Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Another Nobel laureate (Nobel Peace Prize 1970) who should
know his genetics better is Norman Borlaug, father of the
Green Revolution, a reductionist approach to agriculture
based on breeding genetically uniform high yielding
varieties (HYVs) that has brought short-term increases in
crop yields at tremendous environmental and social costs.

Borlaug has persisted in promoting this failed approach,
especially in the form of genetically modified (GM) crops,
as made clear in a recent Nature editorial, “Feeding a
hungry world”.

Far from suffering disgrace, Borlaug is showered with
awards, the latest being the US Congressional Gold Medal,
America’s highest civilian honour. At the presentation
event, M.S. Swaminathan, father of the Green Revolution in
India, gave the keynote address.

India meanwhile is caught in a worsening epidemic of
farmers’ suicide as the result of the Green Revolution. Its
agricultural minister acknowledged in the Indian Parliament
that an estimated 100 000 farmers have taken their own lives
between 1993 and 2003; and the introduction of GM crops to
the country since has escalated the suicides to 16 000 a
year (Stem Farmers’ Suicides with Organic Farming, SiS 32).

Borlaug is doing a great deal more damage to the world than
Watson with their bad genetics. The difference is that while
Watson is now seen as a liability in attracting grants and
investments, Borlaug serves as ideal mouthpiece for the
biotech industry’s fake moral crusade of feeding the world.

Failures of the Green Revolution widely acknowledged

The failures of the Green Revolution are widely
acknowledged. Swaminathan himself referred to a Green
Revolution “fatigue”: a drop in yield, as well as a sharp
drop in the yield of grain per unit of fertilizer applied.

The Green Revolution packaged specially bredHYVs with
fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. And given optimum
inputs, these HYVs did indeed increase yields dramatically,
especially in the short term. In the longer term, the soils
become depleted and degraded, and yields fall even as more
and more fertilizers are used. Similarly, pests become
resistant to pesticides, and greater amounts have to be
applied. Farmers and the general public become increasingly
at risk from the toxic effects of pesticides and fertilizers
that contaminate ground water. At the same time, heavy
irrigation results in widespread salination of agricultural
land, while aquifers are pumped dry.

The high costs of fertilizer and pesticides put small
farmers at a disadvantage right from the start, driving them
off the land while big farmers grow bigger, thereby
deepening the divide between rich and poor.

But even farmers who manage to keep going are soon plunged
deeper and deeper into debt by the spiralling costs of more
fertilizers and pesticides, coupled with falling income from
reduced crop yields, or massive crop failures from droughts,
pests and diseases to which the genetically uniform HYVs are
especially susceptible. For many of these farmers, the only
exit from debt is suicide.

The Green Revolution’s success in raising yields has
blatantly failed to reduce poverty or hunger. India’s 26
million tonne grain surplus in 2006 could feed the estimated
320 million of its people who are hungry, but starving
villagers are too poor to buy the food produced in their own
countryside.

The Green Revolution also led to the loss of crop
biodiversity, compromising food security for small farmers
and increasing malnutrition for all. Bangladesh lost nearly
7 000 traditional rice varieties and many fish species. In
the Philippines, more than 300 traditional varieties
disappeared.

Instead of learning from the failures of the Green
Revolution, Borlaug, Swaminathan and the biotech industry
are offering the world a second ‘doubly green’ revolution in
GM crops, and they are taking it to Africa.

Beware the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

Bill & Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation
announced a joint $150 million Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA) on the grounds that the Green
Revolution had bypassed Africa. But as the Food First
Institute points out, the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research, which brings together
the key Green Revolution research institutions, has invested
40 to 45 percent of their £350 million annual budget in
Africa; which shows that the Green Revolution must have
failed Africa, not bypassed it. The Green Revolution failed
Africa for the same reasons it failed Asia and Latin
America: it did not address the causes of poverty and
hunger. On the contrary it contributed to increasing hunger
and poverty in the midst of plenty.

Borlaug claims to have reduced hunger in the world through
the Green Revolution, and even many of his critics are
willing to give him credit for that. But this too, turns out
to be a myth. In the two decades from 1970 to 1990 spanning
the Green Revolution, the total food available per person in
the world rose by 11 percent while the estimated number of
hungry people fell from 942 m to 786 million, a 16 percent
drop. However, if China is left aside, the number of hungry
people in the rest of the world actually went up by more
than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million.

Rural Africa has been devastated by 25 years of ‘free trade’
policies imposed by the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the US and EU.
The forced privatization of food crop marketing boards -
which once guaranteed African farmers minimum prices and
held food reserves for emergencies - and rural development
banks - which gave farmers credit to produce food - left
farmers without financing to grow food and without buyers
for their produce. Free trade agreements have made it easier
for private traders to import subsidized food from the US
and EU than to negotiate with thousands of local farmers.
This effective dumping drives local farm prices below the
costs of production and puts local farmers out of business.

Introducing GM monoculture crops will further narrow the
genetic base of indigenous agriculture, increase farmers’
indebtedness in paying for patented seeds, and bring extra
environmental and health risks (see GM Science Exposed.,
ISIS CD book).

Given appropriate land reform and institutional support in
finance and marketing, there is no doubt that farmers in
Africa, India and elsewhere can free themselves from the
cycle of indebtedness, increasing poverty, hunger,
malnutrition and ill-health, especially with zero-input
organic farming methods based on indigenous crops and
livestocks (see How to Beat Climate Change & Be Food and
Energy Rich - Dream Farm 2 also Organic Now series, SiS 36).
The really green revolution has started in Ethiopia a few
years ago, when the government adopted organic agriculture
as a national strategy for food security. Crops yields have
doubled and tripled while reversing the damages of the
failed Green Revolution (see Greening Ethiopia for Self-
sufficiency series, SiS 23).

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