Food Production and Ecosystem Protection

The impact of intensive agriculture on the ecosystem has become evident since the end of the last century. Degradation of the environment, excessive urbanization, and reduction of green areas have already endangered the Earth's biodiversity. At the same time the progress in agricultural productivity has selected a handful of productive crops or farmed animals at the expense of genetic variety. The consequent reduction in biodiversity and ecological resilience is a potential menace to the food supply chain and to human survival itself. For harmonizing sustainable food production with protection and restoration of the ecosystem, the combination of institutional and technical efforts with the potentialities offered to the novel biotechnological solutions is required. Cautious but encouraging signals are coming from countries, such as China and India, where the novel policies and economic strategies that place ecosystems at the core of future economic development are repairing degraded bionetworks and resulting in numerous benefits to the population. These models have to be implemented with the aid of developed countries, and exported from local to global scale to keep the requirements of the food productions preserving the ecosystem stability. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.