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ORGANIC AGRICULTURE CAN FEED THE WORLD
Peter Saunders
; Institute of Science in Society and King’s College London, UK
Sažetak
Conventional high-input farming is unsustainable because of its effects on the soil and on the rural economy and because of its heavy reliance on oil both as fuel and as the source of fertilizer. Genetic modification is claimed in some quarters to have the potential to increase yields and decrease the dependence on oil, but so far it has singularly failed to deliver and there is very little to suggest that it ever will. What is more, the present technology involves many hazards to human health and to the environment and these are being deliberately ignored rather than addressed. The alternative to high-input and GM is to use organic agriculture and farming methods that require little or no external inputs. Many people, however, argue that attractive though this idea may be, and despite the growing evidence that organically produced crops are superior, it simply cannot provide the amount of food that ten billion people are going to need. Until recently, there were no large scale direct comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture to support or refute this claim. In 1997, however, the government of Ethiopia, which had previously tried to promote a version of the so-called Green Revolution, introduced a new Environmental Policy. Part of the implementation of this policy involved the growing of a number of crops on many farms using either no fertilizer, chemical fertilizer, or compost. Over the six years from 2000 to 2006, data were collected for almost a thousand farmers’ fields. In particular, there is a large amount of data for five crops that are especially important in Ethiopia: barley, durum wheat, faba beans, maize and teff. For all five crops, higher yields were achieved with compost than with chemical fertilizers. When combined with other practices such as the anaerobic digestion of waste, organic agriculture is capable of feeding the world sustainably.
Ključne riječi
high-input farming; genetic modification; organic agriculture; feeding the world
Hrčak ID:
28413
URI
Datum izdavanja:
25.7.2008.
Posjeta: 3.899 *