Farming/food production

[colorlessman]

There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature ... all » of the food we eat.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.

From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.

Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=84...=future+of+food (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=849146694200968214&q=future+of+food)

[Delirium]

Farming Will Make or Break the Food Chain

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, May 2 (IPS) - As the world population swells to nine billion by 2050, global biodiversity will be under extreme pressure unless new ways to grow food are developed, experts say.

An additional one billion hectares of wild lands -- mainly forests and savanna -- will be converted to food production fields by 2050. While this may provide enough food, it is likely to result in a massive decline in biodiversity, undermining ecosystems that provide vital services such as clean water and air, and capture carbon to slow the build-up of climate-altering gases in the atmosphere.

Sixty percent of the Earth's ecosystems are in trouble right now, warned the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report last year.

What state will they be in by 2050?

It depends how society decides to feed itself, says Louise Jackson of the University of California at Davis, and head of an agro-biodiversity task force at Diversitas, an international scientific organisation devoted to biodiversity research based in Paris, France.

"If all agricultural lands adopt the industrial, monocultural model, there will be enormous impacts on water and other essential services provided by diverse ecosystems," Jackson told IPS.

Societies need to recognise the value of ecosystem services and encourage farmers to use methods that benefit biodiversity, she says.

Biodiversity refers to the amazing variety of living things that make up the biosphere, the thin skin of life that covers the Earth and is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. The trees, plants, insects, bacteria, birds and animals that make up forest ecosystems produce oxygen, clean water, prevent erosion and flooding, and capture excess carbon dioxide, among other things.

"There is an unbreakable link between human health and well being and ecosystems," Walter Reid, director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and a professor with the Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, told IPS last year.

The MA is a 22-million-dollar, four-year global research initiative commissioned by the United Nations, and carried out by 1,360 experts from 95 countries. Its mission has been to examine ways to slow or reverse the degradation of the Earth's ecosystems, including a look at what the future may be like in 2050.

The more species and diversity there are in an ecosystem, the more robust it is. Remove some species and it will continue to function. However, like a complex house of cards, removing key cards or too many cards results in a collapse.

For many ecosystems such as oceans, scientists do not know what the key cards are or how many lost species is too many.

Agriculture has been the biggest contributor to species loss in the past, but Jackson and others believe that valuing agricultural lands as both sources of food and biodiversity could slow the loss of future species.

"There are ways to enhance biodiversity even here in California where there are very intensive agricultural monocultures," Jackson said.

Crop rotation, re-vegetating farm edges and integrating thin strips of land into farm fields to provide habitat for insect predators boosts biodiversity while reducing pesticide use and the impacts of chemicals on water and soil, she said.

The benefits to farmers include less spending on pesticides and fertilisers and improved soil quality due to enhanced microbial biodiversity.

However, such benefits often take years to emerge and pose short-term-financial risks for farmers. To offset these, society should support farmers with some form of payment for increasing biodiversity since everyone benefits from ecosystem services. At the same time, there ought to be strong penalties for chemical pollution, she says.

Conversion of the one billion hectares of wild lands into farmland can also be done in ways that preserve some biodiversity by leaving corridors of connected habitat so species can move from one place to another. Research in the Amazon has shown that islands of untouched forest surrounded by agricultural lands quickly begin to fray at the edges and slowly shrink.

"We can do better in terms of preserving biodiversity in converting forest into farmlands," said Truman Young, an ecologist who is also at University of California, Davis.

"The problem in feeding the world is poverty not food production," Young said in an interview.

While agreeing that more land will be needed in the future, the biggest current and future threats to biodiversity are food and timber export markets, and biofuels, he says.

"Brazil's rural population is in decline even as more Amazonian rainforest is being cleared and turned into soy fields," Young said.

Although some poor farmers are still trying to farm the Amazon, the main pressure today is large industrial farm operations that grow soy for export to Europe. The soy and timber barons of the Amazon have tremendous influence and power, making it difficult to slow deforestation of the region, he said.

The international community needs to counteract that by applying pressure on Brazil because the carbon that is being released by deforestation affects everyone on the planet, he argued.

The other major threat to biodiversity is the thirst for biofuels, derived from corn and sugar cane, among other things, and which experts say have already caused deforestation in Asia and parts of South America.

"Brazil, because of its size and climate, could become the biofuel capital of the world," Young said.

And that could devastate the country's biodiversity without adding much to the world's energy supply. Europeans are turning away from biodiesel made from palm oil because it is causing deforestation. Biofuels only offer a benefit when agricultural waste products are used for conversion into fuel. The technology for doing that is not yet here, he said.

"Improving fuel efficiency is the fastest and easiest way to reduce use of fossil fuels," Young noted.

Just as boosting ethanol or biodiesel production fails to solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, so does investing billions of dollars in research into genetically engineered crops, says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. think tank.

"We already know how to grow enough food to feed the world. The problem is the food distribution system," Mittal told IPS.

That system favours large-scale monocultures of a few specialised crops, and is destroying biodiversity. Ultimately that approach is a recipe for global famine, she said.

"We know how to end hunger and preserve biodiversity, but there are powerful corporate interests in opposition," Mittal said.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37581

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?...070503133418321 (http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20070503133418321)

[Janus]

ROME - Organic food has long been considered a niche market, a luxury for wealthy consumers. But researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday that a large-scale shift to organic agriculture could help fight world hunger while improving the environment.

Crop yields initially can drop as much as 50 percent when industrialized, conventional agriculture using chemical fertilizers and pesticides is converted to organic. While such decreases often even out over time, the figures have kept the organic movement largely on the sidelines of discussions about feeding the hungry.

Researchers in Denmark found, however, that food security for sub-Saharan Africa would not be seriously harmed if 50 percent of agricultural land in the food exporting regions of Europe and North America were converted to organic by 2020.

While total food production would fall, the amount per crop would be much smaller than previously assumed, and the resulting rise in world food prices could be mitigated by improvements in the land and other benefits, the study found.

A similar conversion to organic farming in sub-Saharan Africa could help the region's hungry because it could reduce their need to import food, Niels Halberg, a senior scientist at the Danish Research Center for Organic Food and Farming, told the U.N. conference on "Organic Agriculture and Food Security."

Farmers who go back to traditional agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive chemicals and would grow more diverse and sustainable crops, the report said. In addition, if their food is certified as organic, farmers could export any surpluses at premium prices.

The researchers plugged in data on projected crop yields and commodity prices until 2020 to create models for the most optimistic and conservative outlooks.

Alexander Mueller, assistant director-general of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, praised the report and noted that projections indicate the number of hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa was expected to grow.

Considering that the effects of climate change are expected to hurt the world's poorest, "a shift to organic agriculture could be beneficial," he said.

Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, an FAO official who organized the conference, pointed to other studies she said indicated that organic agriculture could produce enough food per capita to feed the world's current population.

One such study, by the University of Michigan, found that a global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least 2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world's current production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per day, researchers reported. A kilocalorie is one "large" calorie and is known as the "nutritionist's calorie."

"These models suggest that organic agriculture has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional agriculture today, but with reduced environmental impacts," Scialabba said in a paper presented to the conference.

However, she stressed that the studies were only economic models.

The United Nations defines organic agriculture as a "holistic" food system that avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution and optimizes the health of plants, animals and people. It is commercially practiced in 120 countries and represented a $40 billion market last year, Scialabba said.

Switch to organic food could alleviate problems (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070505/ap_on_re_eu/un_organic_food;_ylt=AiQzmi8ur7U.LEGW0j3OFiJvaA8F)

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Janus, you stole my friggin' article! ;)

On a more serious note, I don't know what to say about this technological retrograde, other than the fact that traditional agricultural methods do not take advantage of economies of scale, as per my comments and government stats in this History Forum post (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=65638&view=findpost&p=1292303250).

It's even admitted by these small-farmer lobbyists (http://www.checkbiotech.org/green_News_Genetics.aspx?infoId=14574).