New Big Ag Push to Fight World Hunger Misses What Organic Ag Is Already Doing

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.

This event kicked off a campaign by these corporate leaders to claim the moral high ground in addressing world hunger, which already impacts 1 billion people, according to the UN. While nutrition received prominence at the event, the top three agenda items listed at the GHI website are seeking new funds for research, liberalized ag trade, conservation.

The GHI overture appears to be geared to grab even more money, attention, research, trade and policy support for high-input dependent systems. This mission runs counter to calls from several world food study groups (here and here) who say organic and ecological production systems are the best hope for transforming the "feeding the world" challenge from simply producing more corn and soybeans on industrial farms toward growing more diverse and nutritive crops, better suited to feed the hungry poor, produced in more ecologically sound ways based on locally-available, biologically renewable resources.

Food-focused farmers already know how well biology works. Without further research, organic farms in widely varied climates and sizes are already producing highly nutritious food in sustainable ways that are reducing greenhouse gases, increasing resilience in the face of changing climatic conditions, and providing greater economic opportunity.

With a fraction of the hundreds of millions of research dollars already spent to overcome chemical agriculture's failures, agricultural researchers around the world could work on organic farming advances relevant to their bioregions. NGOs dedicated to exploring ecologically sound ways to optimize hunger-relieving livestock and crop production could adopt and teach organic techniques to help bring degraded soils into production -- a goal of the GHI's white paper -- while improving nutrition through complex crop mixes that are impossible when pesticides are used.

"Conservation" in today's symposium too seemed to be crafty balancing of "agricultural sacrifice zones" (where pesticides and fertilizers protect commodity monocrops) with non-farmed wild areas. Mitigation is good, but organic systems done well actually increase biodiversity throughout farmed land: in the soil, as fungi and other microorganisms build up to support crop productivity over time; in the fields as crops are protected by health soil and beneficial insects; around the fields through hedgerows and scattered bio-habitat plantings.

And how telling about GHI means and ends is this quote from its white paper:

While the technological advances brought by the Green Revolution have been fully exploited by now, a new frontier -- biotechnology -- has emerged with the capacity to provide important new benefits for both developed and developing countries, and even to target new technologies specifically to local needs and conditions, including those in developing countries.

I want hungry people to be fed, farmers to prosper, ecosystems to thrive while farming improves, wildlife to flourish and whole bio-regions to develop sustainable economies. That's why I demand organic agriculture be front and center on the global food agenda.

Rodale Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit engaged in research and advocacy for "Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People, Healthy Planet." We were founded in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, in 1947 by organic pioneer J.I. Rodale.

Our research findings are clear: A global organic transformation will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere and restore soil fertility. Our mission: We improve the health and well-being of people and the planet.

Follow Timothy LaSalle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RodaleInstitute

Comments

[firekeeper38]

I am really glad to see someone address these reality-deficit ads by the GMO corporations. These crops are typically grown on factory farms created by either the displacement of sustainable family farms or the slash and burn of our really critical forests. The forests already provide their inhabitants food. The traditional farmers and communities need some minimal support through bad years but by and large manage those years better than their industrial competitors.

Displaced farm families and tribes-persons will never be able to afford such extensively grown foods. It would be much better to support subsistence farmers and community food gardens. Far better to bring adequate heath and human services back to small communities ans to support traditional farmers and subsistance farming.

[AlexCFS]

I really don't agree with the statistic that the seed industry uses that states "we will need to double production by 2050 to close the productivity gap." First of all, we grow more than enough food to feed the world, and that is a fact. People are starving right now because they do not have adequate access to healthy food and because agribusinesses work against subsistence farmers by dumping our surplus crops onto the market. Secondly, what is really to be gained by producing more food? An increase in food production will inevitably lead to another increase in population, and so on and so forth. The most responsible thing that we can do right now to fight future hunger is work to reduce population growth by increasing women's education and birth control. Then there would not be a manufactured demand for more tasteless GE crops in the first place. And what about after 2050? When these companies will insist that even more food must be grown to feed an even larger global population? And after that? This may be news to some, but the human population cannot grow forever. Producing more environmentally harmful crops is not going to help anyone, but chain us to a treadmill that can only end in humanitarian and environmental disaster.

[Kaviraj]

I agree with the previous post till it comes to the fallacy of increased world population. The population is not increasing but in decline. All nations that have a certain standard of living automatically reduce their amount of children to maintain that standard, because having more children is costly and will reduce the standard for everyone.
The developed world has a replacement necessity of 3.2 children per family, but reaches a meagre 1.2.
China has its one child policy and also there, the population is reducing instead of growing. The growth elsewhere offsets this somewhat, but since it lacks sufficient numbers, it cannot make up for the loss elsewhere. The population has gone back from 6.5 billion to 6.2 billion.

Since man is a greedy creature - the rape of our planet the perfect example of this truism - better distribution of food is the only way to bring the population further down.

Poor countries produce more children to replace those that die prematurely and to obtain more food, through work and any other means - this encourages begging, theft, child-labour and child-prostitution, among many other evils. What is needed is not genetically modified food to further reduce populations, but the return to small farmers who grow organic and don't use pesticides. wherever that is the case, health improves, because wealth improves and reduction of the amount of children the inevitable outcome.

[firekeeper38]

I am not sure what your argument is with the fact of increased world population? It is true that stable, traditional societies with adequate health services and food and educated women tend to lower their birth rates. If they have access to birth control. But all that has been regularly sacrificed to politics. Industrial society women do get adequate health care to keep things in balance, but we still have to take on the displaced populations of other societies. Only fair since our policies have helps cause so much of that but still, that means an all- over increase.

Lacking empowerment, education or birth control, world population has gone up to it's current point of 6.786 billion. Since births still (and have always, except in times of plague) outnumber deaths, we are expected to reach 9 billion by 2050.