HORIZON INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS SITE

Worldwide, about a million people are poisoned by pesticides each year; ten thousand of these victims die from such poisonings. The risks are greatest in developing countries. Ninety-nine percent of the deaths caused by agricultural chemicals occur in those countries.

Food legume improvement project (FLIP) is under the rain-fed agricultural research program at National Center for Agricultural Research and Technology Transfer (NCARTT) in Jordan, a government body under the umbrella of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Many nations are taking steps to protect the tropical rain forests within their borders by creating parks and nature reserves. But it is clear that this kind of action can protect merely a fraction of the world’s rain forest lands. Maintaining parks and reserves is expensive, especially for governments who are trying to meet the competing needs of other people for income and for land on which to live.

Juan Guevera’s job is to help the farmers who live in the area around the city of Pucallpa, in the part of the Amazon Basin that lies in Peru, meet their needs for food and income.

The demand for alternative agricultural systems has grown in response to the failures of conventional agriculture and to set this analysis in context the introduction provides a summary of these failures both generally and then specifically for Thailand and Japan. A brief overview of the agricultural development of both Thailand and Japan is presented to provide a background to the study. A literature review was undertaken to document other studies on alternative agriculture in the two countries and to help establish a definition for the term 'alternative agriculture'.