“Africa could become the food bowl of Europe”. Quite an export industry there, associated with a new style of colonialism, assuming the required African fertility is achieved:

One tonne of grain transported from Africa equals how many tonnes of water in its production, and incorporating what mass of phosphorus and other elements, and nitrogen?

Will those necessities for agriculture be returned – at what cost in fuel etc. – or will they will be travelling one-way and therefore be part of an exercise of limited duration?

A thought-provoking article with a lot of good ideas in it. I was expressing some related ideas about more labour-intensive and land-intensive local food production and consumption in a talk "Human and Political Scenarios On A_Warming Planet" that I gave at a Manning Clark House conference "Imagining the Real: Life on a Greenhouse Earth" at Australian National University on 11-12 June. The conference papers are going up progressively on the Manning Clark House website www.manningclark.org.au/
I'm not sure global food trade is going to grow much more. With sharply increasing transport costs, more and more food will be grown and consumed locally, between and within nations. That means new or revived older farming systems, as the author suggests.

The writer says, As Australians, we should be prepared to pay farmers more for food. It is exactly the stimulus that is required to fund the development of diverse and multifunctional farming landscapes that are valued not only on the basis of the food and fibre produced but also the people they support.
This is a statement that I have been repeatedly making, in commentary this month. Farmers need the incentive of being paid more for their product. They will then increase production.
The productivity of farmers in the past half century greatly increased because the universities in the USA received grants from chemical companies. The universities trained experts to show farmers how to use these chemicals to increase productivity. No one taught farmers how to market their produce to keep pace with the cost of living. Australians became accustomed to inexpensive food, sometimes imported into Australia from other countries - the level playing field. If we have another burst of funding to universities to create more experts to again teach farmers how to increase productivity, it will only continue the cycle of Australian farmers leaving land fallow or drifting to the cities where they can earn a living wage.
We must be prepared to pay the farmers the true value of the food they produce. How this can be done, when the largest cost of any food sold is the mark-up going to the big distribution companies, I don't know

I agree with the author, Rowan Reid, and also Countrygirl the contributor. I am a semi-retired tertiary educated farm manager/agronomist who grew grain in NW for 40+ years. Farmers up to now have not been paid the true value for their commodities, and have been subject to a cost-price squeeze for many years. Perhaps this situation may change in the near future.

However we need to ensure that the farmer receives a fair share of the price of the commodity, and not the middleman or retailer.
I am sure that farmers will continue to adapt and change to meet the changing environment (be it climate change, energy costs, other input costs, changes into bio-fuel production etc. etc.)

However despite what our organic friends may say, farmers will continue to embrace the use alternative means of crop production (mainly through use of pesticides), and decrease reliance on energy hungry, soil destroying tillage as the main method of land preparation and crop growing.

As others have also mentioned, there is also enormous scope for increases in farm productivity in the Third world if only those farmers have access to affordable technology and can sensibly implement modern systems on their farms. (even though the farm size is mostly small by our standards.)