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Thu, 02 Aug 2007

Organic Agriculture Is The Answer to World Hunger

I seem to be attracted to Canada more than usual this week - especially Toronto. Maybe it means I'm supposed to go to the Annual Vegetarian Food Fair in TO next month. Wouldn't it be lovely!

Anyway ... always on the look-out for good news about food, I just read Utne's Web Watch newsletter, and found a bit about an article in Toronto's NOW Magazine, about organic agriculture feeding the hungry in third world countries.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has changed it's tune, and now says that "Organic agriculture is essentially a civil society enterprise which has developed outside, often against, the domain of the public sector" - that's how the FAO paper discreetly refers to this grassroots success after 50 years of scorn from Big Ag corps, government departments and universities. "Since the 1950s, it's been an article of faith that only the fierce foursome of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, altered seeds and gargantuan irrigation projects could ever fill global bellies."

Not so, says NOW. Most of the food produced in third world countries like Vietnam and Bangledesh isn't available or affordable for the poor, and is exported to wealthy countries.

A study by Cornell University's David Pimental shows that "Organic shines in the remote corners of the developing world where three-quarters of the world's poorest and hungriest people live, because it's low-cost and low-risk. Failure to get that fundamental point until 2007 is testimony to the holding power of big-yield thinkers over access thinkers."

"The strongest feature of organic agriculture, FAO's Nadia El-Hage Scialabba says, is its ability to use local and natural assets – compost and animal manure, or traditional and well-adapted crops. Acting locally, it turns out, is not so different from thinking organically." A recent study by Ivette Perfecto, University of Michigan, concludes that in developing countries, organic systems produce over 80 per cent more than traditional or conventional farms.

Read the NOW article about organic food in developing countries