Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

"Global Agricultural Survey Shows Nearly Half of Farm Soil 'Seriously
Degraded'" -- Associated Press, May 22, 2000.

Detailed satellite photos of the Earth's land mass and other data are
helping scientists at the UN-affiliated International Food Policy Research
Institute determine the state of global agriculture. Their conclusion:
nearly 40% of farmland is seriously degraded. Soil erosion, loss of organic
matter, hardening of soil, chemical penetration, nutrient depletion, excess
salinity and other damage have left much of the world's potential and
previous agricultural land unusable. The research covers only human-induced
degradation. See Land Degradation In The Developing World: Issues and
Policy Options for 2020:
http://www.ifpri.org/2020/briefs/number44.htm

The myth of efficiency
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_eff.html

 -- Industrial agriculture claims "efficiency" and cheaper food. But it’s
a false promise. In farming, bigger is not more efficient. And if you count
social and environmental costs, it’s not cheap either... The situation is
clear: Our conversion to industrial agriculture means subsidizing the
richest corporations on earth to run a system that eliminates livelihoods,
harms communities, poisons the earth, and doesn’t feed the people,
either. Maybe you pay a few pennies less for your industrial potato, but
the next generation will pay billions more in taxes, to clean up the mess
this system creates. This is not "efficiency."

Biotech has bamboozled us all: Studies suggest that traditional farming
methods are still the best -- "The truth, so effectively suppressed that it
is now almost impossible to believe, is that organic farming is the key to
feeding the world." -- The Guardian, August 24, 2000
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4054683,00.html

"Organic farming can 'feed the world'" -- BBC Science, September 14, 1999
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/specials/sheffield_99/447337.stm

"The Greener Revolution", New Scientist, 3 February 2001 -- It sounds like
an environmentalist's dream. Low-tech "sustainable agriculture", shunning
chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up
crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more. A
new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research
into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the
world's hungry live and work. For some, talk of "sustainable agriculture"
sounds like a luxury the poor can ill afford. But in truth it is good
science, addressing real needs and delivering real results.
http://www.biotech-info.net/greener_revolution.html

Sustainable Agriculture - A Case Study, Peter M. Rosset, co-director of
Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy -- When trade
collapsed with the socialist bloc in late 1989 and 1990, the degree to
which Cuba relied on monocrop agriculture proved to be a major weakness for
the country. Searching for the most efficient solution, the Cuban
government launched a national effort to convert the nation's agricultural
sector from high input agriculture to low input, self-reliant farming
practices on an unprecedented scale. By mid-1995 the food shortage had been
overcome, and the vast majority of the population no longer faced drastic
reductions of their basic food supply. In the 1996-97 growing season Cuba
recorded its highest-ever production levels for ten of the thirteen basic
food items in the Cuban diet. The Cuban experience illustrates that we can
feed a nation's population well with a small or medium-sized farm model
based on appropriate ecological technology, and in doing so we can become
more self-reliant in food production.
http://www.farmingsolutions.org/successtories/stories.asp?id=117