The Hindu Business Line : Myths about organic farming

It is disheartening and shocking to read a scientist’s view that organic farming will not feed the world (Business Line, July 11), when the globally recognised International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge (IAASTD), other international organisations and research scientists of the world are coming around to the fact that growing food sustainably and in an environmentally safe manner is the best way to ensure global food sovereignty and remove hunger.

However, the article is creative in its approach, instead of promoting GM seeds, pesticides, and other technologies directly, it attacks organic farming.

It is a recognised fact that the world carries 850 million hungry people today. When it produces enough to feed every one of us, why are so many hungry? Clearly, it is not a problem of production, but that of distribution, purchasing power, and access. By producing even more humungous quantities of food, we are not going to solve these problems; instead, by allowing control over our food supply to a fewer number of corporations we are, in fact, going to make the situation worse. It has been established that the current short-term food crisis is primarily a result of the bio-fuel obsession of the West, commodity market speculation, un-fettered liberalisation, import dependence of many third world countries and decreasing agricultural productivity. However, this decreasing productivity was created by the article’s very prescriptions — technology-driven farming.

Adding insult to injury is the suggestion that farmers have to grow and consume pesticide-laden, genetically-modified food to ensure food security while the elite the world over can be fed organic produce!

Of course he couches it as an economic benefit for farmers. But the farmers might be better off growing and eating organic, living healthy and ignoring the elite and the scientists. We need to survive on this planet, sustaining the soil, conserving our fast depleting sources of water, preserving other species and finally preventing the worst of global warming effects and the author’s prescriptions are of no help here!

Sreedevi Lakshmikutty Mumbai