NEW YORK, March 8, 2011: (by Mark Bittman) The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world’s citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact. And industrial agriculture isn’t working perfectly, either: the global food price index is at a record high, and our agricultural system is wreaking havoc with the health not only of humans but of the earth. There are around a billion undernourished people; we can also thank the current system for the billion who are overweight or obese.
Yet there is good news: increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels and experts are suggesting that agricultural practices pretty close to organic — perhaps best called ‘sustainable’ — can feed more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by industrial production and, in the long term, become the norm.
On Tuesday, Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Right to Food, presented a report entitled ‘Agro-ecology and the Right to Food.’ Chief among de Schutter’s recommendations is this: ‘Agriculture should be fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are more environmentally sustainable and socially just.’
Industrial (or ‘conventional’) agriculture requires a great deal of resources, including disproportionate amounts of water and the fossil fuel that’s needed to make chemical fertilizer, mechanize working the land and its crops, running irrigation sources, heat buildings and crop dryers and, transportation. This means it needs more in the way of resources than the earth can replenish. Agro-ecology and related methods are going to require resources too, but they’re more in the form of labor, both intellectual and physical.