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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Organic farming can too feed the world
  • Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 19:56:53 -0500

I'd like to comment on one sentence snipped from this post:  "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."
 
There is an exceptional interview with David Blume in the latest issue of Acres USA.  Although I dislike Charles Waters' writing style (stylized to the point of confusion), he gave Blume the opportunity to relate alcohol production to all of the other issues affecting food and farming.  The point  about diversity is strongly supported.

E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 1:06 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Organic farming can too feed the world

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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