With proper management, crops and animals actually will grow quite well
without the addition of chemicals developed in a laboratory, unless we are
striving for
unsustainable yields, as you so eloquently stated. I am a
Canadian, but as far as I know organic farming methods are not being taught
anywhere in Canada. The entire Ministry of Agriculture and Food in British
Columbia had, at last count, 1 person who knew anything about organic
farming (and I think he quit to be a farmer). I took the Ecological
Agriculture program at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington,
one of the very few schools that teaches this discipline
As people learn more about the health and environmental effects of the
materials used by conventional farmers, more and more people will refuse to
buy their products and then there will be an unmeetable demand for organic
food, as you say. Most
agricultural chemicals have not been in use long enough for us to really
assess their long-term effects (and we do not have the proper procedures in
place to do a true assessment of their effects, thanks to the lobbying
efforts of the companies that manufacture them). I think when we find out
what their true costs, to human and animal health and to the environment,
are, we will have to stop using them as it will become too expensive to
sustain.
There is actually no shortage of food in the world, even though many people
go hungry, even in the US and Canada. People go hungry because they do not
have jobs or money to buy food, or land to produce it on. Producing more
food by using ever more advanced technologies will not solve their hunger
problems. The idea that we need to produce more and more each year "to feed
the world" doesn't
really benefit the land, the animals or the farmers, it only benefits those
who sell them the inputs with which to overproduce. (Look at Bovine Growth
Hormone for a good example of this. In Canada we were actually successful
in
convincing our government that we neither needed nor wanted this
technology.) Even during the Irish potato famine when millions died of
hunger, Ireland was still exporting food to those who could afford to buy
it, a fact I believe I learned right here on this list.
Cheers, Ellen
...
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