A pair of combines harvesting soybeans in the US. Courtesy: World Resources Institute.

By James Jeffrey
WASHINGTON, D.C., Apr 17 2019 (IPS)

Water supply has long been a key issue in California. Today it is no less critical, especially given the years of drought that California is experiencing, lending additional impetus to assessing the impact of agriculture on water.

The conventional estimate is that 80 percent of the water used in California flows into the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector.

But it goes way beyond water. As in California, agriculture in the United States is dominated by large, specialised crop and animal farms that focus on short-term productivity, often at the cost of creating other environmental problems, as well as public health issues.

Increasingly, there is recognition that societies need to work towards an agriculture that is greener, cleaner, and provides better quality, more nutritious food that not only feeds people but improves their diet. This is not a new idea, rather one that has been ignored in our impatient, on-demand society, as well as one that has had to compete against a food and diet industry valued at 66 billion dollars in the U.S., with all the vested interests that go with it.

“It is not necessarily the size of holdings or the level of mechanisation and industrialisation that is a problem, rather it is the way agriculture is practiced, when this has unintentional impacts on the environment,” Jean-Marc Faurès, a former senior advisor on sustainable agriculture at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), tells IPS.

“In the past, we have looked at productivity as the sole metrics to measure success in agriculture. Measuring agricultural sustainability forces us to go beyond productivity only and include other dimensions, like the environmental, but also the social dimension.”

To better help people understand where the problem areas are occurring, the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), a non-profit research centre studying the causes and effects on food created by economic, scientific, societal and environmental factors, has produced a food sustainability index profile for the U.S. and another 66 countries.

Each country profile focuses on three pillars—food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, nutritional challenges—each of which is broken into multiple relevant categories that are rated green, yellow or red, to indicate progress: green being good, red being bad.

The U.S. score for sustainable agriculture was average due to the land category having repeatedly low scores across indicators such as the impact on land of animal feed and biofuels, agricultural subsidies and diversification of agricultural systems (the U.S. earned a high score for the food loss and waste pillar, but only performed moderately well in terms of nutritional challenges).

“A major issue in the U.S. is the low proportion of land set aside for organic farming as opposed to the large amount used for bio-fuel and animal feed,” BCFN’s Katarzyna Dembska tells IPS. “The large demand for animal feed is directly linked to the meat supply in the country: the additional 225 grams of meat available per capita per day—compared to the recommended intakes—makes the U.S. availability of meat for consumers among the highest in the world.”

Lack of diversification is another problem in the U.S., and around the world, with people fed from just a very limited basket of crops and animals, Faurès says. This increases the vulnerability of agricultural systems to unexpected events—climatic, pests, or market related—but also means that people eat food that is not diversified and is too rich in carbohydrates and not enough in vitamins.   

“It is a paradox in a way that many developing countries show much more diverse production systems than developed countries,” Faurès says. “This is in part due to the imperative need for farmers to diversify sources of income and reduce risks related to shocks.”

He emphasises, however, that he isn’t recommending turning to be more like those farming models, which have many of their own problems.

“Moving towards more sustainable agriculture takes different shapes according to your starting point,” Faurès says. “In poor, unproductive areas, the focus is on increasing productivity and reducing vulnerability; in more advanced, input-intensive systems, sustainability implies a move towards greener production systems that make better use of the resources that our ecosystems offer and progressively reduce their negative impacts on the environment.”

Food subsidies in the U.S. are often called out for sustaining problems, scoring a red in the food sustainability index profile.

“The bigger issue with subsidies is what they have failed to do, and how they are underachieving in terms of what they could be doing,” Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University and for the World Resources Institute, tells IPS. “Agriculture has been grossly under regulated and under incentivised on the environmental side.”

The result has seen environmental costs incurred and opportunities missed for the likes of improving land use.

“Even though the U.S. is blessed with an abundance of farm-friendly country, it’s still limited,” Ari Phillips, an environmental journalist, tells IPS. “Agricultural land is extremely unaccommodating for wildlife and can lead to nearby chemical contamination issues.”

There are good examples of countries succeeding in cutting back on such environmental consequences, Searchinger says. Costa Rica has made significant progress in reducing deforestation that was occurring as a result of subsidies paid for grazing, while New Zealand has basically gone “cold turkey” on subsidies and as a result improved land use and agriculture.

He notes that when considering all this, it should be borne in mind there are different ways of defining progress and hence it should not be forgotten that agriculture has achieved what it set out to do.

“There’s been stunning progress in making food—the advances really have been staggering,” Searchinger says. “Twenty-five years ago, many people in China were desperately hungry—that’s been turned around, though with gigantic environmental consequences.”

The implications globally are clear enough to cause grave concerns. The UN has predicted that as soon as 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population could be dealing with water scarcity. Increasingly in the news are stories of water-starved communities around the world—from Houston to Puerto Rico to Cape Town—indicating that our trust in the tap is far less dependable than we assume.

“Drought-prone states like Texas and California were already water stressed before climate change came around,” Phillips says. “Overcoming the combined challenges of population growth and reduced precipitation in a limited amount of time will be tough. Agriculture will have to play a big part in this transition. If it gets bad enough, there could be permanent water rationing.”

Tackling these sorts of problems, and how agriculture influences them, is highly complex due to all the interlinking factors.

“People need to be better educated about the water embedded in the food that they eat and the products that they use,” says Jack Ceadel with Global Water Intelligence. “We need to adopt new technology and invest properly in our water infrastructure and making our cities more efficient and resilient.”

At the same time, it requires better appreciation of the sorts of hard data provided by the likes of Barilla’s food sustainability index profiles, rather than being swayed by what might look good. Searchinger notes that though people may prefer more traditional farms that appear more in harmony with the surrounding environment, even those types of farms have transformed the environment significantly, while larger, more ugly farms may have less impact environmentally per tonne of food produced.

Commentators note that changing the food culture of any country like the U.S.—in its case with 328 million keen and diverse appetites—will require redirecting, reframing and sometimes remaking traditional habits, expectations and the physical environment, as well as what is taken as normal and acceptable in people’s lives.

“The first thing is to feed people,” Searchinger says. “But you have to do it with more environmental sensitivity.”

Dorianne Rowan-Campbell is an organic coffee farmer in Jamaica. Taking over her father’s farm in 1992 and turning it into an organic one was a huge risk at the time. However, she sustainably grows 1,800 coffee trees and harnesses nature to deal with pests, rather than using pesticides. Courtesy: Dorienne Rowan-Campbell

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 20 2019 (IPS)

In 1992, the idea of replanting her father’s ruined coffee farm seemed foolhardy at the time. But in retrospect it was the best business decision that Dorienne Rowan-Campbell, an international development consultant and broadcast journalist, could have made.

Nearly three decades later, Rowan-Campbell grows organic coffee on her two hectare, Rowan’s Royale farm. The nearly 60-year-old farm is situated on a steep slope in western Portland, a parish in northeast Jamaica overlooking the famous Blue Mountains, known for their coffee plantations.

Rowan-Campbell is a select grower of the famous Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, one of the most rare and expensive coffees, favoured for making delectable espresso.

“I was foolhardy I just wanted to get up in the mountains and try farming,” Rowan-Campbell tells IPS about her foray into growing coffee, an energy-boosting beverage loved the world over, which may well become scarce, thanks to climate change.

Freshly picked coffee beans. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

Shifting to organic farming a big risk but not for nature

Growing organic coffee was a major shift from conventional coffee farming but it was a big bet. Her father grew coffee the conventional way using polluting pesticides, herbicides and industrial fertilisers to manage pests and diseases while maintaining soil nutrition. She cultivates over half a hectare of the farm with more than 1,800 coffee trees.

“Organic came [about] because everyone said ‘You need a big 50-60 gallon drum to mix pesticides’ and I thought not me,” says Rowan-Campbell, a former Commonwealth Director of the Women and Development Programme at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London.

She beat the odds of having initially a poor knowledge about organic farming. Her husband and small staff were trained in organic farming techniques. And the organic farming experiment worked. In 2002, BCS OEKO-GARANTIE in Germany—which certifies some 35 percent of all organic products in the country— certified the farm organic.

Since 2004, it has been inspected and certified annually by the Certification of Environmental Standards (CERES), an organic certification agency that uses the presence of birds as one indication of environmental balance.

A 2006 study, by Humbolt University and the University of the West Indies, into birds as vectors of pest control found that although Rowan’s Royale was the smallest farm in the sample, it had the most birds, the greatest variety of birds and the least coffee berry borer (a beetle harmful to coffee crops).

“As an organic farmer, I have to harness nature and work with it because we do not use any chemicals on my farm. I have insects and birds and they eat more than 50 percent of any pests that would attack my coffee so the quality of the coffee is naturally protected,” she says, explaining that she mulches and prepares natural compost for the coffee trees and manages pests and diseases with natural chemicals.

“We have coffee rust disease right now, decimating the coffee industry in Central, South America and the Caribbean. Some people are using extremely strong chemicals to deal with it. I use a mixture of garlic and water. It works, and I share it with all the farmers.”

An estimated 4,000 farmers are growing Blue Mountain Coffee in Jamaica. This year Rowan-Campbell expects to harvest up to four tonnes of coffee beans and is marketing the coffee in America, Europe and Asia.

Dorianne Rowan-Campbell’s farm is a select producer of the famous Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, one of the most rare and expensive of coffees, favoured for making delectable espresso. Courtesy: Dorienne Rowan-Campbell

Beating climate change

Once Rowan-Campbell packed a packaged, a box with various coffee roasts and sent it to Prince Charles, the future king of England via a courier. But he never got it.

“He had asked about organic coffee and was told there was none,” she remembers. “Organic farming is an adaptation strategy against climate change and I try to teach others.”

Coffee is vulnerable to temperature change as it only grows at specific temperatures around the tropics.

Scientific research is showing that climate change will reduce coffee growing areas around the world by up to 88 percent by 2050. It has become necessary for more than 25 million coffee farmers in more than 60 tropical countries to adapt to climate change using a blend of techniques such as shade improvement and crop rotation.

“Our results suggest that coffee-suitable areas will be reduced 73–88 percent by 2050 across warming scenarios, a decline 46–76 percent greater than estimated by global assessments,” says a study by the PNAS journal.

Coffee is the second most commonly traded commodity in the world, trailing only as a source of foreign exchange to developing countries, according to the International Coffee Organisation.

Bouyed by global demand for organic produce, Rowan-Campbell—an active member of the Jamaica Organic Agriculture movement—is also growing root vegetables and makes organic jams and marmalade.

“For me organic farming it is the most important thing in farming because it says you are building a sustainable future for your great [grand] children,” she said.

However, what has made organic farming work? “Probably love and passion,” she says.

“I think it is important that in Jamaica we have this wonderful flavour of coffee. It is a gift because coffee is grown at a certain elevation and the soil is good.

“When I started, I did not know I was taking such a major step in Jamaica. I have many women who come to me and say they want to grow organic.”

Since 2004, the farm purchased by her father in 1960 has weathered four hurricanes with Hurricane Dean in 2007 damaging close to 70 of the coffee trees. Despite this, Rowan-Campbell says organic methods have prevented landslides and soil erosion on the farm.

Rowan-Campbell is a certified inspector and trains other farmers in organic farming and promoting certification. Last year she was part of an initiative to develop a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) standard for organic coffee production.

Organic coffee farmers in Jamaica have had to overcome the challenges of poor regulations for organic coffee, high license fees and local certification.

Rowan-Campbell says she has no plans of expanding the business. She wants to keep it small, efficient, profitable and delivering high quality export coffee.

“I am meticulous. I want only well ripened cherries and I reap a little at a time. No big pay-out at end of the day, but sustainable production and high quality coffee.”

One of the street markets where fresh produce is sold in Buenos Aires. The predominance of an agro-export model based on transgenic crops and the massive use of agrochemicals makes things difficult for those who produce food for local consumption in a sustainable manner. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 21 2019 (IPS)

“Our philosophy is based on two principles: zero tolerance of pesticides or bosses,” says Leandro Ladrú, while he puts tomatoes and carrots in the ecological bag held by a customer, in a large market in the Argentine capital, located between warehouses and rusty old railroad cars.

Leandro and Malena Vecellio are a young couple who come every Saturday to the Galpón de la Mutual Sentimiento, a wooden building with a sheet metal roof used by farmers and social organisations for products to be sold in the “social economy,” located in the Chacarita neighborhood, on the grounds of one of Buenos Aires’ main railway stations.

In the Galpón, family farmers sell their organic, pesticide-free products four times a week, with a share of their sales being discounted to pay the rent."We hand-pick everything. It's a lot of work and takes patience. A broccoli plant with agrochemicals is ready in a month, ours take several months to grow. But we know it's worth it.” -- Enrique García

In a country that in the last 20 years has devoted itself practically entirely to a model of agricultural production based on transgenic crops for export, with massive use of agrochemicals, this couple’s project, named Semillero de Estrellas (Seedbed of Stars), is an act of resistance.

Transgenic products, which began to be planted in this agricultural powerhouse in 1996, cover about 25 million hectares in the country – three-quarters of the total area devoted to crops.

Today, almost 100 percent of the main crops – soybeans and corn – are genetically modified, and most of the cotton is also transgenic.

The industrial agriculture model is taking stronger hold, and in late 2018, the government approved the commercialisation of a new genetically modified food product, fully developed in Argentina: the first transgenic potato resistant to the PVY virus.

In Argentina, transgenic agriculture is associated with a high level of agrochemical use. In fact, the use of herbicides, insecticides and fertilisers grew 850 percent between 2003 and 2012, the last year in which statistics were published.

“In the area where we live, most of the small farmers walk around with a backpack in which they carry the agrochemicals that they spray on the vegetables. We do something else: we let the plants grow at their own pace,” Vecellio told IPS.

The low level of sustainability of Argentine agriculture is reflected in the Food Sustainability Index, drawn up by the Italian foundation Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition and the Intelligence Unit of the British magazine The Economist.

The ranking classifies 67 countries according to the average obtained in three categories: food and water loss and waste, sustainable agriculture and nutritional challenges.

Malena Vecellio and Leandro Ladrú, at their organic vegetable stand in the Chacarita railway station in Buenos Aires, where they arrive every Saturday from Florencio Varela, one of the poorest areas on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, with fresh produce they and their neighbors have grown. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Argentina ranks 13th in the ranking (ahead of the other three Latin American nations included: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico), but its score is very low in both sustainable agriculture and nutritional challenges. Poor performance in these two areas is offset by good food and water waste ratings.

Initiatives such as Semillero de Estrellas try to offset these two deficits. They farm on half a hectare of land in Florencio Varela, a municipality just 30 kilometers south of the capital, one of the poorest in Greater Buenos Aires.

About four years ago, Ladrú and Veceillo began selling their organic products in the Galpón de la Mutual Sentimiento.

First they traveled by train with their backpacks loaded with vegetables and fruit, and now they make the trip in their own vehicle, also carrying the organic pesticide-free vegetables produced by neighbors.

Agrochemicals are generally associated with transgenic crops – most of which were designed to tolerate glyphosate and other herbicides – but they are also used in the production of fruit and vegetables by family farmers in Greater Buenos Aires.

In this South American country of 44 million people, where agribusiness has grown exponentially in recent decades, agriculture accounts for 20 percent of GDP, including direct and indirect contributions.

In addition, in the first half of 2018, soybean and corn exports alone contributed 9.7 billion dollars, or 32 percent of the total, according to official figures.

The challenges of family farming

But family farmers are hanging on, and play a decisive role in the local diet. And they are the battering ram for more sustainable agriculture and more responsible food consumption.

According to data from the 2002 Agricultural Census, there are 250,000 family farms that produce 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the country and employ five million people – about 11 percent of the country’s population.

Enrique García grows vegetables ecologically on a four-hectare plot near Buenos Aires, and sells his produce in a social economy market that is shared by various social cooperatives in Argentina’s capital. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

One of the flashpoints is the sale of products in the market. Ladrú explains that small farms are often worked by tenant farmers.

“Tenant farmers work land that is not theirs. Then they give their harvest to the owner, who takes it to the Central Market and gives them half of what he earns,” Ladrú told IPS.

“The problem is that when the owner can’t sell the vegetables, he ends up using them to feed the pigs and the tenant farmer doesn’t get any money,” he added.

Access to land and credit is a huge obstacle for small farmers, despite the fact that in December 2014 Law 27.118, on the Historical Repair of Family Farming for the Construction of a New Rurality in Argentina, was passed, declaring the sector to be of public interest.

That law created a land bank composed of public property to be awarded to peasant farmers and indigenous families, which was never implemented.

State neglect has to do with the ideology that prevails in the government of center-right President Mauricio Macri, as noted in September by Turkey’s Hilal Elver, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, during a visit to Argentina.

“During interviews with officials at the Ministry of Agroindustry, I observed a tendency of support geared towards the industrial agricultural model with the Family Agriculture sector facing severe cuts in support, personnel and their budget, including the lay-off of almost 500 workers and experts,” she wrote in her report.

Elver urged the government to promote a balance between industrial and family farming. “Achieving this balance is the only way to reach a sustainable and just solution for the people of Argentina,” she said.

Family farmers, in that context, are looking for ways to subsist. In the Palermo neighborhood, in an old municipal market with sheet metal roofing, various cooperatives that emerged after Argentina’s severe 2001-2002 crisis sell their products in the Bonpland Solidarity Market.

“Our basic principle is that we are consumers of our own products. There is no slave labor, there is no resale, and everything is agro-ecological,” Mario Brizuela, of the La Asamblearia cooperative, which brings together some 150 families that produce everything from vegetables to honey and preserves, told IPS.

Another of those selling in the market is Enrique García, who arrives at the Palermo neighborhood with his truck loaded with vegetables from the Pereyra Iraola Park, an area of great biodiversity covering more than 10,000 hectares, some 40 kilometers south of Buenos Aires.

“We have about four hectares that we share with my brother and all of us who work in the fields are relatives,” he told IPS as he showed a stem of green onions several times larger than the ones usually found in the greengrocers’ shops in Buenos Aires.

Garcia added, “We hand-pick everything. It’s a lot of work and takes patience. A broccoli plant with agrochemicals is ready in a month, ours take several months to grow. But we know it’s worth it.”

Under the hot sun of the Pacific Ocean coast, in the department of Piura, 25 women farmers undergoing training in the Agroecological School return from a technical assistance activity in the province of Morropón, in northern Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Sabina Córdova

By Mariela Jara
CHULUCANAS, Peru, Apr 26 2018 (IPS)

Getting children and adolescents to replace junk food with nutritious local organic foods is the aim of a group of women farmers in a rural area of Piura, on Peru’s north coast, as they struggle to overcome the impact of the El Niño climate phenomenon.

“We have given talks about healthy eating in schools, because in today’s times we have forgotten what it means to eat healthy, nutritious food, and everything is fried or sweets, which is why there is malnutrition and obesity,” one of the women, Rosa Rojas, who has an organic garden in the community of Piedra de Toro, told IPS.

She is one of 25 women farmers trained in agro-ecological techniques by the non-governmental Flora Tristán Centre for Peruvian Women. They are engaged in small-scale agriculture in the valleys and highlands of Morropón, one of the eight provinces in the department of Piura, whose capital is Chulucanas."I feel that I contribute to the well-being of my family and my community. With the other women we are constantly working to eliminate malnutrition, anemia and obesity from our lives because these cause other ills. If we sit idly by, what future are we going to have?" -- Jacqueline Sandoval

The department of Piura was hit between December 2016 and May 2017 by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a complex weather pattern resulting from variations in ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific.

During that period, heavy rains and flooding affected more than one million people, left 230,000 without homes, and destroyed 1,200 hectares of crops, according to the governmental National Information System for Disaster Prevention and Response.

Rojas, 53, remembers those terrible months when many families were torn apart with the departure of parents or older siblings, forced to go abroad to make a living and to support those left behind in their communities.

“Women were left in charge of the homes and the plots of land, worrying about how to put food on the table for our children and grandchildren,” she said.

“We had to eat the beans that we had kept for seed, and supporting each other among all the neighbours, we have recovered little by little to be able to plant again on the land that had been washed clean by the rains,” she said.

Almost a year later, she has replanted her vegetables, including coriander, lettuce, carrots, beets, cabbage, leeks, tomatoes, yellow peppers and cucumbers, using organic fertiliser that she makes herself.

“My family’s diet is enriched with these healthy and nutritious organic fruits and vegetables. My community is waking up to what is natural food, we are learning the importance of eating vegetables daily, and that is what we are sharing at schools with teachers, mothers, fathers and students,” she said.

Yaqueline Sandoval, 42, a farmer in the community of Algodonal, in the neighbouring municipality of Santa Catalina de Mossa, is also recovering from the ravages of the coastal El Niño.

Rosa Rojas (2nd-R), stands with other women farmers participating in the Agroecological School of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Centre, where they were trained in organic production techniques that they have been applying in their gardens, in the rural area of the department of Piura, in Peru’s northern coastal region. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

She says she has resumed planting in her organic garden, together with her family, where the star product is the cowpea bean or black-eyed pea, which they call the “bean of hope” as it is ready for eating in a short time.

“Just 40 days after planning we are eating our beans. It is a very generous plant, it feeds us and it is a seed for the future because it adapts to different conditions and is very strong, something vital now we are facing climate change,” Sandoval told IPS.

Changing school habits

This is one of the inputs that the farmers use to create “healthy lunch boxes,” for students to carry their meals to eat in the public primary and secondary schools in the urban centres of the municipalities.

The lunches include meals prepared with local produce, to replace what schoolchildren were buying in the kiosks at their schools, such as cookies, crackers and chocolate, sugary drinks and other industrially processed sweets.

“We make tortillas with our vegetables and beans, we prepare passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) soft drinks, and we accompany it with a banana,” Sandoval said, describing what the children are now carrying in their lunch boxes.

“They are healthy and nutritious fruits of our land, free of chemicals, that nourish and do not damage the children’s health,” she said proudly about the initiative she is carrying out with other mothers of schoolchildren at the local “Horacio Zevallos” school.

This experience began last year with talks in the high school classrooms on the benefits of a healthy diet and the negative effects on their bodies and health of fast food or junk food.

“There was so much interest that this year in the Science, Technology and Environment course they are working in a small garden that they have set up on the premises of the school, where they are planting lettuce, carrots and other vegetables,” she added.

Sandoval, who considers herself an activist and entrepreneur, said agroecology is a tool that has allowed her to improve her relationship with nature, to make better use of the soil, water and seeds, and consequently, to improve her diet and health.

“I feel that I contribute to the well-being of my family and my community,” she said. “With the other women we are constantly working to eliminate malnutrition, anemia and obesity from our lives because these cause other ills. If we sit idly by, what future are we going to have?”

Sandoval’s concern is well-founded.

The governmental Observatory of Nutrition and the Study of Overweight and Obesity indicates that more than 53 percent of Peru’s population has excess body fat and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) ranks the country as the third in Latin America in terms of overweight and obesity.

Escolástica Juárez, 57, stands on her family farm where she grows organic fruits and vegetables in the village of Chapica, Morropón province, in the northern coastal department of Piura, Peru. She is involved in the effort to promote healthy eating at the local school. Credit: Courtesy of Sabina Córdova

For its part, the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) has warned that one in five children under ten is already experiencing this problem due to the combination of factors such as inadequate diets and low levels of physical activity. And in Piura, three out of ten children under five suffer from anemia.

Eating healthy and nutritious food in a region rich in biodiversity could seem normal. But it is still a pending objective due to a lack of public investment in small-scale agriculture, training for rural populations and attention to the problem of water shortages.

In this context, taking advantage of traditional knowledge and using new know-how acquired in training and thanks to technical assistance puts women farmers in a better position to face the permanent challenges of climate change in order to achieve food security.

“Knowing about agroecology helps us use water more efficiently, irrigate our crops without wasting, replace crops that need a lot of irrigation, and choose beans that adapt to droughts. This knowledge is important for our food security,” said Escolástica Juárez.

Juàrez, a 57-year-old farmer, lives in the village of Chapica, in the municipality of Chulucanas, where the temperature reaches 37 degrees Celsius.

She has taken the healthy lunchbox initiative to the local “Colegio de Fátima” school.

“The school principal has called us back to continue with the talks this year,” she told IPS. “My grandson tells me that more of his classmates are eating healthy meals, it’s a matter of persistence, it takes time to bet families to change bad habits but it can be learned.”

She added that she feels grateful for the “bean of hope”, which like other farmers she has learned to cook in different ways, based on knowledge they have shared among themselves.

“We can eat them fresh from the pod, store them to cook later, and select some for seed. Even if there is a shortage of water, we know that it will feed us. We return the plant’s generosity sharing what we know with other neighbours and at the schools,” Juárez said.

By Ken Cook
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 2017 (IPS)

Conventional farming and food production practices in this country are creating serious environmental and public health problems. Every day, an industrial farming system spinning out of control confronts all Americans with serious challenges. Among these are the explosion in toxic algae blooms in sensitive waterways, cancer-causing pesticides on foods we feed our children, the rapid spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and, of course, contaminated drinking water, all courtesy of corporate agribusiness.

Thankfully, we have an alternative: organic.

Study after study shows organic food is better for our health, and organic farming is better for our environment.

Organic milk has higher concentrations of beneficial nutrients than its conventional counterpart, and organic foods can have higher levels of antioxidants and far fewer, if any, pesticide residues than conventionally grown crops. In addition to the notable consumer benefits, organic farming consumes far less energy and can reduce water pollution, increase biodiversity, promote healthy soils and sequester significantly more carbon than conventional farming.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has been advocating for organic food and farming for more than two decades, with much of our research documenting how the practices and finished products of both conventional and organic agriculture influence our health and the environment.

Despite years of double-digit growth, far outstripping that seen in the conventional food sector, the number of certified organic farms in the U.S. is struggling to keep pace with soaring consumer demand
In that time, I have worked alongside many pioneers and have seen organic farming grow from a fledgling movement available to few, into a nearly $40 billion a year industry. Organic is now the fastest growing segment of the U.S. food industry with some of the country’s largest retailers struggling to keep up with customer demand and keep their store shelves stocked.

Despite years of double-digit growth, far outstripping that seen in the conventional food sector, the number of certified organic farms in the U.S. is struggling to keep pace with soaring consumer demand. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2012, fewer than 1 percent of American farms were classified as organic. This has forced many organic food companies in the U.S. to turn to foreign suppliers to meet customer demand.

There is no reason why we cannot be meeting the surging demand for organic foods here at home, growing and producing it ourselves. However, if we are going to grow more organic food in this country we will need more organic farmers. That means recruiting new farmers, and helping existing farmers transition to organic.

Easier said than done.

We will need to provide farmers with technical assistance to help them transition to organic. We will also need to invest in more science and research to ensure that organic and transitioning farmers are armed with high yielding, regionally adapted seeds, designed with organic systems in mind.

Now, you don’t have to be a D.C. lobbyist or congressional staffer to know that the purse strings on Capitol Hill have been pulled tight in recent years, and funds supporting agriculture are tethered closely to the interests of Big Ag, not organic. While EWG will continue to call on Congress to make serious investments in organic in the next farm bill, there is a lot that can be accomplished in the interim if the organic community pools its resources, and approves an organic research and promotions program.

That is why EWG supports the organic check-off program.

The principle of a check-off program is simple: Producers of a particular commodity pool their resources, and collectively invest in research and promotion of that commodity. These programs are authorized by Congress and directed by industry-driven boards overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While this sounds simple, it hasn’t always worked out in the best interest of producers.

EWG is fully aware that farmers have been burned by past check-off programs, and we are glad that so many in the organic community have been part of productive discussions about the organic check-off currently under consideration. After all of those discussions one thing is clear: The organic check-off is not your father’s check-off.

It is the first such program that is not based on a specific commodity, but rather on the notion that if everyone pitches in a little, the organic community can address its shared research, education and promotion needs together.

With the funds raised every year from the check-off, the organic community would be able to provide transitioning farmers with greater technical assistance and training to bring more acres into organic production. It would also be able to fill in the research gaps left every year by limited federal research dollars that all too often skew toward outdated and damaging industrial farming practices. And, the check-off will ensure that the organic sector has an opportunity to educate consumers about organic and promote its benefits in the same way that major commodities like milk and pork were able to do with the “Got Milk?” and “Pork. The Other White Meat” campaigns, respectively.

To be clear, both Congress and organic food companies will also have to do their parts to increase funding for research and promotion of organic in the years to come. But that shouldn’t stop the organic community from supporting the organic check-off program and taking organic to the next level.

After all, EWG not only believes that organic farming can help feed the world, we believe that organic systems and practices may be the only way to do so sustainably. However, the footprint of organic on the agricultural landscape and in Americans’ shopping carts must grow significantly if we are to realize organic’s full potential to feed the planet in ways that enhance the environment and public health.

I hope you will join me in supporting the GRO Organic campaign to make this a reality.

This story was originally published by Food Tank

Excerpt:

Using bio-fertilizers, farmers in Tamil Nadu are reviving agricultural lands that were choked by salt deposits in the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Credit: Jency Samuel/IPS

By Jency Samuel
NAGAPATNAM, India, Jan 7 2015 (IPS)

Standing amidst his lush green paddy fields in Nagapatnam, a coastal district in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a farmer named Ramajayam remembers how a single wave changed his entire life.

The simple farmer was one of thousands whose agricultural lands were destroyed by the 2004 Asian tsunami, as massive volumes of saltwater and metre-high piles of sea slush inundated these fertile fields in the aftermath of the disaster.

“The general perception is that organic farming takes years to yield good results and revenue. But during post-tsunami rehabilitation work [...] we proved that in less than a year organic methods could yield better results than chemical farming." -- M Revathi, the founder-trustee of the Tamil Nadu Organic Farmers' Movement (TOFarM)
On the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, Ramajayam had gone to his farm in Karaikulam village to plant casuarina saplings. As he walked in, he noticed his footprints were deeper than usual and water immediately filled between the tracks, a phenomenon he had never witnessed before.

A few minutes later, like a black mass, huge walls of water came towards him. He ran for his life. His farms were a pathetic sight the next day.

The Nagapatnam district recorded 6,065 deaths, more than 85 percent of the state’s death toll. Farmers bore the brunt, struggling to revive their fields, which were inundated for a distance of up to two miles in some locations. Nearly 24,000 acres of farmland were destroyed by the waves.

Worse still was that the salty water did not recede, ruining the paddy crop that was expected to be harvested 15 days after the disaster. Small ponds that the farmers had dug on their lands with government help became incredibly saline, and as the water evaporated it had a “pickling effect” on the soil, farmers say, essentially killing off all organic matter crucial to future harvests.

Plots belonging to small farmers like Ramajayam, measuring five acres or less, soon resembled saltpans, with dead soil caked in mud stretching for miles. Even those trees that withstood the tsunami could not survive the intense period of salt inundation, recalled Kumar, another small farmer.

“We were used to natural disasters; but nothing like the tsunami,” Ramajayam added.

Cognizant of the impact of the disaster on poor rural communities, government offices and aid agencies focused much of their rehabilitation efforts on coastal dwellers, offering alternative livelihood schemes in a bid to lessen the economic burden of the catastrophe.

The nearly 10,000 affected small and marginal farmers, who have worked these lands for generations, were reluctant to accept a change in occupation. Ignoring the reports of technical inspection teams that rehabilitating the soil could take up to 10 years, some sowed seed barely a year after the tsunami.

Not a single seed sprouted, and many began to lose hope.

It was then that various NGOs stepped in, and began a period of organic soil renewal and regeneration that now serves as a model for countless other areas in an era of rampant climate change.

The ‘soil doctor’

One of the first organisations to begin sustained efforts was the Tamil Nadu Organic Farmers’ Movement (TOFarM), which adopted the village of South Poigainallur as the site of experimental work.

The first step was measuring the extent of the damage, including assessing the depth of salt penetration and availability of organic content. When it became clear that the land was completely uncultivable, the organisation set to work designing unique solutions for every farm that involved selecting seeds and equipment based on the soil condition and topography.

Sea mud deposits were removed, bunds were raised and the fields were ploughed. Deep trenches were made in the fields and filled with the trees that had been uprooted by the tsunami. As the trees decomposed the soil received aeration.

Dhaincha seeds, a legume known by its scientific name Sesbania bispinosa, were then sown in the fields.

“It [dhaincha] is called the ‘soil doctor’ because it is a green manure crop that grows well in saline soil,” M Revathi, the founder-trustee of TOFarM, told IPS.

When the nutrient-rich dhaincha plants flowered in about 45 days, they were ploughed back into the ground, to loosen up the soil and help open up its pores. Compost and farmyard manure were added in stages before the sowing season.

Today, the process stands as testament to the power of organic solutions.

Organic practices save the day

Poor farmers across Tamil Nadu are heavily dependent on government aid. Each month the state government’s Public Distribution System hands out three tonnes of rice to over 20 million people.

To facilitate this, the government runs paddy procurement centres, wherein officials purchase farmers’ harvests for a fixed price. While this assures farmers of a steady income, the fixed price is far below the market rate.

Thus marginal farmers, who number some 13,000, barely make enough to cover their monthly needs. After the 90-135 day paddy harvest period, farmers fall back on vegetable crops to ensure their livelihood. But in districts like Nagapatnam, where fresh water sources lie 25 feet below ground level, farmers who rely on rain-fed agriculture are at a huge disadvantage.

When the tsunami washed over the land, many feared they would never recover.

“The microbial count on a pin head, which should be 4,000 in good soil, dropped down to below 500 in this area,” Dhanapal, a farmer in Kilvelur of Nagapatnam district and head of the Cauvery Delta Farmers’ Association, informed IPS.

But help was not far away.

A farmer named S Mahalingam’s eight-acre plot of land close to a backwater canal in North Poigainallur was severely affected by the tsunami. His standing crop of paddy was completely destroyed.

NGOs backed by corporate entities and aid agencies pumped out seawater from Mahalingam’s fields and farm ponds. They distributed free seeds and saplings. The state government waived off farm loans. Besides farmyard manure, Mahalingam used the leaves of neem, nochi and Indian beech (Azadirachta indica, Vitex negundo and Pongamia glabra respectively) as green manure.

Subsequent rains also helped remove some of the salinity. The farmer then sowed salt-resistant traditional rice varieties called Kuruvikar and Kattukothalai. In two years his farms were revived, enabling him to continue growing rice and vegetables.

NGO’s like the Trichy-based Kudumbam have innovated other methods, such as the use of gypsum, to rehabilitate burnt-out lands.

A farmer named Pl. Manikkavasagam, for instance, has benefitted from the NGO’s efforts to revive his five-acre plot of farmland, which failed to yield any crops after the tsunami.

Remembering an age-old practice, he dug trenches and filled them with the green fronds of palms that grow in abundance along the coast.

Kudumbam supplied him with bio-fertlizers such as phosphobacteria, azospirillum and acetobacter, all crucial in helping breathe life into the suffocated soil.

Kudumbam distributed bio-solutions and trained farmers to produce their own. As Nagapatnam is a cattle-friendly district, bio solutions using ghee, milk, cow dung, tender coconut, fish waste, jaggery and buttermilk in varied combinations could be made easily and in a cost-effective manner. Farmers continue to use these bio-solutions, all very effective in controlling pests.

“The general perception is that organic farming takes years to yield good results and revenue,” TOFarM’s Revathi told IPS.

“But during post-tsunami rehabilitation work, with data, we proved that in less than a year organic methods could yield better results than chemical farming. That TOFarM was invited to replicate this in Indonesia and Sri Lanka is proof that farms can be revived through sustainable practices even after disasters,” she added.

As early as 2006, farmers like Ramajayam, having planted a salt-resistant strain of rice known as kuzhivedichan, yielded a harvest within three months of the sowing season.

Together with restoration of some 2,000 ponds by TOFarM, farmers in Nagapatnam are confident that sustainable agriculture will stand the test of time, and whatever climate-related challenges are coming their way. The lush fields of Tamil Nadu’s coast stand as proof of their assertion.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Coconut oil producers in Samoa are benefitting from a scheme to connect local organic farmers with the international market. Credit: Matias Dutto/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Catherine Wilson
SALELOLOGA, Samoa , Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

Rural farming families in Samoa, a small island developing state in the central South Pacific Ocean, are reaping the rewards of supplying produce to the international organic market with the help of a local women’s business organisation.

“In Samoa, we are a very blessed nation, most people have their own piece of land and we have the sea,” Kalais-Jade Stanley, programme manager for Women in Business Development Inc (WIBDI), a Samoan non-government organisation dedicated to developing village economies, told IPS.

With the resources to grow food and the social safety net provided by traditional kinship obligations, people rarely go hungry. According to the World Bank, Samoa has one of the lowest food hardship rates in the region at 1.1 percent, compared to 4.5 percent in Fiji and 26.5 percent in Papua New Guinea.

Women in Business Development Inc (WIBDI) is working with 1,200 farming families and 600 certified organic farmers across the country, generating local incomes totalling more than 253,800 dollars per year.
But Stanley says many rural families experience a lack of economic opportunity, such as “not being able to access markets” and being “unaware of what they could potentially access” to make their livelihoods more resilient.

In Gataivai, a village of 1,400 people on Savaii, the largest island in Samoa, Faaolasa Toilolo Sione has worked the land for 40 years. Here approximately one quarter of the country’s population of 190,372 support themselves mainly by subsistence and smallholder agriculture.

In the island’s rich volcanic soil Sione grows taro, yams, bananas, cocoa and coconuts. He sells these crops at a market in the nearby town of Salelologa and from a stall located on the roadside in front of his home.

But his livelihood significantly prospered after he began working with WIBDI in 2012 to produce certified organic virgin coconut oil for international buyers.

Now Sione employs four to five workers in the organic oil-processing site on his farm, which is adding value to his coconut harvest. He produces 80 buckets, each 19 litres, of coconut oil per month, which brings in a monthly income of about 12,000 tala (5,076 dollars).

“Organic farming is not easy, but there are a lot of benefits,” Sione said. “I have more knowledge about good farming practices and a regular weekly income, which helps send the children to school and support my extended family.”

He has also purchased water tanks for the family and a new truck to transport produce. Transportation can be a major challenge for farmers. Those who don’t own vehicles frequently rely on public bus services to take their wares to buyers across the island or in the capital.

An estimated 68 percent of Samoan households are engaged in agriculture and WIBDI, which understands rural vulnerability to environmental extremes and economic barriers in the Pacific Islands, wants to see many more achieve Sione’s success.

Samoa’s economy is limited by the geographical challenges of being a small island state situated far from main markets. Located in a tropical climate zone and near the Pacific Ring of Fire, the country is also highly exposed to natural disasters.

Multiple shocks in the past 20 years, including numerous severe cyclones since the 1990s, an earthquake and tsunami in 2009, the 2008 global financial crisis and the destructive taro leaf blight pest took their toll on the agricultural sector. As a result, its contribution to the economy almost halved from 19 percent to 10 percent in the decade ending in 2009.

According to a government report prepared for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), “Raising the quality of life for all in all sectors of the economy remains the most significant challenge” for the small Polynesian state of Samoa.

WIBDI, which aims to be part of the solution, is working with 1,200 farming families and 600 certified organic farmers across the country, generating local incomes totalling more than 600,000 tala (253,800 dollars) per year.

Their hands-on approach includes providing on-going training every month to fresh produce gardeners and coconut oil producers, and conducting regular farm visits to help growers address any problems in their agricultural practice. The Ministry of Agriculture also supports organic farmers with advice on the best practices of managing land and soil without using chemicals.

WIBDI, which is organically certified by the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture in Australia, further acts as a link between small local producers and the global organics market, which has the potential to provide huge benefits: the global organic food market alone is estimated at more than 50 billion dollars.

“Our biggest success story would be our work with Body Shop International,” Stanley claimed. “Last year was the first year that we were able to meet demand. We sent just over 30 tonnes [to the Body Shop], which was amazing for our farmers with whom we have a fair trade relationship.”

The Samoan NGO is the international brand’s sole global supplier of certified organic virgin coconut oil, which is used in more than 60 countries and 30 different skincare products. WIBDI also exports organic dried bananas to New Zealand.

International partners are selected carefully to ensure that they are supporting not only the product, but the mission to help local rural families.

“Sharing similar values is very important to us because that helps the process of getting the farmers to where they would like to be,” Stanley said.

In contrast, the domestic market is growing slowly. Working to generate greater local support and interest in the nutritional benefits of organic fruit and vegetables, WIBDI arranges weekly deliveries direct from farmers to local customers, including about 16 local hotels and restaurants.

But for Sione on Savaii Island, in addition to monetary gains, there is also a long-term inter-generational benefit of organic farming, which requires that farming land is free of chemicals and pesticides.

“I will have healthy soil for passing my farm on to the next generation, for the future livelihood of my family,” he emphasised.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An ecological market that is set up every weekend on one of the busiest streets in Málaga. Similar markets can be found in towns and cities all around Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Aug 12 2014 (IPS)

José María Gómez squats and pulls up a bunch of carrots from the soil as well as a few leeks. This farmer from southern Spain believes organic farming is more than just not using pesticides and other chemicals – it’s a way of life, he says, which requires creativity and respect for nature.

Gómez, 44, goes to organic food markets in Málaga to sell the vegetables and citrus fruits he grows on his three-hectare farm in the Valle del Guadalhorce, 40 km west of Málaga, a city in southern Spain,

And every week Gómez, whose parents and grandparents were farmers, does home deliveries of several dozen baskets of fresh produce, “thus closing the circle from the field to the table,” he told Tierramérica on his farm.

The economic crisis in Spain, where the unemployment rate stands at 25 percent, hasn’t put a curb on ecological farming. In 2012, organic farming covered 1.7 million hectares of land, compared to 988,323 in 2007, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.

Organic farming generated 913,610 euros (1.22 million dollars) in 2012, 9.6 percent more than in 2011.

“Ecological farming is growing in Spain and Europe despite the crisis because those who consume organic produce are loyal,” agricultural technician Víctor Gonzálvez, coordinator of the non-governmental Spanish Society of Organic Agriculture (SEAE), told Tierramérica.

Organic food markets have mushroomed in the streets and plazas of cities and towns around Spain, and some supermarket chains now sell ecological produce.

The southern community or region of Andalusía has the largest extension of land under organic farming: 949,025 officially registered hectares, equivalent to 54 percent of the national total, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Most production from Andalusía is exported to other European countries, like Germany and the United Kingdom – which seems contradictory to those in favour of organic farming that truly provides a local alternative to intensive, industrial agriculture, with a short food supply chain.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about exporting ecological foods because production should bring benefits to the local economy,” Pilar Carrillo told Tierramérica from her La Coruja farm in the municipality of Tacoronte on Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands.

She and her partner, Julio Quílez, have been living there for a year with their young son. They have less than half a hectare of land, where they practice permaculture – the use of ecology and local ecosystems to design self-sustaining productive landscapes that, once established, need a minimum of human intervention. They sell their produce every Saturday in the nearby farmer’s market.

“When you buy local ecological products you are eating healthy food, you’re interacting with people from the countryside, and you generate wealth in your local surroundings,” engineer Juan José Galván, who for five years has been buying food in organic markets in Málaga, told Tierramérica.

José María Gómez walking among the tomato plants on his Bobalén Ecológico farm in the Valle de Guadalhorce near the southern Spanish city of Málaga, where he grows organic vegetables and fruits. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

Spain, with its mild climate, has the largest area dedicated to organic farming in the European Union, according to Eurostat 2012 figures, and the fifth largest area in the world, after Australia, Argentina, the United States and China, according to a report by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.

But the controls and certification of ecological agricultural production, which in Spain are carried out by both public and private bodies, are neither simple nor free of cost.

To be sold as organic food, products must carry a label with the code of the corresponding authority in each community, the Ministry of Agriculture explains on its website.

Certification of ecological farming takes at least two years to obtain, and the inspections are thorough, farmers told Tierramérica. The requisites and controls involved and the economic effort entailed drive up the prices of organic products, they argued.

Quílez, who grows aromatic and medicinal plants in Tenerife, said he has to pay for certification “as an ecological farmer and also as a seller of organic produce, which doubles the cost; a large part of the price of ecologically produced food goes into red tape.”

According to Gonzálvez, public funds in Spain go more towards conventional agricultural production and research in biotechnology than into supporting ecological farming.

He said farmers “are afraid to take the leap” into this kind of alternative production because there are no advisory services, unlike in intensive, industrial agriculture.

“Ecological agriculture is very empirical. If an aphid attacks my melons, I plant beans next to the melons because they draw the aphids away. Every year you get wiser,” Gómez said, standing among his tomato plants on his Bobalén Ecológico farm.

Gómez, who has tousled dark hair and skin tanned by the sun, argues that while “big industry produces market-oriented varieties, ecological agriculture, especially local farming based on geographical proximity, focuses on producing quality food,” as well as preserving the environment and soil fertility.

Critics argue that organic products are expensive and the production methods inefficient, “but it depends on what you buy, and where,” Esther Vivas, with the Centre for Studies on Social Movements at the Pompeu Fabra university in the northeast city of Barcelona, wrote in her article “Who’s afraid of ecological agriculture?”

Vivas told Tierramérica that although the level of consumption of organic products in Spain is still low compared to conventional farm products, the market for ecological produce is growing, as interest has been boosted by various scandals involving food products.

Galván said that while it is true that the higher cost of organic products can turn away consumers, “demand is steadily growing.”

“The real revolution has to come from below, from the consumer who goes to the markets to buy and who demands high-quality products,” Gómez said.

The ecological farmer – who worked for years as an environmental agent – stressed the social dimension of organic agriculture and short food supply chains, pointing to “the affection that your customers give you, as they are aware of the health benefits of the food and of the sustainability of the production.”

Quílez, who left a well-paid job in computers to dedicate himself to ecological farming, said “exploitative agriculture undermined food sovereignty,” and this is seen clearly in the Canary Islands “where 85 percent of the products consumed come from outside.”

On Gómez’s farm it’s time to plant beans, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli to harvest in October and November. “I get up at 5:30 in the morning and farm for 15 or 16 hours,” he said.

But “it’s the best job I’ve had in my life,” he added, smiling.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Attempts to genetically modify food staples, such as crops and cattle, to increase their nutritional value and overall performance have prompted world-wide criticism by environmental, nutritionists and agriculture experts, who say that protecting and fomenting biodiversity is a far better solution to hunger and malnutrition.

Two cases have received world-wide attention: one is a project to genetically modify bananas, the other is an international bull genome project.

In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it has allocated some 10 million dollars to finance an Australian research team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), working on vitamin A-enriched bananas in Uganda, by genetically modifying the fruit.

On the other hand,  according to its project team, the “1000 bull genomes project” aims “to provide, for the bovine research community, a large database for imputation of genetic variants for genomic prediction and genome wide association studies in all cattle breeds.”“It makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries” – ‘Failure to Yield’, a study by the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists

In both cases, the genetic modification (GM) of bananas and of bovines is an instrument to allegedly increase the nutritional value and improve the overall quality of the food staples, be it the fruit itself, or, in the case of cattle, of meat and milk.

James Dale, professor at QUT, and leader of the GM banana project, claims that “good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food.”

In the ‘1000 bull genomes project’, the scientists involved (from Australia, France, Germany, and other countries) have sequenced – that is, established the order of – the whole genomes of hundreds of cows and bulls. “This sequencing includes data for 129 individuals from the global Holstein-Friesian population, 43 individuals from the Fleckvieh breed and 15 individuals from the Jersey breed,” write the scientists in an article published in Nature Genetics of July 13.

The reactions from environmental activists, nutritionists, and scientists could not be more critical. The banana case has even prompted a specific campaign launched in India – the “No to GMO Bananas Campaign”.

The campaign, launched by Navdanya, a non-governmental organisation founded by the international environmental icon Vandana Shiva, insists that “GMO bananas are … not a solution to” malnutrition and hunger.

The group argues that so-called bio-fortification of bananas – “the genetic manipulation of the fruit, to cut and paste a gene, seeking to make a new or lost micronutrient,” as genetic expert Bob Phelps has put it – is a waste of time and money, and constitutes a risk to biodiversity.

“Bananas are highly nutritional but have only 0.44 mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion,” a Navdanya spokesperson said. “All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short the (natural) iron content of indigenous biodiversity.”

The rationale supporting bio-fortication suggests that the genetic manipulation can multiply the iron content of bananas by six. This increase would lead to an iron content of 2.6 mg per 100 grams of edible fruit.

“That would be 3,000 percent less than iron content in turmeric, or lotus stem, 2,000 percent less than mango powder,” the spokesperson at Navdanya said. “The safe, biodiverse alternatives to GM bananas are multifold.”

Scientists have indeed demonstrated that the GM agriculture has so far failed to deliver higher yields than organic processes.

In a study carried out in 2009, the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrated that the yields of GM soybeans and corn have increased only marginally, if at all. The report, “Failure to Yield“, found out that increases in yields for both crops between 1995 and 2008 were largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

“Failure to Yield” also analyses the potential role in increasing food production over the next few decades, and concludes that “it makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries.”

Additionally, the authors say, “recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods that minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers in such developing regions as Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Yet another ground for criticism is the fact that Bill Gates has repeated an often refuted legend about the risk of extinction of the banana variety Cavendish, grown all over the world for the North American market.

In his blog, Gates claims that “a blight has spread among plantations in Asia and Australia in recent years, badly damaging production of … Cavendish. This disease, a fungus, hasn’t spread to Latin America yet, but if it does, bananas could get a lot scarcer and more expensive in North America and elsewhere.”

The risk of extinction, however, is practically inexistent, as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), among other institutions, had already shown in 2003.

“What is happening is the inevitable consequence of growing one genotype on a large scale,” said Eric Kueneman, at the time head of FAO’s Crop and Grassland Service. That is, monoculture is the main cause of the fungus.

“The Cavendish banana is a “dessert type” banana that is cultivated mostly by the large-scale banana companies for international trade,” recalled Kueneman, today an independent consultant on agriculture.

On the other hand, as FAO numbers show, the Cavendish banana is important in world trade, but accounts for only 10 percent of bananas produced and consumed globally. Virtually all commercially important plantations grow this single genotype, and by so doing, make the fruit vulnerable to diseases. As FAO said in 2003, “fortunately, small-scale farmers around the world have maintained a broad genetic pool which can be used for future banana crop improvement.”

Actually, the most frequent reasons for malnutrition and starvation can be found in food access, itself a consequence of poverty, inequity and social injustice. Thus, as Bob Phelps, founder of Gene Ethics, says, “the challenge to feed everyone well is much more than adding one or two key nutrients to an impoverished diet dominated by a staple food or two.”

The same goes for the genome sequencing of bulls and cows, says Ottmar Distl, professor at the Institute for Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of Hannover. “Some years ago, we thought that it would impossible to obtain more than 1,000 kilograms of milk per year per cow,” Distl said. “Today, it is normal to milk 7,000 kilograms, and even as much as 10,000 kilograms per year.”

But such performance has a price – most such “optimised” cows calve only twice in their lives and die quite young.

And yet, the leading researchers of the “1000 bull genomes project” look at further optimising the cows’ and bulls’ performance by genetic manipulation of the cattle in order to, as they say in their report, meet the world-wide forecasted, rising demand for milk and meat.

Distl disagrees. “Whoever increases the milk output hasn’t yet done anything against worldwide malnutrition and hunger.” In addition, he warned, the constant optimisation of some races can lead to the extinction of other lines, thus affecting the populations depending precisely on those seldom older races.

It goes without saying that such an extinction would hardly serve the interests of the world’s consumers.

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 8 2014 (IPS)

An estimated one billion small farmers scratching out a living growing diverse crops and raising animals in developing countries represent the key to maintaining food production in the face of hotter temperatures and drought, especially in the tropical regions, says Sarah Elton, author of the book, “Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.”

The Canadian journalist travelled to southern France, China, India and the province of Quebec in her own country to observe how small farmers apply their practical knowledge of agriculture – defined as either organic, agroecological or sustainable.“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things." -- Evan Fraser

“What I found most surprising as a journalist was to see how pervasive the social movement was at the grassroots. So, rather than it being a policy perceived by government, people [in the rural areas] are not waiting for government. Government is not there to solve their problems. [Small farmers] are figuring out better ways themselves.”

At the moment a “very big but brittle” global industrial food system is supplying the world’s supply of food, she explains. Typically, it is reliant on the massive growing of single crops like wheat, corn or rice, which in turn are assisted by commercial agriculture inputs such as hybrid seeds, chemical based pesticides and fossil fuel-based fertilisers, as well as an overuse of water.

Global industrial food is praised for its efficiency and high yields and so small farmers get aboard. But in the process some become too dependent on these expensive commercial agricultural inputs by borrowing money to pay for them and thereby incurring large debts.

The journalist relates in her book how Chandrakalabai, today a resourceful and thriving farmer in the agricultural state of Maharashtra in the western part of India, managed to avoid that economic fate.

Originally, she struggled in terms of growing a range of items – millet, sorghum, vegetables and cotton – while simultaneously investing into the commercial agricultural inputs when she could afford them.

By the early 1990s, she made the switch to organic farming, minus these inputs and with the assistance of an NGO, the Institute for Integrated Rural Development.

“Chandrakalabai’s story shows us that smaller farmers in the developing world can lessen their input costs and grow organically. If they can then embed themselves in a local food system with a minimum of intermediaries between them and the consumer, they can earn more money and secure a better future,” Elton writes in her book.

The other problem with global industrial food is that single crop farming undermines the soil’s fertility and makes these kinds of operations especially vulnerable to storms, floods and drought, associated with climate change, adds Elton.

She cites how 880 small holders based farming plots in Nicaragua with diverse crops and minus the commercial agricultural inputs managed to survive the catastrophic battering of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. On average these agro-ecological operations retained 40 percent more topsoil after the storm and lost 18 percent less arable land in landslides.

Isabel Michi carefully tends seedlings in the greenhouse on her small organic farm in the settlement of Mutirão Eldorado in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

The latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a stark picture of a hotter future where crop yields decline, demand for food increases and food prices rise.

Farming operations are being urged by scientists to alter their growing practices as a part of a general mitigation strategy for a range of human activity (which also includes reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy) in order to avoid the worst case scenario of world temperatures rising way past two degrees Centigrade.

“One of the things that the report makes very clear is how farmers respond and how farmers behave will have a huge impact on the effect of climate change,” says Evan Fraser, a University of Guelph geography professor, food security specialist and Canada Research Chair in Global Human Security. He worked on an earlier draft on the food section of the IPCC report.

Fraser says that sophisticated weather forecasting tools are being developed to make it possible for government authorities to react before a catastrophic storm arrives to cause devastation to crops, infrastructure, homes and people. And he also maintains that drought conditions represent a far more serious threat to agriculture single episodic events like storms and floods.

“I think that drought is going to be the bigger problem over the long term, in the 21 century. Certainly drier conditions in the tropics are going to lead to significant challenges for farmers,” he says.

With that in mind, Fraser calls for going in the direction of traditional small farmers by planting diverse crops. Furthermore, he say, one should include drought tolerant crops with a deeper root structures to access water. Furthermore, the food security specialist suggests a ramp up of organic matter, be it recycled manure or what is left of last year’s crop, to serve as a sponge in the soil to trap or restore water.

“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things. Developing and applying new technologies to boost yields into the future will require a deft handling of both science, agricultural extension, social policy, and a very context-specific understanding of the needs local farmers face,” Fraser told IPS.

But experimentation in agricultural practices is less likely to happen in North America where farming operations, because of their size, are tied up in loans and big contracts to corporations in agribusiness and their unsustainable practices, says food security specialist Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Chicago based Food Tank, a food security think tank.

But small farmers, especially in developing countries, are better able through necessity to innovate and so, “we have a lot to learn from them,” she told IPS.

Many farmers have been encouraged to practice more industrial methods and they are finding in the face of drought and extreme flooding that going back to more traditional and indigenous practices they are able to better combat climate change,” says Nierenberg.

But the president of Food Tank warns against a rigid definition of what constitutes sustainable agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, where are the soils can be deficient, “an extra boost” of artificial fertiliser may be needed to make the land more productive, she explains.

Meanwhile, some government and international development agencies including the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation are jumping on the “sustainable” bandwagon without completely breaking away from chemical inputs, says Julia Wright, deputy director at the UK-based Centre for Agroecology and Food Security at Coventry.

“Sustainable intensification, for example, can mean a concentrated form of industrial agriculture, and conservation agriculture – one form that the FAO likes to promote,” she told IPS.

One piece of good news, Wright adds, is that there are a number of national governments which have genuine programmes for agroecological or organic smallholder farmers.

“Bhutan is planning to become the world’s first organic country. Bolivia has some supportive policies. Parts of Germany are quite forward thinking in this respect, and of course the Cuban government supports smallholder organic urban agriculture,” Wright said.

Isabel Michi carefully tends seedlings in the greenhouse on her small organic farm in the settlement of Mutirão Eldorado in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
SEROPÉDICA, Brazil , Mar 29 2014 (IPS)

Brazilian farmer Isabel Michi’s day starts before dawn, when she goes out to the organic garden on her small five-hectare farm that she runs with help from her husband and occasionally their children.

Starting at 5 AM, the 42-year-old farmer of Japanese descent plows the soil, plants seeds and seedlings, fertilises, harvests, and carefully tends the plants in her greenhouse.

She acquired the farm in 2002 thanks to a swap in a settlement that emerged 10 years earlier as part of the government’s agrarian reform programme.

The settlement, Mutirão Eldorado, is in the rural municipality of Seropédica, an area with 80,000 inhabitants located 70 km from Rio de Janeiro, a city that is home to agricultural research institutions and organisations that provide support to small farmers.

Six years ago, Michi took a radical step and decided to go 100 percent organic, abandoning all chemical products.

On average, chemical fertilisers and pesticides absorb 70 percent of the income of small farmers in Brazil, according to experts.

Michi is a cofounder of the group Serorgânico, made up of 15 small farmers, which has become a local leader in supplies of chemical-free seeds and seedlings.

The farmer, who is a Nisei – the term used for second-generation Japanese immigrants – said she was deeply affected by the death of one of her brothers at the age of 37. He died of lung cancer, even though he had never smoked. Michi blames his death on the intensive use of agrochemicals on the farm of their parents, who came to Brazil in the 1960s.

“In my family we worked the land with many pesticides. We were young and the damages they caused were not well-known then,” Michi told IPS during a visit to her farm.

She was one of the youngest of eight siblings, from a family who settled in another part of the state of Rio de Janeiro. “We were very poor; we managed to harvest a truckload of food, but we didn’t have money,” she said.

“It was a really hard life,” said Michi, who has worked in the countryside since the age of 13.

Michi stopped using agrochemicals on her crops when she married Augusto Batista Xavier, 51, who she met in 1992, the first time she visited an organic farm in a neighbouring state.

“When we moved to this land, I was already thinking about agroecology, because for me, it’s the future,” she said.

The land in Seropédica is good for growing mandioc, okra, maize, pumpkin, sweet potato and banana.

Besides these vegetables and fruits, Michi is also growing 25,600 organic seedlings in her new greenhouse, to supply Serorgânico.

Her husband’s job managing a cattle farm ensures them a steady income. But he helps her with the heaviest tasks in his free time. Their three children, between the ages of 14 and 16, also lend a hand when school is out.

On average, Serorgânico produces three tonnes of food a month, most of which is sold in the circuit of organic farmers markets in wealthy neighbourhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

For Michi, chemical-free farming is part of a holistic philosophy, which also takes into account the social and economic welfare of farmers and of consumers of fresh farm products.

But many organic farmers find it hard to survive in the face of competition from those who use more conventional farming methods at a much lower cost.

Although ecological products in Brazil cost between 30 and 50 percent more than food produced with agrochemicals, demand has grown approximately 30 percent in recent years.

José Antônio Azevedo Espíndola, a researcher with the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, pointed out to IPS that the number of organic farmers is still limited.

“There is potential for growth, but there is also a long road ahead,” he told IPS. “In the last few years, society’s concern about food quality has grown, from the point of view of the environment and of more sustainable, healthy production.”

Espíndola is a researcher in EMBRAPA’s agrobiological unit, which is dedicated to developing ecological farming techniques and methods.

Organic farmers represent a mere one percent of agricultural producers in Brazil. In 2006, when the last agricultural census was carried out, there were 5,000 certified ecological farmers, most of them small-scale family producers.

Espíndola estimates that there are now around 12,000 organic producers, who farm a combined total of 1.75 million hectares.

But threats loom on all sides.

Michi’s small farm is one illustration of the problems organic farmers face. It scrapes along, surrounded by quarries, cattle ranches, a sanitary landfill and a projected orbital motorway to be built just two km away.

In other words, the neighbourhood endangers her ecological production.

Trucks hauling rocks and gravel rumble up and down the dirt road in front of her farm, trailing clouds of dust, while the dump gives off a terrible stench and brings swarms of flies. Chemicals used at the dump are also in the air, causing skin ailments among her family.

Given these difficulties, Michi’s family constantly debates whether to move away.

“Besides the bad smell, there is the danger of water pollution,” Michi says. “There are days when I can’t stand working in the garden because of the odours and the flies. We’re an organic community directly affected by developments that arrived here after us.”

Family famers in Seropédica are worried about being hemmed in by industrial endeavours, while they put up with pressure from companies interested in setting up shop in the area.

“They made me an offer to buy my land, but I turned it down,” Michi said. “I’ll only leave here if I can buy the same thing elsewhere, where I can farm. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Besides the challenges of using green-friendly farming methods, small-scale organic farmers have to overcome other obstacles, Michi said, like difficulties in access to credit and technical assistance from institutions dedicated to agricultural research and development.

The solution, according to Espíndola, is for the different parties involved to be brought together by a public policy specifically providing support for the organic farming sector.

“If that doesn’t happen, there will always be a bottleneck limiting production levels,” he said.

Another EMBRAPA technician, Nilton Cesar Silva dos Santos, told IPS that organic farming was undergoing a major restructuring.

“The conditions still don’t exist in Brazil for a 100 percent organic chain of food production,” said Santos, who is earning a graduate degree in sustainable development in rural settlements that emerge from the government’s land reform programme.

Not only the ecological farming sector but family agriculture as a whole is suffering from a scarcity of resources, said Santos, who is behind the first project to set up greenhouses on family farms in the state, with support from EMBRAPA.

Michi’s farm was one of the first four to have a greenhouse installed.

Santos said it is possible to improve working conditions for organic farmers while at the same time getting the city “to look to the countryside once again.”

The past year has seen multiple state-level legislative attempts to label or ban GM products. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 3 2014 (IPS)

A third of U.S. organic farmers have experienced problems in their fields due to the nearby use of genetically modified crops, and over half of those growers have had loads of grain rejected because of unwitting GMO contamination.

Of U.S. farmers that took part in a new survey, the results of which were released on Monday, more than 80 percent reported being concerned over the impact of genetically modified (GM) crops on their farms, with some 60 percent saying they’re “very concerned”."USDA has been extremely lax and, in our opinion, that’s due to the excessive influence of the biotech industry in political circles.” -- Organic farmer Oren Holle

The findings come as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken the unusual step of extending the public comment period for a controversial study on how GM and non-GM crops can “coexist”. During a major review in 2011-12, the USDA Advisory Committee on Biotechnology and 21st Century Agriculture (AC21) concluded that it lacked sufficient data to decide on the extent to which GM contamination was happening in the United States, or to estimate the related costs incurred by organic and other non-GM farmers.

The AC21 recommendations came out in November 2012 and were criticised for being weighted in favour of industry. Critics have subsequently seized on the USDA’s decision to revisit those conclusions, and the new study, produced by an association of organic farmers and Food & Water Watch, a Washington advocacy group, aims to fill the committee’s professed gaps.

“The USDA said they didn’t have this data, but all they had to do was ask,” Oren Holle, a farmer in the midwestern state of Kansas and president of the Organic Farmers’ Agency for Relationship Marketing (OFARM), which assisted in the new study’s production, told IPS.

“Our very strong feeling is that the introduction and propagation of the genetically modified products that are coming out under patent at this point have not had the regulatory oversight that they should have, and need to involve a far broader section of stakeholders. USDA has been extremely lax and, in our opinion, that’s due to the excessive influence of the biotech industry in political circles.”

Misplaced responsibility

While GM crop use has expanded exponentially across the globe over the past two decades, nowhere has this growth been more significant than in the United States. While just one percent of corn and seven percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. came from GM seeds during the mid-1990s, by last year both of those numbers had risen to above 90 percent.

In the new study, nearly half of the farmers polled said they did not believe that GM and non-GM crops could ever “coexist”, while more than two-thirds said that “good stewardship” is insufficient to address contamination.

“The USDA’s focus on coexistence and crop insurance is misplaced,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said Monday, referring to an AC21 recommendation that GM contamination problems be dealt with through a federal insurance scheme set up to lessen the impact of natural disasters.

“The department must recognise the harm that is already being done to organic and non-GMO farmers and put the responsibility squarely where it belongs – with the biotech companies … Now USDA can no longer claim ignorance about this problem.”

Even as contamination reports continue to grow, the U.S. government’s most recent response, drawn from the AC21 recommendations, has been to encourage “good stewardship” practices and communication between neighbouring farmers. Yet non-GM farmers say that, in practice, this has meant substantial outlays of both time and money in order to safeguard their crops – and virtually no corresponding responsibility on the part of farmers using genetically modified crops.

Beyond regular testing and certification requirements, U.S. farmers are required to set aside a substantial buffer zone around their fields to guard against GM contamination. Averaging around five acres, this buffer zone alone costs farmers anywhere from 2,500 to 20,000 dollars a year in lost income, according to the new survey.

Other farmers resort to waiting to plant their crops until after their neighbours’ GM crops have pollinated. Yet this delay, too, imposes a financial burden of several thousand dollars per year.

“I’m getting tired of maintaining these miles of buffers,” one farmer wrote in response to the new survey, complaining about the heavy use of herbicides typically associated with GM crops. “How about the guy that sprays up to the fence be liable for the damage that is done?”

Old playbook

OFARM’s Holle says the findings on just how much farmers are paying to avoid GM contamination took him by surprise. Of this imbalance, he says U.S. regulators are continuing to play out of an “old playbook”.

“There’s been a lot of new technology introduced in agriculture over the past 50 years. But there’s always been a point of law that, whatever happens on my side of the fence, I’m still responsible for how it might affect my neighbour,” Holle notes.

“GMOs take away that neighbour-to-neighbour relationship, however, as the ways in which unintended presence occurs is a completely different set of concerns from other new technologies. For that reason, they need a completely different set of rules.”

While Holle says the USDA has been slow in recognising this new reality, he’s guardedly optimistic that a regulatory rethink is now taking place.

“This additional comment period, I think, points out that they were paying some attention to the initial comments that came in,” he says.

“It does appear that they’re taking a step back. It’s our hope that our efforts have at least gained some traction in recognition that all is not well and that they, perhaps, need to do some re-evaluation.”

Against what he says is an onslaught of lobbying by the biotech industry, Holle says the voice of non-GM farmers has strengthened largely through newfound consumer demand. The past year alone has seen multiple state-level legislative attempts to label or ban GM products, while stores have acted unilaterally.

On Monday, the United States’ two largest grocery chains indicated that they would not sell genetically modified salmon, a product currently being weighed by regulators here. Some 9,000 stores countrywide have reportedly made similar pledges.

“At least 35 other species of genetically engineered fish are currently under development,” Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, stated Monday. The “decision on this genetically engineered salmon application will set a precedent for other genetically engineered fish and animals … to enter the global food market.”

According to a 2013 poll, 93 percent of U.S. respondents want GE ingredients or products to be labelled, despite strident pushback by industry.

A group of visitors tours Jorge Cora's farm on Jan. 25, 2014. Credit: Elisa Sanchez

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico, Feb 10 2014 (IPS)

A decade after the United States Navy’s departure, the Puerto Rican island town of Vieques faces new challenges, and the rebirth of its agriculture sector is hampered by a legacy of toxic military trash that has uncertain consequences.

From 1999 to 2003, Vieques, which is just over twice the size of New York City’s Manhattan Island, was the site of a massive civil disobedience campaign to put an end to the presence of the Navy, which had used the island for bombing practice since World War Two. Puerto Rico is officially a commonwealth and territory of the United States.“The soils in Vieques could be safe for farming, or maybe not. There is uncertainty." -- Biologist Arturo Massol

In 2003, the bombing range was closed. But Vieques faces other challenges, like unemployment, crime, and basic infrastructure issues like health and transportation.

The principal means of transportation between Vieques and the main island of Puerto Rico is the ferry that travels the 30 kms between the town of Fajardo and the pier at Vieques’ Isabel Segunda village. The service is plagued by frequent breakdowns and delays, a situation which discourages tourism and makes life difficult for Vieques residents that need to travel to the main island.

“Transportation here is a disaster,” said Robert Rabin, a U.S. expatriate who moved to Vieques in 1980 and was a major figure in the anti-Navy movement. “This situation is an attempt against the island’s economic development and the health of its residents. When the elderly and sick have to go to the main island for medical appointments, they cannot arrive on time because of the poor ferry service.”

Rabin works at the Conde de Mirasol historic museum in Isabel Segunda and at the newly founded Radio Vieques community radio station. He pointed out that the island town of Culebra, some 15 kms to the north of Vieques, faces a similar transportation plight. “This shows the Puerto Rico government’s lack of commitment to the economic development of both Vieques and Culebra,” he said.

Local residents of both islands feel squeezed out by a large influx of wealthy new residents – mostly U.S. citizens – which is allegedly causing “gentrification”. Rabin says that this type of population displacement is also happening in the main island and in the nearby Virgin Islands.

“I see an increase in the control of foreigners, especially American, over local tourism. The government has not responded to this problem. And the local community has not been able to respond in a coherent way due to lack of organisation,” he said.

“There are some foreigners who set up businesses here and provide good jobs for local people, but they are the exception. Most of them employ friends they bring in from the U.S., and offer Vieques residents only the lowest paying jobs, like maintenance.”

Many of these migrants are “snowbirds”, the term used by local residents to describe people who come only for the winter, staying in Vieques no longer than six months a year. According to Rabin, “When they are away they rent their properties for as much as a thousands dollars a week, or even a thousand a night. Some of those houses are real palaces.”

Not all “snowbirds” are rich property owners. Some come for high-paying jobs in the tourism and construction sectors, others work as carpenters or electricians. The poorer ones live in camping tents in Sun Bay beach, in the island’s south coast.

Vieques has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts in its farming sector. New farm operations, both conventional and organic, have been sprouting up in recent years. One of these nouveau agricultural operations is the small company Hydro Organics, which is working a 30-acre farm called La Siembra de Vieques, located between the Lujan and Esperanza sectors.

La Siembra grows squash, green beans, papaya, moringa, avocado, coconut, eggplant, pineapple, guava and salad greens, among many other crops. Part of the labour is provided by woofers, international backpackers that travel from one farm to another, working in exchange for lodging and food. The farm is run according to the principles of permaculture, a discipline that combines ecological design and sustainable agriculture.

“We are getting started with community-supported agriculture,” said Hydro Organics farmer Vanessa Valedon. “We have consumer-investors who pay in advance for six months of our harvest.”

In Monte Carmelo, a hillside sector next to the old Navy firing range, is the farm of Jorge Cora. He has no running water or electricity and there is no paved road leading to his farm. He plants salad greens, okra, peppers, tomato, basil, neem, tobacco and beets, all without the use of agrochemicals.

“I get no government aid, not even food stamps,” said Cora, who prides himself on his independence. “If I can do all this with no chemicals or government help, I challenge conventional industrial farmers to do the same.”

But there is debate as to whether Vieques farm produce is safe to consume. Some point out that all of the island’s settlements are downwind from the old firing range, where shells of different calibres were exploded over 60 years, blowing up dust and debris contaminated with munitions toxic chemicals, which were carried by the winds and settled in the civilian area.

In the 1990s, the Puerto Rico Health Department determined that the cancer rate among Vieques residents was 26.9 percent above the national average. The anti-Navy movement attributed this anomaly to toxic pollution caused by military activities.

Biologist Arturo Massol, professor at the University of Puerto Rico and volunteer staffer at the non-governmental organisation Casa Pueblo, carried out peer-reviewed studies of military pollution in Vieques and how these toxins travel the marine and land food chains. He believes there is reason for concern, but advises that more studies need to be done.

“The soils in Vieques could be safe for farming, or maybe not. There is uncertainty,” he told IPS.

Massol declared that the Puerto Rican government has a duty to carry out soil tests to ascertain any toxic hazard. For its work with the people of Vieques and the anti-Navy protest movement, Casa Pueblo won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002.

Peasant women working on the family plot of land near the village of Padre Rumi in the Andes highlands department of Huancavelica in Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jan 9 2014 (IPS)

A new institution set up in Peru will strengthen small-scale organic farming, providing support to some 43,000 exporters of ecological products and another 350,000 who supply the domestic market with environmentally-friendly products.

The National Council for Organic Products (CONAPO) was formed to support the weakest link in the food chain, small-scale agriculture, the very year that the United Nations dedicated to family farming worldwide because of its social and productive importance.

“There is no public spending that puts the priority on small-scale farmers,” Moisés Quispe, a Peruvian farmer, told IPS. “The budget for agriculture is reduced year by year, even though over 70 percent of the food that Peruvians consume comes from small farms.”

According to the last agricultural census, carried out in 2012, 72 percent of farms in this Andean country are smaller than six hectares, and they mainly supply the domestic market.

Quispe is executive director of the National Association of Ecological Producers of Peru (ANPE), which groups 21,000 organic farmers, 60 percent of whom are smallholders.

For the members of ANPE, the new council represents an opportunity to reach agreements with the state that were never possible before, said Quispe, who has been farming for four decades in the southern department or region of Cuzco.

Agriculture represents 25 percent of all jobs in Peru, around 7.5 percent of GDP and nine percent of exports, according to official figures.

The technical secretary of CONAPO, José Muro, told IPS that Jan. 24 is the date set for the first meeting of its members, who include representatives of key sectors of the executive branch, the regional organic production councils and civil society.

According to the law for the promotion of organic and ecological production, in effect since 2008, regional and local governments are to put a priority on providing support for organic agriculture in their plans, programmes and projects.

The law also requires Peru’s agriculture development bank, Agrobanco, to grant loans to certified farmers during the period of conversion to organic production. In addition, the government must provide incentives to promote the production and commercialisation of organic products.

“Organic production is extremely important for Peru,” Agriculture Minister Milton von Hesse said at the installation of CONAPO on Dec. 22.

Von Hesse stressed that the council recognised “the key role that small farmers play in rural development” – one of the arguments cited by the United Nations for naming 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

Quispe said full enforcement of the 2008 law is urgently needed, in order to expand agricultural frontiers for small farmers, who face challenges from all sides: lack of access to credit; water scarcity; low prices due to dependence on middlemen; and a lack of state investment in infrastructure.

Muro said the Agriculture Ministry has made progress in support policies, thanks to which exports of organic products, principally cocoa, bananas and coffee, have surpassed 350 million dollars a year.

Some 43,000 small farmers are registered with Peru’s agricultural health service, SENASA. But that number only includes farmers who are certified to export their products.

The head of the Organic Agriculture Network (RAE), Alejandra Farfán, told IPS that there is another large segment of farmers who supply the domestic market, estimated at around 350,000. “We don’t have official figures, but the challenge is to see how to bring them visibility through the Council, so they can also benefit,” she said.

Farfán described the creation of CONAPO as a “milestone,” after years of waiting.

She is a representative of civil society on the council, and also presides over the Peruvian Agroecological Consortium.

“We know that small farmers are steeped in poverty,” she told IPS. “So the hope is that in 2014 they will be included on the agenda of policies for productive infrastructure.”

She said it was necessary to incorporate them in existing government agriculture programmes, and to bolster organic production, with an emphasis on the poorest rural families.

Because of the lack of support, campesinos or peasant farmers have been abandoning their small plots of land to find seasonal or temporary work, in order to feed and clothe their families, Quispe said.

Rural migration to mining areas is one of the most visible and painful consequences of the lack of attention to small farmers, he said.

But even those who are exclusively dedicated to producing and exporting organic products year-round face a major challenge: commercialisation.

On average, 30 percent of the organic coffee produced in the country is sold as regular beans due to the lack of markets, said Miguel Paz, sales manager for the Central Association of Farmers from Pichanaki, in the Amazon jungle department of Junín in central Peru.

Farmers in the valleys of Junín produce 25 percent of the coffee consumed in the country, Paz told IPS.

In his view, it is time to look for new markets and turn to other countries, like Japan or Australia. Today, exports of Peru’s organic coffee mainly go to Germany and the United States.

“The government should make headway into new markets for organic products by means of different strategies, ranging from printing a good pamphlet in several languages to encouraging and teaching producers to participate in business rounds, to learn who’s who,” said Paz, who has taken part in several international negotiations.

In February he will travel to Germany, Belgium and France along with representatives of a dozen cooperatives from different parts of the country.

The task of opening up new markets falls to the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism, which is also represented in CONAPO, along with the Ministry of Production and the National Institute for the Defence of Competition and Intellectual Property.

Farfán said the Environment Ministry should also be included, because climate change has a huge impact on organic production.

The new council will now draw up a National Plan for Organic Production, internal rules for the plan, and regulations for the regional councils. Based on that, the government is to earmark the necessary budget funds to carry out the plans.

“The idea is to guarantee that the population has healthy food. Clean agriculture won’t only benefit the people of Peru, but humanity as a whole,” Quispe said with conviction.

Alfalfa is the fourth-widest grown crop in the United States. Credit: Public domain

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

With state and federal government agencies investigating a U.S. farmer’s complaint that his alfalfa crop may have been contaminated by a genetically modified strain, consumer rights groups are suggesting that such reports were inevitable.

The incident comes just months after similar allegations were made regarding genetically engineered (GE) wheat, a report that is still under investigation. While several strains of GE alfalfa have been approved for commercial use – unlike the modified wheat – the implications of any proven contamination could still be far-reaching.“We did everything we could to prevent this from happening and unfortunately the government and industry went ahead, and this is now the result." -- George Kimbrell of the Centre for Food Safety

In accounts that were publicly confirmed on Wednesday, a farmer in Washington state told government officials in late August that his alfalfa crop had been rejected for export after it was found to include a genetic modification that made it resistant to certain herbicides. A spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Agriculture told IPS that results of a state-level investigation could be ready by Friday.

While it is unclear which organisation carried out the original testing or how any contamination may have taken place, several countries refuse to allow the import of GE products. That has led some exporters to refuse to deal with GE crops entirely.

Alfalfa is the fourth-widest grown crop in the United States, according to U.S. government figures, with exports alone valued at nearly 1.3 billion dollars last year. Following years of debate and litigation, in 2011 federal U.S. regulators allowed the largely unfettered production of GE alfalfa, though the issue remains contentious.

“Based on both the government’s and industry’s negligence, this type of contamination was an inevitability – we vigorously opposed the original approval, and litigated whether it was lawful for eight years,” George Kimbrell, an attorney with the Centre for Food Safety (CFS), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“We did everything we could to prevent this from happening and unfortunately the government and industry went ahead, and this is now the result. This is the beginning, and I think you’ll see these types of reports happening more and more frequently.”

Administration about-face

Starting in 2006, Kimbrell and CFS fought a series of cases against the agribusiness company Monsanto over whether U.S. regulators should be allowed to plant GE alfalfa. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ban on such crops, stating that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) failed to take into account environmental risks.

That decision prompted a USDA review that found that GE alfalfa genes “could be found” in non-GE alfalfa “at low levels”, and noted that the commercialisation of GE alfalfa would result in greater use of herbicides.

“In December 2010, the Obama administration proposed limiting GE alfalfa to restricted planting zones to prevent contamination; however, in January 2011, under tremendous industry pressure, the [USDA] did a complete about-face and again approved the crop without protections,” according to CFS.

“The administration relied heavily on industry assurances that its ‘best practices’ would prevent GE contamination from occurring, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.”

While Monsanto seeds were implicated in the GE wheat contamination earlier this year (though the company has said it was sabotaged), its products are not involved in the Washington reports, according to a spokesperson.

“The farmer was growing alfalfa purchased from another seed company, not Monsanto seed … [That company] offers GM, conventional and organic alfalfa seed products for sale,” Thomas Helscher, a Monsanto representative, said in an e-mail to IPS.

Helscher also notes that the industry allows multiple levels of purity in crop seeds, while it is not yet clear which seeds the Washington farmer was using.

“Varietal purity standards followed by the alfalfa seed industry allow for low level presence of impurities, including GM traits, in conventional alfalfa seed,” he says. “If a grower is growing alfalfa for sensitive markets and wants specialized, GM-free alfalfa, they can purchase [those varieties].”

On Thursday, a USDA spokesperson confirmed to IPS that the agency was working with Washington state to gather information on the alfalfa findings. Meanwhile, the agency is continuing to examine the report, from earlier this year, of possible contamination of non-GE wheat in neighbouring Oregon.

That news prompted at least two countries to temporarily halt U.S. wheat exports. The report was particularly worrying for both government regulators and the biotech industry because GE wheat has never been cleared for commercial use, and any contamination would have come from test fields grown in the area a decade ago.

Yet if that were true, it would vindicate a longstanding concern on the part of environmentalists that accidental cross-pollination between GE and non-GE crops was largely inevitable.

Food concerns

Such concerns have been particularly strong with regard to alfalfa, a perennial, bee-pollinated crop – characteristics that some say increase the likelihood of cross-breeding. Further, because alfalfa is a prime constituent of cattle fodder across the country, the potential for GE contamination worries the fast-growing organic dairy sector.

Indeed, Washington state will soon be voting on a referendum to require the labelling of GE foods, part of a mounting national campaign. Major agribusiness companies, including Monsanto, are reportedly spending millions of dollars to counter that initiative.

Although relatively little is known about U.S. public opinion on the broader agricultural applications of GE products, on food sources reactions are fairly clear. According a 2010 poll, just one in five people in the United States feel that genetically modified foods are safe, while a recent public comment period on whether the U.S. government should approve GE salmon garnered more than 1.8 million responses.

Such findings appear to be in line with public sentiment in other countries, too. Consumers in the European Union have been repeatedly found to oppose genetically modified crops, for instance, and E.U. countries have been at the forefront of requiring the labelling of foods with GE ingredients.

While legislative action on this issue has lagged in most developing countries, civil society opposition has been widely documented. Late last year, Peru and Kenya both imposed bans on the import of genetically modified foods, while Nigeria was reportedly considering following suit, citing lack of scientific consensus on the long-term impact of GE materials.

In April, a decades-long push to require the labelling of foods containing genetically modified ingredients in the United States received a significant boost, when bipartisan bills on the issue were simultaneously proposed in the House and Senate. If the bills pass, the United States would join 64 other countries that have already put in place similar laws or regulations.

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 22 2013 (IPS)

When Gabriela Blanco tells other Cubans that she works in an organic vegetable cooperative and is getting ready to study agronomy at the university, she gets surprised looks.

She is not sure where her vocation came from, but she does know that this is what she wants to do.

In Cuba, which is seeking to boost agricultural yields, there is a scarcity of young people working in the sector.

Blanco, a petite 20-year-old, dropped her math studies after two years to try her hand at the Vivero Alamar, a successful agricultural cooperative in Havana that operates as a Basic Unit of Cooperative Production.

“I began working here in September 2012; in three months they made me a member of the cooperative. I realised that I really like it and I want to stay here. The agricultural sector has lots of possibilities and many fields of investigation; it’s a very interesting and lovely experience,” she told IPS.

Mercedes Cepero, 18, has had a similar experience, although she came to this cooperative to fulfil her professional training requirement as an agronomy technician. “I’ve passed the student stage, and now I have to get trained and learn as a worker. I used to think that agronomy was just working with a hoe in the sun, but I was wrong,” she told IPS.

Cepero is also preparing for university entrance exams, which will be held this month, because she wants to be an agricultural engineer. Unlike Blanco, she was told about this career when she was in secondary school. “That was when I became interested,” she said.

Blanco thinks that the lack of interest in agricultural careers among young people is due in part to today’s society. “A lot of people see agriculture as something that is not studied, that doesn’t involve science, because it’s just planting and harvesting. Other people view work in the countryside as a lot of hard work that brings few benefits,” she said.

Twenty young people, between the ages of 17 and 30, work at the Vivero Alamar.

However, most young people leave agriculture when they find jobs that are more in line with their aspirations for better incomes and less hard work.

Cepero has little patience with the general attitude toward agricultural work: young people “are a little bit lazy, and they want everything to just fall into their lap,” she said.

According to figures provided by the national urban and suburban agriculture programme, about 70,000 young people in this country of 11.3 million are working in agriculture.

The Vivero Alamar urban farming cooperative is located in the housing project of Alamar about 15 km from downtown Havana. The housing development is home to about 100,000 people.

Research by the Centre for the Study of Youth has found that young Cubans prefer to seek jobs in the emerging economy, such as foreign companies, and reject jobs related to sanitation services, construction and agriculture.

“People view agriculture today as if it were punishment. Whoever misbehaves will go work in the fields. The children of farmers do not want to continue their parents’ work; they want to move to Havana and become doctors,” said Isis Salcines, who describes herself as a worker-of-all-trades at the coop, and who is about to graduate as an agronomist.

Shortly after beginning her university studies, Salcines decided to create a kind of vocational club at an elementary school close to the coop, dubbed “Agro-ecological Kids”. But first she conducted a couple of surveys. One asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and another asked them to complete the sentence: “When I grow up, I want to be.…” with farmer as one of the choices.

Not one of the children chose farmer. Salcines, who is the daughter of the coop’s founder and president, Miguel Ángel Salcines, set herself the goal of holding weekly sessions to teach the children about how the coop is run using agro-ecological methods, and why it is important to eat healthier.

By the time the first course was over, the “Kids” would eat every bite of vegetables they were served in tasty salads, and they knew how to work on the farm, understood the importance of producing food, and had learned about the comprehensive management of pests and diseases.

In a new survey she conducted at the end of the first workshop, 15 of the boys and girls – nearly three-quarters – marked agronomy as a possible career. “This experience was a real incentive. It made me see how it was possible for them to choose this line of work once they are grown-up,” Salcines said.

For Norma Romero, a plant protection engineer, the formula must include education from an early age and assurances for young people that they will feel recognised, motivated and encouraged to continue working in agriculture, despite any difficulties.

Good wages, a flexible schedule to allow them to study, free breakfast and lunch, work clothing and shoes, and other benefits are motivating factors, “because in agriculture there is mud, lots of sun, dust, and really hard conditions. For us it is vital for people to come and stay, especially young people,” Romero said.

As part of the recent reforms of the Cuban economy, the Education Ministry expanded in 2011 the number of agronomy specialties offered at the vocational school level and ordered a reinforcement of vocational guidance toward agriculture in the early years of primary education, in line with the characteristics and needs of each province.

Agriculture accounts for 20 percent of total employment but less than five percent of GDP because it has the lowest productivity of any sector. Last year, the country imported 1.6 billion dollars’ worth of food.

Of the 195 workers at Vivero Alamar, 46 are women. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, May 21 2013 (IPS)

“The people are the only thing that matters,” says agronomist Miguel Ángel Salcines, who then goes on to list a series of other “secondary” factors that have turned Vivero Alamar, an urban farm on the outskirts of the Cuban capital, into a rare success story in the country’s depressed agricultural sector.

“We offer flexible hours, relatively high wages, and professional upgrading, among other benefits that make the cooperative an attractive option. This is how we attract high quality human resources, who are crucial today in order to produce more organic food,” said Salcines, the president of Vivero Alamar, where production has been chemical-free since 2000.

The cooperative’s recipe for success also includes transparent accounting, equitable profit sharing, interest-free loans for the workers, free lunches, and support for women workers with young children or others in their care: they are allowed to arrive up to an hour later than the official beginning of the work day, at seven in the morning, Salcines told Tierramérica*.

Human capital played a decisive role in raising production at this urban agriculture venture, founded in 1997 on an initial 800 square metres of land in the community of Alamar, around 15 kilometres east of downtown Havana. This is why Salcines believes that the key to achieving food security in Cuba lies in agricultural workers with a “vocation” for farming, as well as training.

In 2012, world food prices skyrocketed as a result of poor crop yields in various centres of agricultural production, such as the United States. The Caribbean countries, which are net food importers, suffered the greatest impact in the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Less than five percent of the population of Cuba suffers from malnutrition, but the country was forced to spend over 1.633 billion dollars on food imports last year, an unsustainable expenditure for an economy in crisis for more than 20 years, specialists say.

Reducing this massive expenditure by raising domestic food production remains a challenge for the government of President Raúl Castro. In fact, in the first quarter of this year, the National Office of Statistics and Information reported a 7.8 percent decrease in agricultural production other than sugar cane.

“There is a big demand that needs to be met, which is why we are able to sell everything we grow,” said Salcines, one of the founders of the cooperative, which now covers a total of 10.14 hectares and produces more than 230 different crop varieties (primarily garden vegetables, as well as some fruits, grains and tubers) in greenhouses and open fields.

In the midst of a generally inefficient agricultural sector, Vivero Alamar has achieved consistent growth for more than 15 years, thanks to the constant upgrading of its organic farming methods, which have even earned the praise of the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, who visited the cooperative earlier this month.

In 2012, they produced 400 tons of vegetables, 5.5 tons of medicinal and “spiritual” plants (used in religious rituals), 2.6 tons of dried herbs and spices, and 350 tons of worm manure.

They also produced 30,000 ornamental plant and fruit tree seedlings and three million vegetable seedlings, some for their own planting needs, others for sale to other farmers, reported Salcines.

Fresh vegetables, especially lettuce, are the products most sought after by the local residents in Alamar, who have begun to learn in recent years – like people in the rest of the country – about the benefits of including more greens in the traditional Cuban diet of rice, beans, “viandas” (starchy tubers and plantain) and pork.

“The first time we planted cauliflower, in 2000, it all got left in the fields, because nobody knew what it was,” plant health engineer Norma Romero told Tierramérica. In her view, one of the most important contributions made by the more than 33,000 urban and suburban farms in Cuba has been the expansion of access to and consumption of vegetables.

Thanks to a new initiative at Vivero Alamar, recipes for the preparation of different vegetables and mushrooms accompany the lists of products available at the cooperative’s sales outlet, as part of its business and educational strategy. The shelves also stock pickled vegetables, fruit preserves and garlic paste, produced through its own small industry sideline.

Although organic produce can be prohibitively costly in other countries, the organic fruits and vegetables sold by Vivero Alamar are actually priced lower than those produced with agrochemicals and sold in private farmers markets, where the prices are set in accordance with supply and demand.

“The affordable prices are the biggest attraction. A head of lettuce costs four Cuban pesos (five cents of a dollar) here, and everywhere else they charge 10 pesos,” regular customer Sonia Ricardo told Tierramérica. “The vegetables here are fresh, they have no pesticides, and the service is really fast,” she added.

Despite these low prices, the cooperative is able to earn good profits, production chief Gonzálo González assured Tierramérica. Eighty-five percent of its products are sold directly to the population, and the rest go to restaurants like La Bodeguita del Medio, a major tourist attraction in Havana.

Since it first started out with just five people, Vivero Alamar has progressively moved towards a closed-loop farming system that reduces waste and environmental damage.

“We try to buy as few inputs from outside as possible,” explained González, which is what led to “the idea of producing our own manure and various bio-pesticides and fertilisers.”

Vivero Alamar raises bulls to obtain manure, has set up “worm bins” to produce earthworm castings, another organic fertiliser, and breeds mycorrhizal fungi (which attach themselves to the roots of plants and promote their growth) as well as insects and microorganisms that can boost crop yields naturally. The cooperative has also established links with 17 scientific centres for the incorporation of new organic farming techniques and products.

Today, the 195 people who work here are striving to raise production by 40 percent to reach the farm’s full potential output, and have also expanded into raising rabbits and sheep, in order to include meat in its sales to the public and improve protein consumption among the neighbouring population, some 30,000 people.

The staff is made up of 175 cooperative members and 20 employees, and boasts a high overall level of education, with 92 university graduates and 42 technical college graduates. Women currently account for only 46 of the 195 workers.

“A farm can do much more than produce food,” commented Salcines, as he watched a group of foreign tourists who had booked a guided tour and organic lunch at Vivero Alamar.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Despite the growing worldwide demand for organic food, clothing and other products, the area of land certified as organic still makes up just 0.9 percent of global agricultural land, with 37 million hectares being farmed organically.

Organic farming delivers a wide range of benefits, including reduced human exposure to toxic chemicals, improved resilience of landscapes and greater profit margins for farmers.

The countries with the most certified organic producers in 2010 were India (400,551 farmers), Uganda (188,625), and Mexico (128,826). The region that added the most organic farmland between 2009 and 2010 was Europe.

Overall, the amount of organically farmed land worldwide dropped by 0.1 percent between 2009 and 2010, due largely to a decrease in organic land in India and China. Still, organic farmland has grown more than threefold since 1999.

The modern organic farming movement emerged in the 1950s and 1960s largely as a reaction to consumer concerns about the rising use of agrochemicals. The period after World War II and through the 1950s is commonly known as the “golden age of pesticides”.

But as the health and ecological impacts of agrochemicals began to be understood, governments started to regulate their use, and consumers began demanding organically certified foods.

Now fast forward to 2010, when organic food sales reached 59 billion U.S. dollars.

Although the requirements for certification vary for each certifying organisation, farming organically involves following certain ecological principles, such as applying mulch to fields or rotating the crops grown in certain fields. Organic farming prohibits the use of synthetic chemicals, such as fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

Compared with conventional farming methods, organic farming is much healthier for a farm’s entire ecosystem: it boosts on-farm biodiversity, protects nearby waterways from chemical pollution and helps soil retain water and nutrients, improving resilience to drought and other harsh weather patterns. It also reduces human exposure to chemicals or toxic residues, which have been linked to a variety of illnesses.

The Rodale Institute, an organic research and advocacy organisation in the United States, has conducted a comparative study of organic versus conventional farming since 1981. The study focuses on corn and soybeans, for which the United States is the number one and number two producer, respectively.

The study found that organic agriculture outperforms conventional farming on many levels. Over 30 years, organic fields produced equivalent yields, including 31 percent higher yields in times of moderate drought.

Organic soils also retained more carbon, microbes and water, and organic systems were three times more profitable than the study’s conventional systems, producing an average net return of 558 dollars per acre each year compared with 190 dollars per conventional acre. Organic fields emitted nearly 40 percent less greenhouse gases per pound of crop.

Reliable data are lacking for land that is farmed according to organic principles but has not been certified organic. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that the majority of smallholder farmers still operate organically by default, either because chemical inputs have not been introduced to their community, or because their complex agricultural system does not require chemical inputs.

In recent decades, certified organic products have created a niche market, allowing farmers to earn premium prices over conventional products, particularly when selling to supermarkets or restaurants. Farmers in developing countries have also found that their produce will fetch a higher price if exported to more lucrative international markets.

The costs of compliance with international organic standards, however, often force farmers to reduce their on-farm diversity and maximise production of a few “cash crops,” such as cotton, coffee and cocoa, certified organic farming can cause some of the same ecological problems as conventional farming.

Farmers may choose to avoid certification because they believe that the costs or regulation involved in certification hinders their operation, and that their customers trust them to grow food safely and healthfully. This choice is increasingly possible as farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture become mainstream worldwide.

Producing food sustainably, which includes farming without chemicals whenever possible, will be extremely important in the coming decades as the global population continues to grow and as climate change affects land quality worldwide. Organic farming has the potential to contribute to food security, boost farmer incomes, enhance biodiversity and reduce ecosystems’ vulnerability to climate change.

But it is important too that organic farming form part of a larger, more sustainable global food system – where low-income consumers can access and afford fresh, nutritious foods; where farmers can protect endangered plant and animal species that may not be the most productive, but that can withstand drought or temperature extremes; and where supermarkets and advertisers promote consumption of healthy rather than highly processed foods.

Laura Reynolds is a staff researcher with the Worldwatch Institute’s Food and Agriculture Program.