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Organic Farming - A Dose Of Reality

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Howdy y'all,

 

Once we get past the smoke and mirrors we can see that Organic Farming is a

luxury for the privileged.

 

You and I and most other Westerners can grow our vegetables in our garden

plots organically .. without pesticides, fungicides or commercial

fertilizers and they will be more healthy than those grown with pesticides

and fungicides .. though not really more healthy than those grown with

commercial fertilizers. In our gardens we can use crop rotation and

compost to fertilize the soil .. and ladybugs and such to control pests ..

and of course gardening is great therapy for those living in today's rat

race. However, classic Organic Farming is not practical or economically

feasible on a very large commercial scale .. and it is doubtful that it will

ever be practical for even small garden plots in countries where folks must

depend on crops to avoid starvation.

 

Use of manure as fertilizer is a source of E-coli contamination .. but its

commonly used in the poorer countries due to lack of ability to purchase

commercial fertilizers. Crop rotation can enrich the soil but not every

nitrogen producing plant can be grown everywhere in the world. It would be

great if poor countries could farm the insects needed to control other pests

... but its not practical and I know of no insect that can control swarms of

locusts when they devour crops.

 

Y'all keep smiling. :-) Butch ..

http://www.AV-AT.com<http://www.av-at.com/>

... a privileged Organic Gardener.

 

 

December 2, 2007

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts By CELIA W.

DUGGER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/celia_w_dugg\

er/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

 

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a

disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million

people needed emergency food

aid<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_aid/inde\

x.html?inline=nyt-classifier>

..

 

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the

world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to

the World Food

Program<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/worl\

d_food_program/index.html?inline=nyt-org>of

the United

Nations<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/unit\

ed_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org>than

any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of

thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

 

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply.

In October, the United Nations Children's

Fund<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_\

nations_childrens_fund/index.html?inline=nyt-org>sent

three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely

malnourished children, to Uganda instead. " We will not be able to use it! "

Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef's deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

 

 

Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround — one with broad

implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word:

fertilizer.

 

Over the past 20 years, the World

Bank<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_b\

ank/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and

some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed

this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut

back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe

extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the

worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi's newly elected president,

decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

 

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to

reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception

from the United States and Britain. Malawi's soil, like that across

sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its

farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

 

" As long as I'm president, I don't want to be going to other capitals

begging for food, " Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil

servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers,

" Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the

water we have. "

 

The country's successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader

reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in

Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a

farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and

agricultural research.

 

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an

extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its

population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished

farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families,

they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over

time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper

into poverty.

 

Malawi's leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they

reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid

fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an

antipathy to government intervention.

 

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to

eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that

Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the

foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an

economist at the University of London.

 

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank's record on African agriculture,

the bank's own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the

removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African

countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that

improving Africa's declining soil quality was essential to lifting food

production.

 

" The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted, "

said Jeffrey

Sachs<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/jeffrey_d_sac\

hs/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,

a Columbia

University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/c\

olumbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>economist

who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi's

fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries

should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa's farmers.

 

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted

by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006

and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to

2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in

2005, the government reported.

 

" The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic

fertilizer, full stop, " said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since

1989, when he retired as the World Bank's principal agriculturalist in

sub-Saharan Africa. " This technology has not been used in most of Africa.

The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free

or subsidize it heavily. "

 

" The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers

wanted, " he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi's 2007

bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an

independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found

that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year's increase

in corn production.

 

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing

wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan

State

University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/m\

ichigan_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>concluded

in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a

sensibly managed economy " has the potential to drive growth forward out of

the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are

currently caught. "

 

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi's southern and central regions said

fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with

nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi's staff of life.

 

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband

died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of

corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.

 

Last year, roughly half the country's farming families received coupons that

entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an

acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The

government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an

acre.

 

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an

already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to

plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional

flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the

government then in power, the country's entire grain reserve was sold as a

result of mismanagement and corruption.

 

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength

ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many

who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry

official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.

 

" I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every

one, " he said. " It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed. "

 

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies,

which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction

since 2005.

 

" It's quite marvelous! " he exclaimed.

 

Malawi's determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff in

increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of donors, say

economists who have studied Malawi's experience.

 

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8

million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with

the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74

million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

 

" It was really a good economic investment, " he said.

 

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to

Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi

grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy

program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years,

the United States Agency for International Development has focused on

promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed,

and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.

 

But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent

interview that the subsidy program had worked " pretty well, " though it

displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.

 

" The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year, " he said. " They got

fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got the

rains. "

 

And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies

aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.

 

Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi's policy,

though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually

end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are

inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the

subsidy is carried out.

 

" The issue is, let's do a better job of it, " said David Rohrbach, a senior

agricultural economist at the bank.

 

Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi's farmers have embraced

the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its people a more

direct hand in their distribution.

 

Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of

a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting

season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village's 53 families.

 

" Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans? "

asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.

 

Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called

out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing

children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.

 

There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began

among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their

neighbors' fertilized corn fields turned deep green.

 

Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose.

Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a

silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the

sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter.

The tension fled.

 

He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.

 

" I don't want anyone to complain, " he said. " It's not me who chose. It's

you. "

 

The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to

their homes and fields.

Copyright 2007 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>

The

New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

 

 

 

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