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An Organic Recipe for Development |
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By Stephen Leahy* - IPS/IFEJ*
Crops
grown without pesticides and other chemicals can mitigate the effects
of climate change, along with alleviating world hunger, say experts.
TORONTO, Dec 18 (IPS/IFEJ) - Organic agriculture
is a potent tool to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, but also
to alleviate poverty and improve food security in developing countries,
many experts now believe.
Organic agriculture's use of compost and crop diversity means it
will also be able to better withstand the higher temperatures and
more variable rainfall expected with global warming.
"Organic agriculture is about optimizing yields under all conditions,"
says Louise Luttikholt, strategic relations manager at the International
Federation of Organic Agriculture (IFOAM) in Bonn, Germany. IFOAM
is the international umbrella organization of organic agriculture
movements around the world.
For example, a village in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia
that had converted to organic agriculture continued to harvest crops
even during a severe drought, while neighboring villages using conventional
chemical fertilizers had nothing, Luttikholt said in an interview.
Because compost is used rather than chemical fertilizers, organic
soils contain much more humus and organic carbon -- which in turn
retains much more water.
"They can also absorb more water faster which means they are less
likely to flood," she said.
It took more work to make the conversion to organic but it paid
off when the drought stuck in the third year, according to Tewolde
Berhan Gebre Egziabher, director general of the Environmental Protection
Authority of Ethiopia.
Tewolde, who pioneered the organic revolution in a number of communities
in northern Ethiopia as a way of ensuring food security, reported
that the early success has prompted government agricultural departments
to adopt organic techniques.
Organic and other forms of sustainable agro-ecology do not depend
on chemical fertilizers, so they must find other ways to enrich
soil and keep it that way. That also means there are more minerals
and other nutrients in the soil so yields are generally good and
food quality high.
And the added benefit is that organic soils hold much more carbon
than soils farmed with conventional methods.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning
of fossil fuels is the principal cause of global warming. Plants
absorb carbon dioxide from the air and can put it more or less permanently
into the soil under the right conditions.
In a 23-year side-by-side comparison, the carbon levels of organic
soils increased 15 to 28 percent while there was little change in
the non-organic systems, according to the Rodale Institute Farming
Systems Trials conducted in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.
If just 10,000 medium-sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic
production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it
would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, Rodale
reported in 2003.
And there's more: Making chemical fertilizers like nitrogen requires
huge amounts of energy, and tractors also consume large amounts
of fossil fuel. In the United States, organic farming systems use
just 63 percent of the energy required by conventional farming systems,
David Pimentel of Cornell University in New York State found.
Going organic also offers a number of other environmental benefits,
including waterways free of chemical pollution and improved biodiversity.
In North America and European farming regions, expensive systems
must be used to remove agricultural chemicals from drinking water.
"Those external costs of conventional agriculture have to be paid
by someone," said Volkert Engelsman, the CEO of Eosta BV, a European
distributor of organic fruits and vegetables.
"Organic brings a wide range of social and economic benefits, making
it a much better and more efficient way of farming," Engelsman said
in an interview from Eosta's head office in Waddinxveen, Holland.
For low-income countries, that means more jobs because organic farming
is labor-intensive. It also values local expertise and traditional
knowledge. That makes more economic sense than being dependent on
the technical expertise of Western corporations, he said.
Engelsman has just returned from India where organic farming is
undergoing "explosive growth".
Faced with rapidly depleting soils, the Indian government is now
supporting organic techniques because no amount of chemical fertilizer
can improve the soil. In addition, water shortages, increased disease
problems and higher costs of chemicals and hybrid seeds have forced
India to rethink its agricultural strategy, he said.
"It is more economically sustainable to invest in the soils of your
land than to make the chemical companies richer," noted Engelsman.
The problem of global hunger is not about food production -- it
is about poverty and food distribution, since the world already
produces enough food, he said.
Engelsman agrees with the noted Indian scientist and environmentalist
Vandana Shiva that research into ecologically-friendly agriculture
has proved that it is highly productive and is the only solution
to hunger and poverty.
That view, once considered radical, is beginning to gain wider acceptance
as hunger has increased under the globalized food production system.
Ten years after the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, where countries
pledged to halve the number of hungry in the world by 2015, there
were more hungry people in the developing countries today, said
the head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques
Diouf, in a statement.
"Far from decreasing, the number of hungry people in the world is
currently increasing -- at the rate of four million a year," Diouf
said from Rome.
And finally the FAO is looking to organic to play a role in reducing
hunger and alleviating poverty and will host a major conference
in May 2007 in Rome. Many countries request FAO's assistance to
develop organic agriculture, said Alexander Müller, assistant director-general
of FAO, in a statement.
"There is a need to shed light on the contribution of organic agriculture
to food security," Müller said.
Many countries are already moving in that direction.
Brazil's Minister of Agriculture Roberto Rodrigues has said he wants
organic farming to grow from three percent of the country's agricultural
output to 20 percent in the next five to six years.
Last month, 308 delegates from the Philippines' farming sector agreed
to shift to organic production, in part because it can help poverty
alleviation in rural communities.
Studies done by International Fund for Agricultural Development
(IFAD), a U.N. agency set up to assist the rural poor to overcome
poverty, have shown that organic agriculture reduced poverty. In
almost all of the countries where the IFAD evaluations were carried
out, small farmers needed only marginal improvements to their technologies
to make the shift to organic production.
"Everyone is embracing organic agriculture now. And climate change
will only boost that interest," Engelsman said.
* This story is part of a series of features
on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation
of Environmental Journalists. |
