Organic farming could feed the world

The lead author of the study, Professor Ivette Perfecto said:

"The idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic is “ridiculous.”

“Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food,” she said." ... "My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture," Perfecto said.

The study compared yields of organic versus conventional or low-intensive food production for a global dataset of 293 examples and estimated the average yield ratio (organic:non-organic) of different food categories for the developed and the developing world.

Sources:

• Organic farming can feed the world, U-M study shows. Press release from the University of Michigan. 10 July 2007.

• Organic agriculture and the global food supply. C Badgley, J Moghtadera, E Quinteroa et al, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems (2007), 22: 86-108.

Comment by PSRAST

This extensive study puts a nail "into the coffin" of Genetic Engineering of foods, along with several other nails presented on this page and in our website. It is now very obvious that the GE foods cannot be justified in any sense and that their inherent unpredictabililty along with the very scanty knowledge about genes of modern science makes it necessary to immediately ban GE foods and the release of genetic organisms into the environment.

The page "Alternatives to genetic engineering of food" contains some especially important "nails in the coffin" of GE foods. It demonstrates very clearly that industrial chemistry-based agriculture is harmful to the health and the environment. There is no need for it, on the contrary it poses a threat of starvation to hundreds of millions of people if an oil crisis comes.

Now that it has been established that organic agriculture can produce food as effectively, the continuation of industrial, chemistry-based agriculture cannot be justified in any way, whether it uses GE or conventional crops.