See this article:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?ref=opinion

It's not too often that I see such topics covered in the NYT's Ope-Ed.
The author quotes the following statement from a UN report released yesterday:

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Agro-ecology, he said, immediately helps “small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological destruction.” Further, by decentralizing production, floods in Southeast Asia, for example, might not mean huge shortfalls in the world’s rice crop; smaller scale farming makes the system less susceptible to climate shocks.
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