How Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World
Recent research indicates that organic farming can feed the world, and is actually making a significant difference everywhere. In the United States and Europe, universities are reporting that organically produced food will address the problems of hunger and poverty facing the world’s growing population. This is not a surprising finding for organic farmers and advocates of organic agricultural production. The American worldview of agriculture is, in fact, making a radical shift…
(Boer) Tom:
Monsanto’s campaigns against organic food and whom they are funding. DeAnander did link an article a while ago about African small farmers who resist, but there remains a huge challenge: Urbanization has taken hold in Africa much as elsewhere, and the ‘biotech’ companies use African university-educated spokespeople to promote GM and other green-revolution systems, thus tapping into nationalism (are city-dwellers to believe some white North-American activists, or someone from their country who has gone through the rigors of a university education? Third-world university education is generally much more rigorous than first-world university education in most fields as well, and we third-worlders know it – the problem is that a university education also moves one up the local class ladder, leading to ideological blindness…). In this regard, I beg, collect the relevant evidence: papers with appropriate case-studies and/or calculations, etc, so as to have material to convince such would-be spokespeople.
10 March 2010, 11:39 pmJenny:
I dunno about the entire world- seems Idealistic, but it’s been working in parts of Africa for two years:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/organic-farming-could-feed-africa-968641.html
10 March 2010, 11:54 pmLisa.:
The Farm as Organism: The Foundational Idea of Organic Agriculture
http://orgprints.org/10138/
11 March 2010, 7:10 pmaskod:
Since industrial agriculture is about treating nature as something that should be standardized in order to minimize labor input, it is not surprising that organic agriculture gives more food/natural resources. At least not if you consider that it is living processes we deal with.
13 March 2010, 4:18 amStan:
FULL
Yum.
26 March 2010, 8:18 amDeAnander:
I note the fairly flagrant “purity” meme there — scientists in “white” (unstained) coats in “pristine” labs… pristine in this case meaning antiseptic, free of biota. A lab can produce lethal poisons, radioactive nucleides, biowarfare agents — or high-tech food adulterants — and still be “pristine.” But an old-fashioned cheese or cider press worn with decades of cannot possibly be “pristine.” Nor can the average home kitchen, despite all the claims made for toxic and caustic cleaning products.
The other point seldom made explicit is that these food additives are mostly *adulterants*, in the sense that they are attempts to make a cheaper product than is possible if one uses real ingredients or authentic processes. So the bottom line is that they are all about dishonesty, about faking flavours and textures so that inferior grades of food, or even non-food products like cellulose, can be made to resemble real food. So that the cheapest possible ingredients, including waste products from other sectors of the “food industry”, can be resold at high profit margins. (See Let Them Eat Fake for a fascinatingly awful account of corporate cake manufacturing).
Complicating this — which should be a fairly simple perception inspiring fairly direct and simple outrage — is the meme that privileges the artificial, valuing it more highly than the biotic/natural; the cleanliness/purity meme definitely plays strongly in this valuation. The fable of the Emperor and the nightingale may be relevant here
26 March 2010, 10:37 pmStan:
But Deeeee… it makes ice cream hold its texture.
27 March 2010, 6:56 amDeAnander:
Ah no, not even that — if you read the caption carefully on the ice cream photo, the adulterant is added to make the ice cream LOOK better textured. It’s all about surface appearance, like much of industrial effort these days. I suspect that this may be axiomatic. As industry destroys real wealth (biomass destroyed to make technomass), the raw materials available become degraded in quality and more and more chicanery is needed to make them look real.
F’rexample: Farmed salmon flesh is gray. They dye it orange to make it look (not really, but if you’ve never seen fresh coho you wouldn’t know the authentic colour) like real, wild salmon. Meat in the supermarket is two weeks or more out from the slaughterhouse and would naturally be grayish or dark brown, but it’s flooded with oxygen or dyed to make it a bright unnatural red, pretending to be freshly butchered. A lot of the high tech in the food industry is devoted not even to the exaggerated, juvenile-oriented flavourings that cover up spoiled or bland feedstock (or, with calculated intent, trigger addictive eating responses), but to the visual appearance.
Apparently we are very easily fooled.
As an aside, a Russian fan of Dmitry’s weighs in on USian food and culture…
27 March 2010, 11:52 amStan:
Orlov’s fan has a good deal of Orlov’s wit. Must be a Russian thing.
27 March 2010, 2:14 pmCurt:
DeAnander,
27 March 2010, 2:25 pmI was a depressed today until I read your link. The comments of some Bulgarians depressed me. I learned that Germans, as a society know absolutely nothing about making decent Yogurt. I thought to myself, what a disgrace that a country and people that think of themselves as so advanced does not even know how to put a decent yogurt on the market. Why does Germany have such a lack of understanding of such a basic human enterprise?
I have no doubt that the Bulgarians were telling the truth. Americans think that they can walk in to any supermarket and buy bread. Hahahahahahahahahahaha. It is because that I am aware of this problem that I believe that I am not buying real yougurt in Germany unless I buy it from a Bulgarian. I wonder what Bulgarians say about Romanian or Turkish yogurt.
You know if there were not so many children in America I could easily laugh at the way they handle thier misfortune. I chose, in this case, not to remember that everyone is some ones child. Perhaps because I have no compassion left for conservative Americans I will have to do some peninace and get stuck in the cycle of rebirth for several extra lives. Maybe I will regret that maybe not.
40%, 39%, 38%………..