Overcoming barriers to sustainable agricultural intensification

Sustainably closing agricultural yield gaps remains a central challenge for advancing global food security while conserving biodiversity. This article develops a theoretical perspective on why sustainable intensification (SI) is limited in many lower-income countries, despite the technological feasibility of improving yields in these places. It explores these constraints to SI through two case studies of expanding commodity frontiers: (i) beef in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado and (ii) cocoa in West Africa. We find similar barriers to SI across the cases, including limited tenurial, financial, knowledge and cultural support, community-level risks to investment and cheap land favouring agricultural expansion. At the same time, both cases reveal potential for rapid intensification, as demonstrated by success in selected locations. The analysis helps explain why many promising SI strategies have achieved limited uptake in countries where land for expansion is still relatively abundant. The article also identifies a more optimistic pathway: ambitious economic and institutional reforms, well-funded community-level technical and financial investments, and smart conservation policies could unlock joint gains for food security and biodiversity. Global policy and finance changes have opened windows for this coordinated policy agenda, but improved demand-side policies are also needed to tip low-yielding agricultural systems onto new trajectories.