Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
industrial agriculture strip soils of beneficial microorganisms and nutri-
ents. As a result, soils take several years to recover from the “shock ” of
chemical input withdrawal. Microorganisms return only slowly, and con-
sequently the land does not produce as much food during this transition.
In today's world, when industrial agriculture continues to be dominant
and the organic market small, the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) estimates that nearly nine hundred million people, mostly in devel-
oping countries like India, are undernourished.31 The existence of nearly
one billion undernourished people and the initial lower yields of organic
farming have led several scientists to denounce organic farming as a
viable agricultural method. Some, like those in a 2012 article in
Nature
,
argue that to compensate for yield loss under organic farming, more and
more land would have to be dedicated to agriculture, which would only
enlarge agriculture's environmental footprint as it encroaches into areas
of high biodiversity, like forests. Furthermore, land is a limited resource,
increasingly needed around urban areas as they expand.32 “Organic farm-
ing is rarely enough
,
” ran another recent headline in
Nature
.33
The other element in this argument against organic turns on popula-
tion growth. Often, fears that population growth will lead to food short-
ages evoke the eighteenth-century scholar Thomas Malthus's vision of an
overpopulated world, filled with misery and vice, with not enough food to
go around. Malthus argued that because population grows at a faster rate
than food resources, food shortages are inevitable. Malthusian thought
exerts a strong influence on environmental circles and in the scientific
community, contributing to a fixation on yields as the utmost priority in
agriculture.34
W hile there is no scientific consensus on the relationship between
yields and organic agriculture, claims that global grain yields are already
decreasing, thereby threatening the food supply, have bolstered skepti-
cism around organic food. A 2012
Economist
article, for instance, insisted
that consumers need to support the large-scale companies that have his-
torically developed and promoted the use of chemicals in agriculture,
to counter yield declines and combat hunger in a world of seven billion
people.35
The third broad charge against organic agriculture has to do with its
