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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Organic farming can too feed the world
  • Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:06:46 -0600

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=50&entry_id=29714

Organic farming can too feed the world

An Aug. 19 New York Times article "A conversation with Nina V. Federoff" used
a quote from the science advisor to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as its
headline: "If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn't support the
earth's current population -- maybe half."

Federoff, a former professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University who
holds a GMO patent herself and who has sat on the Board of Directors of
Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Company, told the Times that there is opposition to
genetically modified foods because "This is an unintended consequence of our
success. We've gotten so good at growing food that we've gone, in a few
generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We
no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got
there, and we'd like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.

"But I'm afraid we can't, in part, because there are just too many of us in
this world."

(If you ignore the typos, muckraker Pamela Drew does a pretty good job of
deconstructing the Times' piece on the Newsvine.com).

Even without her personal history as an advocate of GMOs, Federoff's very
tenure as advisor to a State Department that supports the spread of
American-style agribusiness throughout the world and that, as Drew notes, has
"targeted for reprisals" through the USAID global food donation programs
nations "who refuse to accept the gmo grains," would make her statements
suspect to a lot of us. On top of that the Q&A style of the article is a
giveaway that the piece is one-sided; not only are there no opposing opinions
or reported checking of facts, but writer Claudia Dreifus reports no followup
questions or challenges to Federoff's broad statements.

Others are not so sanguine. Tim LaSalle, executive director of the Rodale
Institute, was among those incensed both by Federoff's statements and the
Times' article's lack of balance. In San Francisco for this past weekend's
Slow Food Nation, where he moderated a Friday Food for Thought panel on
"Building a New Food System: Policy and Planning," LaSalle talked to The
Chronicle's Home&Garden editors about the Times' article and showed
photographs of the Institute's Pennsylvania demonstration farms where crops
are grown organically and industrially in adjacent fields that showed the
organic, or regenerative, farming methods produced better, healthier crops.

"The production numbers have been the same or greater with organic," he said,
noting that in drought or wet years there is a 30-70 percent higher yield
from organic crops.

Of course, not all industrially grown crops use GMO seeds, but as ecofeminist
Vandana Shiva, author of "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace"
(South End Press, 2005), told the audience at the opening Food for Thought
session, "The World Food Crisis": "Part of the world food crisis is spin" in
order to market GMOs worldwide. "The biggest myth we live under is that
industrial systems have given us more food; they have not." Monoculture
farming, as industrial systems promote, "raises the yield of one crop and
loses yield of the rest."

Biodiverse systems give more output of food, she said. "Mixtures are the only
way to farm sustainably; mixtures are the only way to eat sustainably."

"The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better," Fedoroff said
in arguing that environmentalists should embrace GMO foods.

To that point a statement by Andrew Kimbrell, founder and executive director
of the Center for Food Safety and a Food for Thought panelist on "Policy and
Planning," is germane. "Industrial agriculture is one of the major culprits
in global warming," Kimbrell said, adding we can, and should, learn from
traditional cultures because "no technology can increase the carrying
capacity of nature."

Why should GMO food matter to environmentalists?

Kimbrell has an answer for that as well. "If you're an environmentalist," he
said, "your most important issue has to be food."

The point of many genetically modified organisms is not to increase yield,
Raj Patel, author of "Stuffed and Starved" (Melville House, 2007) and another
panelist, had told a Commonwealth Club audience on Aug. 27. In both venues,
he and Shiva talked about the case of "golden rice," the rice that has been
genetically modified to add vitamin A in an attempt to battle blindness.
Whereas the genetic engineers tout this as a solution to a health problem,
Shiva and Patel see it as a smoke screen, saying that, if populations where
people are afflicted with blindness caused by a deficiency of vitamin A had
proper nutrition from vegetables rich in vitamin A, there would be no need to
enrich rice. As Patel told the Commonwealth Club audience: The problem is not
vitamin A in rice; the problem is poverty -- people so poor they can only
afford to eat rice.







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