How can we feed the world, when the global population is still growing and should reach the 10 billion mark by 2050? How can we provide safe, abundant, high-quality agricultural products for an affordable price? And how can we do that while allowing farmers to live decently from their work? All that, while protecting the planet, too!

Farmers hold the world’s future in their hands. Without dynamic agriculture, not only is humanity on the road to ruin, but the planet itself won’t be able to face the challenges of climate change. We must, therefore, establish agricultural systems that are both responsible and productive. Let’s stop clashing over organic or conventional and start trusting the entire sector, which is already responding to the many challenges it is currently facing: from pesticides to seed selection and from GMOs to irrigation, today’s choices are all the more complex in that they must be considered in both the short- and the long-term, locally and globally.

Sylvie Brunel presents us with a powerful essay about agriculture that takes on conventional wisdom. We as readers have, for the most part, become city-dwellers, losing touch along the way, both with the countryside and with those who feed us. Organic agriculture all by itself is currently unable to feed the world’s population, which is still growing. We need conventional agriculture, which is often seen as evil, precisely when it is starting to adopt more responsible methods for the use of pesticides, GMOs and irrigation.