[OKC] From NY Times: Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?

[Miles, Karen]

Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?

 
By MARK BITTMAN
<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/mark-bittman/> 
The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it 
cannot feed the world's <http://www.economist.com/node/18200618>
citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact. And industrial
agriculture isn't working perfectly, either: the global food price index
<http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/>  is
at a record high, and our agricultural system is wreaking havoc with the
health not only of humans but of the earth. There are around a billion
undernourished people; we can also thank the current system for the
billion who are overweight or obese. 
Yet there is good news: increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels
and experts (not hippies!) are suggesting that agricultural practices
pretty close to organic - perhaps best called "sustainable" - can feed
more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by industrial
production and, in the long term, become the norm. 
On Tuesday, Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations' special rapporteur
on the Right to Food, presented a report entitled "Agro-ecology and the
Right to Food." (Agro-ecology, he said in a telephone interview last
Friday, has "lots" in common with both "sustainable" and "organic.")
Chief among de Schutter's recommendations is this: "Agriculture should
be fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are more
environmentally sustainable and socially just."
Agro-ecology, he said, immediately helps "small farmers who must be able
to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it
benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological
destruction." Further, by decentralizing production, floods in Southeast
Asia, for example, might not mean huge shortfalls in the world's rice
crop; smaller scale farming makes the system less susceptible to climate
shocks. (Calling it a system is a convention; it's actually quite
anarchic, what with all these starving and overweight people canceling
each other out.) 
Industrial (or "conventional") agriculture requires a great deal of
resources, including disproportionate amounts of water and the fossil
fuel that's needed to make chemical fertilizer, mechanize working the
land and its crops, running irrigation sources, heat buildings and crop
dryers and, of course, transportation. This means it needs more in the
way of resources than the earth can replenish. (Fun/depressing fact: It
takes the earth 18 months to replenish the amount of resources we use
each year. Looked at another way, we'd need 1.5 earths
<http://www.business-biodiversity.eu/default.asp?Menue=49&News=233>  to
be sustainable at our current rate of consumption.) 
Article continues at: 
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?pag
emode=print
 
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