The forests of the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania, are internationally recognized as one of the worlds’ most bio-diverse ecosystems. Despite past conservation efforts, these forests face an on-going threat from land clearing for smallholder agriculture and timber harvesting. As many remaining fragments of forest lie on farmers’ properties, often in the form of modified agroforestry systems, a potential means to slow or halt forest loss is a ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES) programme, where farmers are paid to protect trees on their farms.

Intensive farming has been adopted to produce large amounts of food grains and cash crops but environment is being deteriorated at alarming rate also. Increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, chemical growth regulators, machinery and poor management practices are accelerating environmental pollution, soil degradation, global warming, climatic change and food deterioration. Conservation agriculture offers a sustainable solution for all these problems most often. This review focuses the use of fertilizers in conservation agriculture and their impact on weed management.

The 2013 edition of FAO's Statistical Yearbook sheds new light on agriculture's contribution to global warming, trends in hunger and malnutrition and the state of the natural resource base upon which world food production depends.