and often rather specific positive impacts of local AKST held by farmers and traders could help to rebuild natural and social capital in the poorest countries, so fulfilling the African proverb:

"If many little people, in many little places, do many little things, they will change the face of the world."

This will also require that developed country economies and multinational companies work to address the environmental and social externalities of the globalized model ("Enlightened Globalization"), by increasing investment in the poorest countries, by honoring their political commitments, and by addressing structural causes of poverty and environmental damage with locally available resources (skills, knowledge, leadership, etc). In turn, this is highly likely to require major policy reform on such issues as trade, business development, and intellectual property rights-especially in relation to the needs of poor people, notably women.

     The ten lessons above have drawn very broadly on the literature. A specific lesson-learning exercise covering 286 resource-conserving agricultural interventions in 57 poor

countries (Pretty et al., 2006) offers an illustration of the potential of implementing more sustainable approaches to agriculture with existing strategies and technologies. In a study covering 3% of the cultivated land in developing countries (37 million ha), increased productivity occurred on 12.6 million farms, with an average increase in crop yield of 79%. Under these interventions, all crops showed gains in water use efficiency, especially in rainfed crops and 77% of projects with pesticide data showed a 71% decline in pesticide use. Carbon sequestration amounted to 0.35 tonnes C ha-1y-1. There are grounds for cautious optimism for meeting future food needs with poor farm households benefiting the most from the adoption of resource-conserving interventions (Pretty et al., 2006). Thus great strides forward can be made by the wider adoption and upscaling of existing propoor technologies for sustainable development, in parallel with the development of ways to improve the productivity of these resource-conserving interventions (Leakey et al., 2005a). These can be greatly enhanced by further modification and promotion of some of the socially and environmentally appropriate AKST described in this chapter.