Organic Farming Offers Best Hope for Feeding the World. Commentary by Anna Lappé, Foreign Policy, April 29, 2010. "Organic farmers improve output, less by applying purchased products and more by tapping a sophisticated understanding of biological systems to build soil fertility and manage pests and weeds through techniques that include double-dug beds, intercropping, composting, manures, cover crops, crop sequencing, and natural pest control. Biotech and industrial agriculture would in fact more aptly be called water, chemical, and fossil-fuel-intensive farming, requiring external inputs to boost productivity. Industrial agriculture gobbles up much of the 70% of the planet's freshwater resources diverted to farming, for example. It relies on petroleum-based chemicals for pest and weed control and requires massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer. In fact, in 2007, we used 13 million tons of synthetic fertilizer, five times the amount used in 1960. Crop yields, by comparison, grew only half that fast. And it's hardly a harmless increase: Nitrogen fertilizers are the single biggest cause of global-warming gases from U.S. agriculture and a major cause of air and water pollution -- including the creation of dead zones in coastal waters that are devoid of fish. And despite the massive pesticide increase, the United States loses more crops to peststoday than it did before the chemical agriculture revolution six decades ago...
"In the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, several U.N. agencies and the World Bank engaged more than 400 scientists and development experts from 80 countries over four years to produce the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development report [Agriculture at Crossroads, PDF, 606 pp]. The conclusion? Our 'reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky and unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water crises,' said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a lead author on the report... Unfortunately, you don't hear about this study, or others with similar findings, in Attention Whole Foods Shoppers -- Robert Paarlberg's defense of industrial agriculture in the May/June 2010 issue of Foreign Policy. Instead, organic agriculture, according to Paarlberg, is an 'elite preoccupation,' a 'trendy cause' for 'purist circles' ['Organic, local, and slow is no recipe for saving the world's hungry millions']." Ode to Farming. Foreign Policy, April 26, 2010. Slide show: images of farming around the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment