“Green Revolution” technologies helped avert food shortages in South Asia. However, they didn’t reduce poverty as much as anticipated and today many people still remain hungry and poor. Future focus is needed to address issues of poverty as well as production gains needed to match population growth. These will have to come from innovative yield enhancing technology that improves farmer livelihoods, uses natural resources efficiently and minimizes environmental degradation. Various options are discussed in this paper for the populous rice-wheat areas of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. Poverty and the role of livelihood approaches are also discussed with a section on how best to extend new technologies to resource poor farmers so their livelihoods can also be improved. The paper concludes that an expanded set of stakeholders working in innovative alliances will be needed for extending complex conservation agriculture technology to this bypassed group of farmers. The paper ends with suggestions on future research needs including the need for some important social science research looking at the impacts and needed policy decisions for the new labor saving technology on employment, migration and how conservation agriculture techniques impact on rural livelihoods.

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0505|AL-Wheat Program|AL-Economics Program