India, Sept. 21 -- The world doesn't need to choose between feeding a growing population and restoring the planet's soils. According to a new book, it could do both - using just 12 per cent of the world's arable land. The answer, argues development expert Hugh Locke, lies with a group of farmers rarely credited with that kind of power: The world's smallholders.

In Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation, Locke notes that this overlooked segment of agriculture may hold the key to meeting one of the biggest challenges of the next quarter-century: Feeding roughly 1.5 billion more people by 2050, with that growth concentrated in developing countries, without pushing the planet's soils, water and biodiversi...