wood production, while satisfying increasing current and emerging energy demands, as well as environmen­tal and cultural services by agroecosystems?
•   How do we practically provide clean water, maintain biodiversity, sustain the natural resource base and de­crease the adverse impacts of agricultural activities on people and the environment?
•   How do we improve social welfare and personal liveli­hoods in the agricultural sector, and enhance these eco­nomic benefits for the other sectors?
•   How do we empower marginalized stakeholders to sus­tain the diversity of agriculture and food systems, in­cluding their cultural dimensions?
•   And how do we increase productivity under marginal­ized, rainfed lands and incorporate them into local, na­tional and global markets?

Resource use and degradation
Changes in land use have been without exception significant in all the regions. While more land has been brought under the plough in SSA over the past two decades than during any period of human history on the sub-continent, the intensi­fication of production without the expansion of land under cultivation has been significant in NAE, ESAP and LAC. In much of CWANA, such expansion is constrained by access to water. Agriculture has contributed to land degradation in all the regions; in some regions with input intensive pro­duction systems (ESAP, LAC and NAE) the relative share of agriculture-induced degradation is higher than in other regions. On average 35% of severely degraded land world­wide is due to agricultural activities.
     Poorly defined and enforced property rights over com­mon pool resources (SSA), lack of property rights for women (CWANA, ESAP, LAC, SSA), and caste and other social hier­archies that limit access to resources (ESAP, LAC, SSA) have contributed natural resource degradation. Overall popula­tion growth, increasing pressure to generate income from natural resources (using increasingly expensive inputs), and technological solutions that are blanket recommendations irrespective of regional variations in resource quality, have intensified production and extraction processes of crop/com­modity production, livestock, fisheries and forestry. As a re­sult, pockets of high-input agriculture in CWANA, ESAP and LAC as well as the NAE region contribute to the degradation of soil and water systems and pollution that add to global warming. These conditions confront limited state capacities to cope with the effects of climate change in the developing countries [See Part 2: NRM and Climate Change].
     The complex nexus between degradation of natural re­sources and rural poverty is acknowledged in the drylands of SSA, South Asia and CWANA, mountain ecosystems of LAC and coastal ecosystems in all the regions. Despite evidence of several resource conserving technologies and resource shar­ing and improving social contracts or institutional arrange­ments, little effort has been made within mainstream formal AKST to learn from and apply these lessons to other agro-ecological systems and societies. Moreover, while declining water availability and quality, the loss of biodiversity, farmer access to seeds and local plant and animal genetic resources, and local capacities to mitigate and adapt to climate change are discussed in the regions, little effort has thus far been

made to address the causal factors (such as lack of assured property rights and tenure laws, absence of incentives for conservation, and subsidies to address resource constraints) that support resource exploitative production. Environmen­tal technologies such as integrated pest management, agro-forestry, low-input agriculture, conservation tillage, pest resistant GM crops, and climate change adaptations, have often faced a policy gridlock with formal AKST, civil society, the state, private industry and media taking highly polarized positions. Now as biofuels and plantation agriculture add to the competition for limited natural resources, the tradeoffs between production and environmental benefits must be increasingly scrutinized. The challenge is to maintain and enhance environmental quality for increased agricultural production and other goods and services.

Social equity
Worsening income inequality is a serious concern and poses a significant challenge for agricultural and food systems and AKST in all the five regions. The uneven distribution of pro­ductive natural resources coupled with the lack of access to resources and fair markets for small-scale producers and women in agriculture, results in extreme inequality and in­creasing poverty. While peasants and women cultivators are uncommon in NAE, millions of poor people and women in much of CWANA, ESAP, LAC, and SSA contend with unequal production and market relationships on a daily ba­sis. Current inequality is exacerbated by the fact that NAE dominates agricultural and rural development resources as well as formal knowledge generation in AKST. For example, businesses within NAE have a powerful impact on global consumer demand; they obtain and profit, directly or indi­rectly, from commodities, landraces and other valuable ge­netic resources (stored ex situ in other countries), beneficial organisms for biocontrol programs, immigrant labor and have legal and institutional capacities such as intellectual property rights, standards and market regulations, which many countries in the developing regions lack.
     Landless agricultural labor is at the receiving end of inequitable distribution of productive resources, produc­tion practices and technologies. There is increasing rural to urban male migration in search of employment in all de­veloping countries. Social security nets and the provision of non-farm rural or urban employment opportunities are being attempted by countries along with proactive local em­ployment and income generation programs spearheaded by the CSOs. However, these programs remain limited in both scale and scope.
     All five regions are acutely conscious of increasing indi­gence and social exclusion of several indigenous and tribal peoples. Many of these communities are repositories of traditional knowledge and fast depleting, but highly valu­able knowledge about local ecosystems and processes of change and management. Much of this knowledge is out­side the purview of modern AKST and is increasingly sub­ject to pressure from commercial crop, livestock, fisheries or forest-based production [See Part II: Traditional and Local Knowledge]. Within formal AKST systems, little has been done to acknowledge or address the livelihoods concerns, technological and development needs of women, labor and indigenous peoples. Instead, over the past several decades,