In article
,
Billy wrote:

As I asked earlier, please give a bit more of an explaination, if you can
invent some more bullshit, er sorry, scientific research results.

Baz

I doubt crainal-rectally inverted, such as yourself, would understand,
but here goes. Please excuse the paucity of invectives that I know you
rely on to communicate, and apologies for lack of any pictures that are
probably necessary to maintain your attention. This forum is usually
used by adults, but give it a go anyway. You have nothing to lose, but
your profound ignorance.

As you mentioned to Dog, you are wrong again, as you often are.

Your continuing education . . .

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...nic_go_organic

Don't Panic, Go Organic
Be not troubled by Robert Paarlberg's scaremongering. Organic practices
can feed the world -- better, in fact, than wasteful industrial farming.
BY ANNA LAPPÉ | APRIL 29, 2010


In May 2004, Catherine Badgley, an evolutionary biology professor at the
University of Michigan, took her students on a research trip to an
organic farm near their campus. Standing on the acre-and-a-half farm,
Badgley asked the farmer, Rob MacKercher, how much food he produces
annually. "Twenty-seven tons," he said. Badgley did the quick math:
That's enough to provide 150 families one pound of produce every single
day of the year.
"If he can grow that quantity on this tiny parcel," Badgley wondered,
"why can't organic agriculture feed the world?" That question was the
genesis of a multi-year, multidisciplinary study to explore whether we
could, indeed, feed the world with organic, sustainable methods of
farming. The results? A resounding yes.
Unfortunately, you don't hear about this study, or others with similar
findings, in "Attention Whole Foods Shoppers," Robert Paarlberg's
defense of industrial agriculture in the new issue of Foreign Policy.
Instead, organic agriculture, according to Paarlberg, is an "elite
preoccupation," a "trendy cause" for "purist circles." Sure, sidling up
to a Whole Foods in your Lexus SUV and spending $24.99 on artisan
fromage may be the trappings of a privileged foodie, but there's an
SUV-sized difference between obsessing about the texture of your goat
cheese and arguing for a more sustainable food system. Despite
Paarlberg's pronouncements, Badgley's research, along with much more
evidence, helps us see that what's best for the planet and for people --
especially small-scale farmers who are the hungriest among us -- is a
food system based on agroecological practices. What's more, Paarlberg's
impressive-sounding statistics veil the true human and ecological cost
we are paying with industrial agriculture.

*

Since most of us aren't well-versed in the minutia of this debate, we
can't be blamed for falling for Paarlberg's scaremongering, which
suggests that by rejecting biotech and industrial agriculture, we are
keeping developing countries underdeveloped and undernourished.
Paarlberg suggests that we could eliminate starvation across the
continent of Africa were it not that "efforts to deliver such essentials
have been undercut by deeply misguided ... advocacy against agricultural
modernization."

It's a compelling argument, and one industry defenders make all the
time. For who among us would want to think we're starving the poor by
pushing for sustainability? (At a Biotechnology Industry Organization
conference I attended in 2005, a workshop participant even suggested
pro-organic advocates should be "tried for crimes against humanity.")
But the argument for industrial agriculture and biotechnology is built
on a misleading depiction of what organic agriculture is, bolstered with
shaky statistics, and constructed by ignoring the on-the-ground lessons
of success stories across the globe.

For a start, Paarlberg doesn't get what it means to be organic. "Few
smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals," he writes,
"so their food is de facto organic." In contrast, industrial
agriculture, as he sees it, is "science-intensive." But as Doug
Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists
explains, "modern organic practices are defined by much more than just
the absence of synthetic chemicals"; it's knowledge-intensive farming.
Organic farmers improve output, less by applying purchased products and
more by tapping a sophisticated understanding of biological systems to
build soil fertility and manage pests and weeds through techniques that
include double-dug beds, intercropping, composting, manures, cover
crops, crop sequencing, and natural pest control.

Biotech and industrial agriculture would in fact more aptly be called
water, chemical, and fossil-fuel-intensive farming, requiring external
inputs to boost productivity. Industrial agriculture gobbles up much of
the 70 percent of the planet's freshwater resources diverted to farming,
for example. It relies on petroleum-based chemicals for pest and weed
control and requires massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer. In fact,
in 2007, we used 13 million tons of synthetic fertilizer, five times the
amount used in 1960. Crop yields, by comparison, grew only half that
fast. And it's hardly a harmless increase: Nitrogen fertilizers are the
single biggest cause of global-warming gases from U.S. agriculture and a
major cause of air and water pollution -- including the creation of dead
zones in coastal waters that are devoid of fish. And despite the massive
pesticide increase, the United States loses more crops to pests today
than it did before the chemical agriculture revolution six decades ago.
The diminishing returns of industrial agriculture are one reason why
organic agriculture comes out ahead in all the comprehensive comparative
studies. In Badgley's study, for instance, data from hundreds of
certified-organic, industrial, and low-input farms around the world
revealed that introducing agroecological approaches in developing
countries led to between two and four times the productivity as the
previous practices. Estimating the impact on global food supply if we
shifted the planet to organic production, the study authors found a
yield increase for every single food category they investigated.

In one of the largest studies to analyze how agroecological practices
affect productivity in the developing world, researchers at the
University of Essex in England analyzed 286 projects in 57 countries.
Among the 12.6 million farmers followed, who were transitioning toward
sustainable agriculture, researchers found an average yield increase of
79 percent across a wide variety of crop types.
Even the United Nations backs those claims. A 2008 U.N. Conference on
Trade and Development report concluded that "organic agriculture can be
more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional
production systems, and ... is more likely to be sustainable in the long
term."

In the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, several
U.N. agencies and the World Bank engaged more than 400 scientists and
development experts from 80 countries over four years to produce the
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and
Technology for Development (IAASTD). The conclusion? Our "reliance on
resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky and unsustainable,
particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water
crises," said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a lead author on the report.

Too bad we don't hear these success stories from Paarlberg. Instead he
claims that without industrial food systems, "food would be not only
less abundant but also less safe." To build his case, he points to
improvements in food safety in the United States, such as the drop in E.
coli contamination in U.S. beef. He neglects to mention that the
virulent form of E. coli, a pathogen that can be fatal in humans, only
emerged in the gut of cattle in the 1980s as a direct consequence of
industrial livestock factories -- precisely the model he would export
overseas. Meanwhile, Paarlberg conveniently ignores the diet-related
illnesses spawned by industrial food in the United States, where the
health-care system is now crippled with these preventable diseases.
Hypertension (high blood pressure), heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes
have all been linked in part to diet.

Paarlberg defends his case by pointing to a staggering death toll in
Africa where, he claims, 700,000 people die every year from food- and
water-borne diseases compared with only 5,000 in the United States. But
he's deceptively comparing apples and oranges: Those U.S. figures are
only for food-borne illnesses. And the lack of an industrial food system
isn't responsible for most of that high death toll in Africa. The World
Health Organization attributes much of this tragic toll to unsanitary
drinking water contaminated with pathogens transmitted from human
excreta, causing a massive spike in cholera that year. Oh, and pesticide
poisoning, too. Yes, that would be pesticides from industrial chemical
farming.

Paarlberg's praise for industrial practices is similar to the biotech
industry trumpeting its technology for saving us from famine, farmer
bankruptcy, blindness, disease, poverty, even loss of biodiversity. Back
in 1994, Dan Verakis, a spokesman for the industrial agricultural firm
Monsanto, claimed that biotech crops would reduce herbicide and
pesticide use, in effect reversing "the Silent Spring scenario." In
1999, Monsanto said it had developed genetically engineered rice to be a
vital source of vitamin A, reducing blindness caused by its deficiency.
That same year, then Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro boasted that GM
technology would trigger an "80 percent reduction in insecticide use in
cotton crops alone in the United States."

Few of these promises have borne fruit. Instead, commercialized biotech
crops have fostered herbicide-resistant weeds and pesticide-resistant
pests, while reducing biodiversity. "In the past, farmers used a variety
of chemical controls and manual labor, making it unlikely that any weed
plant would evolve a resistance to all those different strategies
simultaneously," explains gene ecology expert, Jack Heinemann, another
IAASTD author. "But as we oversimplify -- as we industrialize -- we make
agriculture more vulnerable to the next problem." Already, examples of
herbicide resistance are popping up from canola fields in Canada to
farms in Australia.

Another cause for concern is that industrial agriculture and genetically
modified crops dangerously reduce biodiversity, especially on the farm.
In the United States, 90 percent of soy, 70 percent of corn, and 95
percent of sugarbeets are genetically modified. Industrial farms are by
their very nature monocultures, but diverse crops on a farm, even weeds,
serve multiple functions: Bees feast on their nectar and pollen, birds
munch on weed seeds, worms and other soil invertebrates that help
control pests live among them -- the list goes on.

So are farmers in southern Africa, across India, in villages throughout
the developing world really waiting for biotech and industrial
agriculture to feed them, as Paarlberg suggests? "No," says Sue Edwards,
a British-born botanist who works at the Institute for Sustainable
Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. "Farmers we work with don't hold
much hope" for these technologies; they see hope in their fields.

Starting in 1996, Edwards and colleagues engaged smallholder farmers in
drought-prone regions in Ethiopia to investigate whether resilient food
systems could be fostered by tapping ecological agriculture, building
farming skills, emphasizing crops indigenous to the continent that had
evolved to be drought resilient. They enlisted farmers in field trials,
comparing crops grown using ecological methods like composting with
those raised with chemical fertilizer or without any inputs at all.
(That'd be what Paarlberg calls "de facto organic.") The results are
conclusive: By 2006, they were finding significantly higher yields in
the ecological test sites of every single crop compared with the
chemical-fertilizer plots and even more dramatic benefits compared with
the no-input plots.

Among the pitfalls in Paarlberg's analysis, two stand out. First, the
benefits of his approach are speculative, at best; at worst, his
assertions are disengenous, based on cherry-picking evidence and
misrepresenting data. We need only compare his claims with Edwards's
work and similar research around the world that demonstrates that
agroecological approaches can protect natural resources and increase
yields. Not in five years; not in 20. But right now -- today.

Second, his approach ignores power relationships that ultimately
determine who will benefit from any technology. In agroecological
approaches, farmers gain knowledge, including knowledge about ways to
adapt to changing climate and to share their knowledge with each other.
Farmers become less dependent on distant, centralized suppliers of
high-priced biotech seeds and chemical inputs and therefore less
vulnerable to their notoriously unstable prices. Though perhaps harder
to measure, this independence may be the most critical advantages of
agroecological farming.

Take away Paarlberg-esque mythologizing -- along with the government
handouts, international financial institutional backing, tax breaks, and
externalized environmental and human costs that prop up industrial
agriculture and biotechnology -- and industrial agriculture would go the
way of the Hummer: an overhyped footnote in the history books.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw