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.
----- 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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