The message from the three-year International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) is that modern agriculture will have to change radically from the dominant corporate model "if the world is to avoid social breakdown and environmental collapse".

"Agriculture has a footprint on all of the big environmental issues ... climate change, biodiversity, land degradation, and water quality," said Professor Robert Watson, director of the IAASTD and chief scientific adviser for the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

"We are putting food that appears cheap on our tables but it is food that is not always healthy and that costs us dearly in terms of water, soil and the biological diversity on which all our futures depend.

"To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message.

"But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world."

Australia, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have not yet joined the 54 nations that signed off on the assessment in Johannesburg this week, although all four countries are have helped fund the IAASTD, along with the United Nations, World Bank, and World Health Organisation.

IAASTD's findings did not resonate with the biotechnology industry, either.

Representatives of Syngenta, BASF and the biotech industry association CropLife International abandoned the process on the grounds that the assessment was overly cautious about biotechnology's risks, and sceptical of its benefits.

Much of the IAASTD's focus is on developing countries, and its assessment of Australia's immediate neighbours is pessimistic.

"The East and Southeast Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest numbers of environmentally displaced people in the world," the report said.

"In addition, 60pc of the ecosystems are degraded or used unsustainably.

"Without political commitment by key decision-makers to ensure development, the downward spiral towards socio-economic turmoil and ecological degradation may be rapid and perhaps even irreversible."

For Australia, however, these problems represent an opportunity to build on and export our own expertise, according to local scientists.

SOURCE: The Land, NSW.