Veteran NPR journalist Daniel Zwerdling gives a brief history of the Green Revolution, which encouraged Indian farmers in the ’60’s and ’70’s to abandon traditional farming methods in favor of input-responsive seeds, that were high-yielding when combined with high levels of chemical use and heavy water irrigation.

According to Zwerdling, “Government studies show that farmers have pumped so much groundwater to irrigate their crops that the water table is dropping dramatically, as much as 3 feet every year… [So farmers] keep hiring the drilling company to come back to their fields, to bore the wells ever deeper…” The soil is being gradually destroyed by the drilling and salt levels. The costs of drilling, and remedying the damage that’s been done, is incredibly expensive– prohibitive, in fact, for many Indian farmers, who are already overwhelmed by their debt and are struggling to support their families.

Read the article and share your thoughts. You can find more resources in the Oakland Institute’s Voices from Africa report or in Vandana Shiva’s writings– both share examples for how we can build solutions in the wake of the Green Revolution.

–Deepa

According WorldWatch, “The questions addressed in the State of the World 2009 are many: how do we adapt- not just as communities and nations, but as a species-to the warming that is headed our way, no matter what we do now? How will the world deal with the fact that the climate burden will fall heaviest on countries whose contributions to climate change have been the most modest? And even as we struggle to adapt, how does society maintain focus on slashing emissions to a pale shadow of their current levels?”

The report selects specific challenges (land use, energy, emissions, etc.) and proposes innovative alternatives. Some of the Innovations highlighted in the Land Use section are:
>> In Parana, Brazil, farmers have developed organic management systems combined with no-till. No-till plots yielded a third more wheat and soybean than conventional plowed plots and reduced soil erosion by up to 90 percent. (p. 36)
>> In 2005, a Pennsylvania dairy farm invested $1.14 million in a project to process the manure from 800 cows, using a digester and a combined heat and power unit. Now the farm makes a profit using biogas to generate 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity to sell back to the local utility. (p. 41)
>> Both India and China have large national programs to revegetate millions of hectares of forest and grasslands-seen as investments to reduce poverty and protect watersheds. (p. 44)
>> In Morocco, 34 pastoral cooperatives with more than 8,000 members rehabilitated and manage some 450,000 hectares of grazing reserves. (p. 44)
>> In Rajasthan, India, community-led watershed restoration programs have reinstated more than 5,000 traditional johads (rainwater storage tanks) in over 1,000 villages. (p. 44)
>> Some countries are redirecting subsidy payments to agri-environmental payments for ecosystem services, some of which explicitly include carbon storage and emissions reduction. (p. 46)

If you’re interested in reading more, download chapters or purchase a copy of this critical report here.

– Deepa

Religious conservative circles around the country push an agenda of “creationism” in public schools, reducing evolution to mere theory. Cummings discusses Darwin’s own delicate balance between science and religion, and questions how the faith vs. reason argument plays out in the world of food and technology (i.e. cloning, genetic modification of animals, gene harvesting, etc).

From reading this website and other resources, we know the potential health and energy repercussions of mixing technology and food production, but for many, the ethical question may be equally significant.

Read the article, and tell us your thoughts.

– Deepa

read their op-ed here and my response below. While my letter to the editor didn’t make it into print, one by George Naylor from the National Family Farming Coalition did.

Dear Editors:
Thank you for your coverage of the Agriculture Secretary nominee (“Agriculture’s next big challenge” January 4, 2009), but the authors mislead your readers about the real costs of the “commercial agriculture” they claim the new Secretary should celebrate.

Industrial agriculture will lessen–not improve–our ability to feed ourselves and foster sustainable rural communities, especially in the face of a climate unstable future. Organic agriculture, on the other hand, is proving to foster more resilient crops and to sequester greater levels of carbon in the soil.

The authors also claim that industrial agriculture is “key in our becoming less dependent on foreign oil,” while in reality this system of farming does the opposite: Because industrial agriculture is addicted to manmade fertilizers, which require significant natural gas to produce, we are increasingly dependent on imports from countries with natural gas reserves. Organic agriculture, on the other hand, releases us from our foreign oil dependence in the food sector by eliminating our addiction to petroleum-based chemicals and manmade fertilizer.

Finally, the authors perpetuate the myth that organic agriculture cannot feed the world, when new research, including a multi-year study from the University of Michigan, has shown that shifting toward organic agriculture can actually increase yields overall, while creating auxiliary benefits like cleaner water and safer fields for our farm workers and farmers.

Sincerely,
Anna Lappé
Oakland, California

Denn calls on us, dear readers, to take a stand. Seven years ago beet seed vendors were ready to sell Roundup-ready beets to sugar-sweet companies like Hersey’s and Kelloggs, but fear of consumer revolt scared off the introduction of this genetically modified source for sugar crystals. Now producers like American Crystal Sugar think the consumer market has become complacent and used to the prevalence of biotech products in everything we eat.

If Monsanto rolls out modified beets, it will be the first new GMO product introduced to the market since genetically modified soybeans and corn entered the scene in the ’90s.

European countries do not allow GMOs to be sold, period. Kelloggs promises they will not market this new product to their European buyers, however here in the U.S. with our lack of GMO restrictions, our food is fair game. –Jeanne