by Jill Richardson
March 8, 2011
from
AlterNet Website
|
A new report from the UN advises
ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in
favor of agroecology.
Jill Richardson is the
founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic
Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of
Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do
to Fix It. |
There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as
food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and
environmental crises.
But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we
can follow the course - and that course involves ditching
corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.
"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we
urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available.
And today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods
outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production
in regions where the hungry live," says
Olivier de Schutter,
the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
Agroecology is more or less what many Americans
would simply call "organic agriculture," although important nuances separate
the two terms.
Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide,
agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term
food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality,
carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time.
Agroecology also values traditional and
indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning
them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As
such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual)
resources.
A
new report, presented today before the UN
Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with
its recommendation of agroecology.
For example, it says,
"We won't solve hunger and stop climate
change with industrial farming on large plantations."
Instead, it says the solution lies with
smallholder farmers.
The majority of the world's hungry are
smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing
enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food
production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot
access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor
farmers will make a dent in global hunger.
Potentially, gains in productivity by
smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow
a surplus of food that they can sell.
With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology
could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide
a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension
services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads,
electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders
with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and
education.
Additionally, it notes the importance of
providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.
In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding
seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor
countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on
less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or
genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation.
Many work each year to make sure their crops go
far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for
those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to
sell to anyway.
Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often
disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid
organizations to teach their fellow farmers.
"Rather than treating smallholder farmers as
beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that
is complementary to formalized expertise," the report notes.
For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers
developed a successful "push-pull" strategy to control pests in corn, and
using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools,
spread the system to over 10,000 households.
The push-pull method involves pushing pests away from corn by interplanting
corn with an insect repelling crop called
Desmodium (which can be fed to
livestock), while pulling the pests toward small nearby plots of
Napier
grass,
"a plant that excretes a sticky gum which
both attracts and traps pests."
In addition to controlling pests, this system
produces livestock fodder, thus doubling corn yields and milk production at
the same time. And it improves the soil to boot!
Significantly, the report mentions that past efforts to combat hunger
focused mostly on cereals such as wheat and rice which, while important, do
not provide a wide enough range of nutrients to prevent malnutrition.
Thus, the biodiversity in agroecological farming
systems provide much needed nutrients.
"For example," the report says, "it has been
estimated that indigenous fruits contribute on average about 42 percent
of the natural food-basket that rural households rely on in southern
Africa. This is not only an important source of vitamins and other
micronutrients, but it also may be critical for sustenance during lean
seasons."
Indeed, in agroecological farming systems around
the world, plants a conventional American farm might consider weeds are
eaten as food or used in traditional herbal medicine.
De Schutter does not dismiss the U.S. government's preferred
strategies of crop breeding and fertilizers as potentially helpful in the
fight against hunger, but warns of caution in using them. Crop breeding, he
notes, can be complementary to agroecology.
Perhaps referring to efforts to develop
drought-resistant maize, the report says,
"Agroecology is more overarching [than crop
breeding] as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems
(including soils, plants, agrobiodiversity, etc.), not just
drought-resistant plants."
When asked to provide more detail about crop
breeding, De Schutter responded that,
"most [agroecologists] are very careful with
some of these [crop breeding] technologies, particularly genetic
engineering."
He noted that genetically engineered crops not
only carry environmental risks, but are also,
"associated with unsustainable farming
practices and with a worrying concentration of the seed industry."
In contrast, he sees promise in marker-assisted
selection and participatory plant breeding, which,
"uses the strength of modern science, while
at the same time putting farmers in the driver's seat."
De Schutter also highlights the risks of using
nitrogen fertilizer, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and water
pollution, saying that,
"the use of fertilizers [in Africa] could
increase a bit without major environmental damages."
He sees many reasons why agroecology is a better
choice than nitrogen fertilizer, pointing out that,
"many agroecological methods simply
outperform mineral fertilizers: they result in similar levels of return
on investments if you measure only productivity, but they create systems
that are more resilient to climate change, some of them produce
additional fodder for animals (nitrogen-fixing trees for instance), or
fruit (thus vitamins)."
He adds that agroecological gains can be
achieved with local resources,
"while fertilizers need to be imported. This
is not a minor issue for the balance of payment of countries! A country
could thus use its foreign exchange to build modern industries and
create jobs rather than buying fertilizers."
However, when an urgent situation of hunger
needs to be addressed, nitrogen fertilizers should not be dismissed if they
can, in fact, provide the best outcome in a short-term emergency situation.
The report also warns of the harmful impact of allowing volatile prices and
dumping of subsidized commodities in poor countries. Dumping occurs when a
country that subsidizes its farmers (like the U.S.) promotes overproduction
and causes prices to fall very low. When the excess, cheap commodities are
exported to poor countries that have no trade barriers, local farmers cannot
compete on price.
De Schutter notes,
"While not the single cause, the lowering of
import tariffs in poor countries and the inability of these countries to
support their small farmers" were major causes of "massive rural
poverty, rural flight, and widespread hunger." He adds, "I believe that
it is vital for poor countries to be allowed to protect their farming
sector and to be helped in supporting this sector."
Will the United States heed De Schutter's
advice, adopting a development approach that embraces agroecology and seeks
trade agreements that are more fair to poor countries? Recently history does
not inspire much hope.
De Schutter is not the first to recognize the
potential of agroecology. In 2008, the International Assessment of
Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD)
report also concluded that agroecology offered farmers a powerful means to
increase production on smallholder farms, and thus decrease hunger in the
world.
Both De Schutter and the IAASTD report seek more
than just food production from agriculture; they see agroecology as a way to
improve rural livelihoods, mitigate climate change and provide resilience in
the face of climate extremes.
However, the United States was one of only three countries that failed to
approve the IAASTD report, due to its
critiques of unregulated trade and biotechnology.
American efforts to fight global hunger, to
date, have focused more on crop breeding, particularly
genetic engineering,
and nitrogen fertilizer than agroecology.
Whereas the new UN report notes
that,
"perhaps because [agroecological] practices
cannot be rewarded by patents, the private sector has been largely
absent from this line of research,"
...the U.S. aggressively promotes
public-private partnerships with corporations
such as,
-
seed and chemical companies
Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and
BASF
-
agribusiness companies Cargill, Bunge
-
Archer Daniels Midland
-
processed food companies PepsiCo,
Nestle, General Mills, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kraft Foods
-
retail giant Wal-Mart
The entire report on agroecology is available on
the
Web site of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.