Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

 Biotech has bamboozled us all

Studies suggest that traditional farming methods are still the best
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4054683,00.html
George Monbiot in the Guardian
Thursday August 24, 2000

also see Special report: what's wrong with our food?
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/food/

The advice could scarcely have come from a more surprising source. "If
anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a
director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted,
"tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and
financial will - it's not about production and distribution."

Mr Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in biotechnology
companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a planet wallowing in
surfeit, people starve because they have neither the land on which to grow
food for themselves nor the money with which to buy it. There is no
question that, as the population increases, the world will have to grow
more, but if this task is left to the rich and powerful - big farmers and
big business - then, irrespective of how much is grown, people will become
progressively hungrier. Only a redistribution of land and wealth can save
the world from mass starvation.

But in one respect Mr Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production. A
series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing techniques
which his company and many others have sought to impose upon the world are,
in contradiction to everything we have been brought up to believe, actually
less productive than some of the methods developed by traditional farmers
over the past 10,000 years.

Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest
agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists had
tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a single, hi-tech
variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older technique
(planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the astonishment of
the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of
"monoculture", that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular
increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally
requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased by 94%. The
farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop applying their
poisons altogether, while producing 18% more rice per acre than they were
growing before.

Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that yields of
organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers and
pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically improves.
In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with manure has produced higher
yields for the past 150 years than wheat grown with artificial nutrients.

Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India,
Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields
by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the US
reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can produce 10
times as much money per acre as big farms growing single crops. Cuba,
forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted this
as policy, having discovered that it improves both the productivity and the
quality of its crops.

Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This year,
food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long celebrated as
the great success stories of modern, intensive cultivation, has all but
collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been encouraged to grow
demand far more water and nutrients than the old ones, with the result
that, in many places, both the ground water and the soil have been
exhausted.

We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been
stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive than
monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic
cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple
reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer
anywhere, without the help of multinational companies. Though it is more
productive to grow several species or several varieties of crops in one
field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in order to make money,
leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds.
This is why they have spent the last 10 years buying up seed breeding
institutes and lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the
sale of any seed which has not been officially - and expensively -
registered and approved.

All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and
tested techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their
scientists dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe. The
truth, so effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to
believe, is that organic farming is the key to feeding the world.

g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk