IT'S up to 400 million small farmers to step up production to feed the world's growing population, a visiting expert says.
And former World Bank economist and Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture executive director Marco Ferroni warns the developed world has become complacent about food production.
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More than 95 per cent of farmers in China and India have holdings of less than 2ha, Mr Ferroni told the Rural Press Club of Victoria on Thursday.
In Indonesia, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, more than 80 per cent of farms are 2ha or less.
And these farmers - mostly in the "lagging regions" of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia - are the ones with the most capacity to increase their production and feed a projected world population of nine billion in 2050.
"Can Australia, the US and Argentina feed the world? Not really," Mr Ferroni said.
Mr Ferroni said as the other countries developed, the number of farms would shrink and the average farm size would increase.
But the process could take "30 or 40 years".
Mr Ferroni stressed agriculture had to lift its intensity "sustainably".
"The world needs another major green revolution," Mr Ferroni said.
"We're seeing natural resource degradation ... an increase in population brings tougher demands on the planet's natural resources."
Getting quality seed to poor farmers in the "lagging regions" was a major issue, Mr Ferroni said.
These producers needed to be assisted by not-for-profit and non-government organisations, he said.
Half of Indian farmers could now afford to buy their seed from seed companies but the remainder continued to harvest seed themselves or source it from governments.
Mr Ferroni said the technology existed to feed the world now and into the future.
However this needed to be applied to all farming areas around the globe, he said.
Farmers needed to produce more food per hectare and per unit of water, he said.
Despite Australia's annual yield increases having slowed, Mr Ferroni said Australia still had the potential to increase yields "significantly" through technology.
"The technology is not a problem," Mr Ferroni said.
"If research and development stopped today, we'd still increase yields by applying the current technology to every hectare farmed."
Mr Ferroni said agriculture would need to be made an attractive subject for students to study in all countries and that more agricultural graduates were desperately needed in the "lagging regions".
He said there was a disconnect in developed nations between city people and the farming community.
Mr Ferroni said he hoped this would be overcome as food shortages became an issue and agriculture was put "back on the agenda".
"Lots of people don't know where food comes from," Mr Ferroni said.
"We've been complacent because we've had cheap abundant food for 30 years."
Food prices had only dropped recently because the global financial crisis lowered the price of oil, he warned.
Genetic modification was "not the answer" to the world food challenge but was a "tool in the arsenal of technology", Mr Ferroni said.
"It can be of real benefit for small landholders," Mr Ferroni said.
