How the Great Food War Will Be Won

By Jonathan Latham, PhD

By conventional wisdom it is excellent news. Researchers from Iowa have shown that organic farming methods can yield almost as highly as pesticide-intensive methods. Other researchers, from Berkeley, California, have reached a similar conclusion. Indeed, both findings met with a very enthusiastic reception. The enthusiasm is appropriate, but only if one misses a deep and fundamental point: that even to participate in such a conversation is to fall into a carefully laid trap. … Continue Reading

Seeds of Truth: Vandana Shiva and the New Yorker

by Dr Vandana Shiva

(A response to the article ‘Seeds of Doubt’ by Michael Specter in The New Yorker)

I am glad that the future of food is being discussed, and thought about, on farms, in homes, on TV, online and in magazines, especially of The New Yorker’s caliber. The New Yorker has held its content and readership in high regard for so long. The challenge of feeding a growing population with the added obstacle of climate change is an important issue. Specter’s piece, however, is poor journalism. I wonder why a journalist who has been Bureau Chief in Moscow for The New York Times and Bureau Chief in New York for the Washington Post, and clearly is an experienced reporter, would submit such a misleading piece. Or why The New Yorker would allow it to be published as honest reporting, with so many fraudulent assertions and deliberate attempts to skew reality. … Continue Reading

What Will the World Inherit From GE Salmon?

By Dr. Gerry Goeden

It’s true; about 50 percent of the fish we eat are farmed. There is good reason for this as, one by one, the world’s commercial fisheries collapse through overfishing. According to FAO (2010), 70% of the world’s large commercial fisheries have either failed or are not far from it.

When things started to go wrong with world fisheries, fish farming was hailed as the ultimate solution. Fish could be produced cheaply and pressure removed from wild stocks. It seemed like the perfect solution to a very big problem. … Continue Reading

The Founding Fables of Industrialised Agriculture

by Colin Tudge

Governments these days are not content with agriculture that merely provides good food. In line with the dogma of neoliberalism they want it to contribute as much wealth as any other industry towards the grand goal of “economic growth”. High tech offers to reconcile the two ambitions – producing allegedly fabulous yields, which seems to be what’s needed, and becoming highly profitable. The high-tech flavour of the decade is genetic engineering, supplying custom-built crops and livestock as GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms). … Continue Reading

Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics

by Morten Jerven Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University, Canada

On 5 November 2010, Ghana Statistical Services announced that it was revising national GDP estimates upwards by over 60 percent. After the revision a range of new activities, worth about US$13 billion, were accounted for, and Ghana was thus upgraded from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country. In the fall of 2011 its near-neighbor Nigeria also announced a forthcoming revision of its GDP. This revision is not yet complete, but it has been suggested that the GDP revision in Nigeria will cause a similarly large jump in GDP. If GDP doubles in Nigeria following the revision it will mean that the GDP for the whole region increases by more than 15 percent. The value of the increase amounts to as much as 40 economies roughly the size of Malawi’s.
… Continue Reading

How Millions of Farmers are Advancing Agriculture For Themselves

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by Sumant Kumar who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village in the state of Bihar in Northern India. His record yield of 22.4 tons per hectare, from a one-acre plot, was achieved with what is known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). To put his achievement in perspective, the average paddy yield worldwide is about 4 tons per hectare. Even with the use of fertilizer, average yields are usually not more than 8 tons.

Sumant Kumar’s success was not a fluke. Four of his neighbors, using SRI methods, and all for the first time, matched or exceeded the previous world record from China, 19 tons per hectare. Moreover, they used only modest amounts of inorganic fertilizer and did not need chemical crop protection. … Continue Reading

America: Becoming a Land Without Farmers

Evaggelos Vallianatos (Photo Credit: Homini:))

The plutocratic remaking of America has a parallel in the countryside. In rural America less than 3 percent of farmers make more than 63 percent of the money, including government subsidies.

The results of this emerging feudal economy are everywhere. Large areas of the United States are becoming impoverished farm towns with abandoned farmhouses and deserted land. More and more of the countryside has been devoted to massive factory farms and plantations. The consequences, though worse now than ever, have been there for all to see and feel, for decades. … Continue Reading

The Unsettling of America

Book Author: Wendell Berry

Reviewed by Jonathan Latham (The Bioscience Resource Project)

In 2002, peasant associations from all over Asia organised an international scientific conference. The motivation for the conference was the fact that peasants and their leaders had no dialogue with agricultural scientists, either from their own countries or with those from abroad. A lack of support from scientists was not the only motivation however. The peasants had also come to believe that the science with which they were familiar was actively hostile to their way of life. As a result, many had demonstrated outside the UN-sponsored International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Phillipines, a research centre set up specifically to support farming in developing countries.

… Continue Reading