly food production, since they remain firmly em­bedded in integrated agriculture.

2.4.2     Improving nutrition and human health
With rapid increase in food production and rise in income, food consumption per capita in ESAP countries has risen significantly during the past 50 years. Since 1990, direct cereal consumption leveled off for the whole region, main­ly from the decline in direct cereal consumption in China (Figure 2-8). On the other hand, meat consumption rose in ESAP, led by China's steady increase. The same change was, however, absent in India and Indonesia (Figure 2-9).
     In spite of the remarkable growth in agricultural pro­duction within ESAP during the last four decades, hundreds of millions of people still live in hunger and poverty. The proportion in developing countries of underfed popula­tion—with dietary energy consumption inadequate to sus­tain more than light activity—was estimated to have fallen substantially in the last 15 years, from around one in three people in 1975, to one in five in 1989. This implies a con­siderable reduction, from nearly 1,000 million people to just below 800 million. This was considerably influenced by the improving situation in China. South Asia probably improved slowly, according to recent results from India and elsewhere, at around a 0.5% reduction in underweight chil­dren each year.
     The prevalence of underweight children in South Asia remained the highest in the world, over half the total. Calo­rie consumption remained low throughout the 1980s, with little change, although this might have improved slightly for some poorer groups, such as the landless. Nutrition in many countries of Southeast Asia improved, reducing un­derweight prevalence about 1% each year. Food consump­tion rose during the 1980s, along with marked success in food production. A number of countries changed from net food importing to exporting.
     Iron deficiency, a cause of anemia, is the only nutritional problem that increased in many parts of the world. Preva­lence is especially high in South Asia, where more than 60% of women are anemic. The worsening anemia is from down­ward trends in intake of dietary iron and has been caused by reduced production and consumption of legumes with the