Moderators: Dr Denis Blight AO (Tuesday) Professor Shaun Coffey (Wednesday) Panels: The conference speakers on each day

Cover Matter Includes: Cover; Contents; Acknowledgements

The Crawford Fund’s Annual Parliamentary Conference for 2012, ‘The Scramble for Natural Resources’, addressed a question of fundamental importance to Australia and to the international community: that is, how to feed, adequately, an extra 2 or 3 billion people within a few decades without...

Humanity is facing its greatest challenge. To produce 70% more food by 2050 without destroying the environment means doing much more with less. Partly due to the abundant food and record-low food prices achieved by the Green Revolution, overseas development assistance for agriculture dropped...

The main drivers of tropical forest biodiversity loss are land clearing for agriculture, pasture and timber plantation development, followed by logging activities that degrade forests. Deforestation and forest degradation also significantly contribute to climate change, given that they...

A sustainable strategy to nourish the planet and its people must also promote biodiversity conservation. This strategy will have to include reduction in land degradation and unsustainable overuse of fertilisers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and irrigation water. A case can be made for...

Biodiversity is the basis for agriculture and for a sustainable future. More than 1.9 million living species have been described; millions more have gone extinct, including major branches of the tree of life. The distribution of this biological diversity is variable in space and time, although it...