development. The environmental issues in the agriculture of developing countries therefore relate primarily to shifting patterns of energy consumption, increasing agricultural productivity and incomes and bringing down the rate of growth of population. In contrast, issues at the center stage in developed countries include preservation of biodiversity, containment of the greenhouse gases to reverse the trend in global warming, protection of water quality and marine life from run-offs of chemicals, pesticides, and animal waste associated with the high input/high output agriculture, and conservation of resources such as coal and oil. With industrialization, urbanization and increased use of capital also arise a different set of modern risks, e.g. the growing incidence of cancer (K. Smith). Transposition of such developed country environmental problems to developing countries is a pervasive problem in the international environmental debate.
The extreme and growing disparities in energy use on the other hand explain in part the different weights attached by developed and developing countries to the issues of income growth and environmental protection referred to earlier. To acknowledge the difference in the level of energy use is not to deny that developing countries are a major contributor to the reduction of biodiversity, nor that they face problems of inadequate handling of the growing use of chemicals and pesticides. Rather these latter problems are often a symptom of rapid population growth, slow or no growth in factor productivity and incomes, inadequate development of human and organizational capital, and lack of regulatory mechanisms to deal with risks of modernization. Moreover, a lack of alternative technologies to increase productivity and incomes makes it often both tempting and expeditious for developing countries to follow the conventional route to economic development as we will show below, with profound implications for organization and application of research and technology.
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