Dear Big Ag: World Hunger Is Not for Sale

What a beautiful article:

"The objectives of this week's Global Harvest Initiative symposium, which focused on coordinated efforts to address world hunger, were compelling. World hunger already affects 1 billion people and the numbers are projected to climb. Unfortunately, thanks to big agribusiness sponsors ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto, the event ultimately amounted to nothing more than glitzy green packaging for the same old unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the world's farmers."

More:
"By framing global food security in terms of "not enough food," the Global Harvest Initiative seems stuck on doing the same old thing harder and faster, citing technology and high-input dependent systems as the solution to world hunger.

What was Einstein's definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The GHI seems to be ignoring this wisdom--more food alone won't help starving people until the global agricultural system radically shifts its focus to address the barriers of poverty (the inability to buy food) and distribution (getting food to where people are)."

More excerpts:
"As demonstrated by 30 years of research in our Farming Systems Trial, organic and near-organic techniques offer robust, biodiverse, productive and regenerative systems that can out-produce chemical approaches in drier and wetter seasons.

Organic restoration is true conservation -- a focus of yesterday's symposium -- that does not require us to choose between areas that will be protected and areas that must be sacrificed to our agricultural destruction. Well-managed organic systems actually increase biodiversity throughout farmed land at every level of the food chain.

And while the GHI mission calls for more money, attention, research, trade and policy support for chemically dependent farming systems, it ignores the findings of many of the world food study groups, who maintain that organic and ecological production systems are the best hope for transforming the "feeding the world" challenge."

The last passage is what I loved the most, I dream... :
"In the midst of all this big-ag hype, the true agenda of the GHI symposium is clear: more money for chemical agriculture systems. But no amount of money can offset the true cost of these systems -- to our environment, and to our health. I want hungry people to be fed, farmers to prosper, ecosystems to thrive while farming improves, wildlife to flourish, and whole bio-regions to develop sustainable economies. That's why I demand organic agriculture be front and center on the global food agenda."


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http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/