If Africa cannot rely on textiles alone, it might try boosting labour-intensive farming instead.
But people who live near intensive farming operations say the most significant problem is still the smell.
But there is also a growing awareness that modern intensive farming methods have much to answer for.
Almost half the 38.6m hectares devoted to ranching could be used for intensive farming, the ministry reckons.
Intensive farming of less land, leaving more land for wildlife, protects biodiversity better.
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NOAH, says that intensive farming is hurting the environment and making pigs suffer.
Not all of it is pretty: some 60% is used for intensive farming.
This implies that cooperative can also inform members of marketing and distribution opportunities, labor rights and non-chemical intensive farming techniques.
Martin Ruhs, director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, suggests it may be time for Britain to let its more labour-intensive farming slide.
Buying foreign products may add to food miles but it can also cut down on the need for heated greenhouses or intensive farming.
Matching that power output with corn ethanol would require intensive farming on more than 21, 000 square miles, an area nearly the size of West Virginia.
Until shoppers refuse to buy such food, intensive farming will continue.
Organic food, which is grown without man-made pesticides and fertilisers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on chemical inputs.
Part of the reason for this decline is that many toads become homeless each year as wild ponds are lost due to road building, development, pollution, intensive farming and drought.
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Some of this use arises because of intensive farming methods: keeping animals shut up in pens or battery sheds makes them more prone to disease, which leads farmers to use antibiotics.
And while it is illegal to give poultry hormones in the United States, antibiotic use to promote animal growth, as well as to prevent disease, is nearly universal in intensive farming and ranching of animals.
If the new EU members do not act on this warning, BirdLife says, "there will be further massive declines or even extinctions of wildlife... especially in those areas as yet relatively untouched by the ravages of intensive farming".
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"Our main concern relating to this application is that the introduction of intensive dairy farming is new (first planning application in Wales) and consequently very few if any regulations refer to this form of intensive farming, " he said.
Alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism and fish farming could provide an alternative to intensive crop farming, while better management of crops and irrigation and the adoption of alternative energy sources such as solar power would all contribute to environmental sustainability.
And indeed, broadly speaking, modern intensive fish farming does harm the environment, although the extent varies enormously.
Although people's desire for abundant, cheap food is the big reason for intensive modern farming, another is the taste for variety that has come from affluence and from fast, cheaper transport.
Because meat production is so resource intensive, livestock farming actually accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Unless we produce biofuels sustainably, we'll end up with more energy-intensive and environmentally damaging farming practices and hasten the degradation of our ecosystems.
Their primary focus is staff costs, so farming out labor-intensive services would be the obvious solution.
"Dry farming" is labor intensive, but in the American West, plentiful, cheap water for irrigation is a distant memory.
At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce.
There's a growing body of evidence showing that in order to provide the extra food needed by the bigger and richer human population of the near future - a doubling of demand by 2050 - without destroying forests and wetlands, farming needs to be made more intensive.
Still, the basic ingredients of Brazil's success agricultural research, capital-intensive large farms, openness to trade and to new farming techniques should work elsewhere.
Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive.
The World Bank calculates that import tariffs lowered returns in Brazilian farming by 5% in 1997, whereas tariffs reduced returns in capital-intensive manufacturing by a full 22%.
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