In the world today, we have on the one hand growing large-scale and capital intensive agriculture with few farmers whose incomes are based on specialization and economies of scale and, one the other hand, hundreds of millions of very small-scale farmers who are locked up in agriculture because they cannot find a better livelihoods in other sectors. Any breakthrough in biotechnology will not reverse such a trend. A sustainable path lies in a high-tech agriculture of a very different nature from that which has been strongly encouraged and subsidized over the last half century, in India, in France and everywhere else in the world: boosting biodiversity and ecological functions in each unique agro-ecosystem is highly complex and requires marrying the best science with traditional indigenous knowledge.