2001 : Local people prepare their community garden for TC-Dialogue's Project (Photo WVC)
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Read at :
http://www.africanagricultureblog.com/2011/03/un-report-reveals-overwhelming-benefits.html
UN report reveals overwhelming benefits of eco-farming
by Brigid Darragh
The latest report out from the United Nations reveals farmers in developing nations can double food production in ten years’ time by simply transitioning from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to ecological agriculture.
The report points to the success in eco-farming projects in 57 nations, where adopting natural methods for soil enrichment and protection against pests has resulted in an average of 80% in crop yield.
Olivier De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report, Agro-ecology and the Right to Food.
“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” De Schutter said in a press release. The solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation, and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.”
He points out that agriculture “is at a crossroads,” and growers will have to implement methods that allow continued crop yield in a time when industrial farming — heavily dependent on oil — is simply not sustainable, nor affordable, for many farmers in developing nations.
“If food prices are not kept under control and populations are unable to feed themselves…we will have increasingly states being disrupted and failed states developing,” De Schutter explains.
And because the cost to produce food is so closely linked with the cost of oil, the agriculture system as we know it is in a certain and long-term state of threat…
Industrial farming is the way of life for most developed nations, where farming methods rely heavily on oil.
The report details why these nations will eventually need to shift to agroecology to sustain crop production — and to increase farms’ resilience to the natural disasters (floods, droughts, a rise in temperature and sea level) projected as a direct result of climate change in coming years.
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