Organic farming can indeed feed the world
A story I’d seen in the Globe and Mail fell by the wayside when I’d first marked it for follow-up. I rediscovered it when periodically ploughing up old links, searching for overlooked or under-regarded treasure.
In brief, there is growing evidence that:
(a) the Green Revolution has not, by and large, provided sustainably higher yields than organic agriculture
(All but one of the seven links above point to different datasets — and that odd-one-out, from Grist, has additional data cited in one of the first comments.)
Before further discussion, a few excerpts. First, from link #1 above,
…the Green Revolution’s key innovations - chemicals and monocultures - are being blamed for a recent pest and disease epidemic that has ravaged Asian rice fields and sharply curtailed the supply of the main food staple of half of the world’s population…
…David Pimentel, a Cornell University entomologist who has also linked pesticide overuse to planthopper outbreaks in Asian rice fields, says that when Indonesia sharply restricted the use of the chemicals on its rice crops in the 1980s, yields increased by 12 per cent in five years.
In a 22-year study he reported on in 2005 in the journal BioScience, Dr. Pimentel compared organic and conventional crop yields in Pennsylvania and found that organic methods produced the same or better harvests, while eliminating the use of pesticides and commercial fertilizers, reducing watering needs and leaving the soil healthier…
And from Monbiot, writing in 2000:
Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists had tested the key principle of modern rice-growing - planting a single, high-tech variety across hundreds of hectares - against a much older technique: planting several breeds in one field. They found, to the astonishment of the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of “monoculture”, that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased by 94 per cent. The farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop applying their poisons altogether, while producing 18 per cent more rice per acre than they were growing before.
Before going further, let me emphasize that I’m no technophobe — I’m a chemical engineer, after all — and that scientific research, including the possible use of genetic engineering, must continue. (Some of the efforts listed here are particularly commendable.) As pointed out by this counter-article in Cosmos magazine, organic farming will not succeed in all circumstances.
None the less, based on the data I’ve seen, I suspect organic farming can feed the world better and more sustainably than industrial, chemical agriculture. There’s simply too much blowback from the use of herbicides and pesticides. Collateral biological damage occurs with the application of these compounds, and killing virtually all the targeted weeds… is in the end, an indirect way of selecting weeds for pesticide-resistance. The (ab)use of pesticides leads to pesticide-resistant weeds, as surely as the (ab)use of antibiotics leads to antibiotic-resistant superbugs. And when that happens, the net effect of the pesticides will have been to weaken the web of other microorganisms in the soil, impairing its fertility.