Q: How can you know when we've gone horribly astray in understanding our role in food production?
A: When we let huge profit-motivated industries convince us that pouring poisons on our food is a good thing.
It sounds absurd - but that's exactly what we've done.
War is a money making racket. It always has been. While we may not currently be living in an age of a 'World War', we are definitely living in an age of a systematised war against our world. And, just like wars with bullets and bombs, there is a lot of money being made out of our misery.
The factories and chemical companies that made huge profits from dealing death to the earth's human inhabitants during wartime - especially World War II - quickly found a new direction for their efforts when killing people quickly was no longer acceptable. They began to use their chemicals to kill us slowly instead.
But, we're starting to fight back, and the truth is getting out. The agribusiness justifications for their war on the earth is beginning to be seen for what it really is - pure propaganda. Over the decades there have been many studies and attempts to show the benefits of organic farming. It was always hard for agribusiness to deny the health benefits (see also) - although they tried there too - but where they have often fully convinced people is in the efficiency aspect. Because people assume greater scale in production equates to greater efficiency, this argument has been accepted without consideration - despite the protests of many under funded but knowledgeable experts in this area. Our increasingly nature-detached public assume that methods of efficiency applicable to a factory floor environment also transfer across to far more complicated and interactive biological processes.
The agribusiness argument has essentially come down to this - we must systematically contaminate our environment and ignore natural systems, because if we try to return to organic systems of farming billions of people will starve as yields fail. But, this pistol-held-against-our-heads agribusiness ploy has today met yet another study that shows this relative efficiency argument is baseless.
Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming on the same amount of land—according to new findings which refute the long-standing assumption that organic farming methods cannot produce enough food to feed the global population.Further Reading:Researchers from the University of Michigan found that in developed countries, yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. In developing countries, food production could double or triple using organic methods, said Ivette Perfecto, professor at U-M's School of Natural Resources and Environment, and one the study's principal investigators....
"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture," Perfecto said....
Perfecto said the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic is "ridiculous."
"Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food," she said. - ScienceDaily
