Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Opponents of organic agriculture have not been slow to point this out. There is a camp
of 800 scientists and pundits, including Norman Borlaug (the architect of the green revolu-
tion), James Lovelock (of Gaia fame), Dennis Avery (of the Hudson Institute) and Matt
Ridley (the UK's best known contrarian and former chairman of Northern Rock) who, un-
der the aegis of the Center for Global Food Issues, have signed a declaration 'In Support
tion, laid out most explicitly in supporting information written by Dennis Avery, is that to
provide sufficient nitrogen to feed the future population of 8.5 billion people which indus-
trialization will spawn, we will have to resort not only to chemical fertilizers, but also to
genetic manipulation. Any attempt to secure nitrogen and other nutrients through natural
organic means would require undue encroachment upon natural habitats - if not their total
destruction. If we want to feed the world and preserve biodiversity, then we'd better con-
tinue with industrial agriculture. Rather than share agricultural land with nature, we should
Frankly, I dislike these mouthpieces for the agrochemical industry, and make no mistake
about it, that is what they are: no less than 21 representatives of Monsanto and seven of
Syngenta signed their declaration. I particularly dislike the Malthusian complacency with
which they assert that the only way forward from the mess that the industrialization of ag-
riculture has got us into is to put ourselves in their hands and pursue yet more of the same. I
label them under the acronymically satisfying heading Global Opponents of Organic Farm-
ing. The worrying thing is that the GOOFs might be right.
The case they make is put forward most powerfully in a book on the history and legacy
of the Haber/Bosch method of producing nitrogen fertilizer by the US academic Vaclav
Smil, entitled
Enriching the Earth
- a book which I would advise anyone who campaigns
on behalf of organic farming to read. Smil is not banging so loud an ideological drum as
the Center for Global Food Issues, and he does not shrink from cataloguing the problems
that chemical agriculture has caused. The move to synthetic fertilizers, he states:
has many undesirable consequences for the soil quality, above all greater soil compaction, resulting in
worsened tilth, easier erodibility, lowered water-holding capacity, and weakened ability to support diverse soil bi-
ota and to buffer acid deposition … Higher applications of nitrogen fertilizers have also increased the opportunities
for losing the nutrient from fields and transferring it to fresh and coastal waters, to soils and into the atmosphere.
Such enrichment must have a variety of consequences for aquatic and terrestrial biota that are now subjected to this
steady, and often increasing eutrophication … Haber-Bosch synthesis has made it possible to sever the tradition-
ally tight link between cropping and animal husbandry, and to move increasing amounts of fixed nutrients not only
within individual countries but also among nations and continents. This has given rise to disjointed, one might say
dysfunctional, nitrogen cycling. Individual farms, even whole agricultural regions, have ceased to be functional
units within which the bulk of crop nutrients used to keep cycling during centuries or even millennia of traditional
farming.
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