In a new post published on the Global Food Security blog, Roger Leakey asserts that if farmers in the developing world were to reap the high yields possible with modern crop varieties, food insecurity "would be a thing of the past." For this, will take closing the yield gap— that difference between potential and actual yield—, which is especially vast on smallholder farms in Africa.

Professor Leakey, vice-chairman of the International Tree Foundation and Senior Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), discusses a three-pronged approach that has been shown to be able to bridge this gap, bolster environmental health and resilience, as well as grow wealth in rural areas:

1. Adopt agroforestry to sustainably increase the productivity of modern crop varieties;
2. Diversify the farming system with beneficial tree species; and
3. Promote entrepreneurism in local communities to develop value-adding and processing technologies.

The blog article describe the approach more fully, and Leakey's book Living with the Trees of Life – Towards the Transformation of Tropical Agriculture expounds upon in.

This model is highly adaptable and applies equally well to dry and moist parts of the tropics, especially in Africa, says Leakey. "It needs to be scaled up to hundreds of millions, or billions, of poor farmers. That’s the challenge."

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Full article: Three steps to bridging the yield gap

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