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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Dead-End Agriculture Says it Will Feed the World
  • Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:50:06 -0600


Dead-End Agriculture Says it Will Feed the World
* New Big Ag Push to Fight World Hunger Misses What Organic Ag Is Already
Doing
By Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-lasalle/new-big-ag-push-to-fight_b_295082.html
Sept 22, 2009


The compelling humanitarian goals expressed today at the corporately
sponsored Global Harvest Initiative symposium were laudable, as were some of
the hunger-relief projects cited. Missing, however, was an honest assessment
of the limits of dead-end chemical agriculture to play a leading role in
actually feeding people.

Also absent from the high-powered forum was a prominent role for what organic
agriculture is already doing to meet the most important goals on the
food-hunger-nutrition side of the problem.

The event, despite all the good people presenting and all the calls for
curbing the environmental harm of chemical ag, amounted to glitzy green
packaging for the same unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the
world's farmers. GHI is sponsored by ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto.
(Yes, the same Monsanto which has promised to double its profits by 2012 with
continuing introductions of "high impact technology" seeds.)

In his opening remarks, GHI executive director William Lesher placed the
focus firmly on the need for more food, highlighting a projected
"productivity gap" that will require a doubling of current world food output
by 2050. This thinking follows the outlines of a white paper by GHI in April:
"Accelerating Productivity Growth: The 21st Century Global Agriculture
Challenge: A White Paper on Agricultural Policy." Yet more food alone won't
help starving people until the global agricultural system radically shifts
its focus to address the barriers of poverty (the inability to buy food) and
distribution (getting food people want to where they are).

By framing global food security in terms of "not enough food," the Global
Harvest Initiative seems stuck on doing the same old thing harder and faster.
It backers still push expensive seeds and continued dependence on
climate-damaging inputs. Organic and near-organic techniques offer robust,
biodiverse, productive and regenerative systems that can out-produce chemical
approaches in drier and wetter seasons.

The symposium's highlighting of groups seeking environmental and social
benefits may do some good -- if the groups can break industrial ag's
profit-driven willingness to sacrifice soil vitality, agricultural
biodiversity, human endocrine and neurological health, farmer control of
seeds and a nation's nutritional well-being. Or it may just be the best
agri-greenwashing money can buy.





  • [Livingontheland] Dead-End Agriculture Says it Will Feed the World, Tradingpost, 09/23/2009

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