Category: Organic agriculture

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More organic meta-analysis

Never rains but it pours. Hardly had I finished writing about the dismantling of the “conservation agriculture” narrative, that news is out of a serious going over for (part of) the organic agriculture one as well.

An independent review commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) shows that there are no important differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food. The focus of the review was the nutritional content of foodstuffs.

Only about a third of the 162 studies from the past 50 years considered in the meta-analysis saw “a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough to be of any public health relevance.” Studies such as this one, presumably.

This follows a meta-analysis by the American Council on Science and Health which came to a similarly skeptical conclusion. That report was criticized in some quarters. And apparently the Soil Association has expressed some reservations about this latest study and called for better research. We can all go along with that, I think..

LATER. Reaction to the report from Civil Eats, US Food Policy and The Organic Centre. Bottom line is perhaps put best by Parke Wilde:

It is wisest to make your decisions about organic and conventional food primarily based on your assessment of the environmental considerations. The nutrient differences are not as decisive.

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Run DMC

ResearchBlogging.orgI am painfully aware of the risk we run here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog of becoming single-issue bores. ((Risk? Becoming? You’re a bit further down that road than you seem to think, bud. Ed.)) To a hammer, everything is a nail. And if your thing is agrobiodiversity, you’ll naturally be tempted to think that every problem can be solved by the judicious application of an agrobiodiversity thwack. How refreshing it must be to occasionally think against the grain, and question your most cherished assumptions. That possibility is why — apart from my native contrariness — I so enjoyed a recent paper in Field Crops Research very appropriately entitled “Conservation agriculture and smallholder farming in Africa: The heretics’ view.” ((Giller, K., Witter, E., Corbeels, M., & Tittonell, P. (2009). Conservation agriculture and smallholder farming in Africa: The heretics’ view. Field Crops Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.fcr.2009.06.017.)) Even though it didn’t really have much to do with agricultural biodiversity.

Continue reading “Run DMC”

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Nibbles: Fisheries, Mangroves, European bison, Dormouse, Eating & drinking heirlooms, Apios, Kombucha, Organic and health

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IUCN in Wonderland

In a recent article, Jeff Sayer, IUCN’s Scientific Advisor, turns to agrobiodiversity. Here’s the crux of his argument:

In simple economic terms, small diverse farms may be less efficient than specialist farmers with genetically engineered seeds and large inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. But these highly diverse small farms provide many other products for consumption and sale beyond just the key staple.

This diversity provides safety nets in cases of failure of one or a few crops. In addition, conservationists are now recognizing that these small farms can support a lot of native biodiversity, protect watersheds and store large amounts of carbon and so contribute to mitigating climate change.

Which is something we’ve been saying here forever; well, ever since we started. So Dr Sayer is not going to get any of what I believe is sometimes called “push-back” from us. At least not on that broad point. He does, however, lose me on the details. Here’s the take-home message of the article.

Local production of a high diversity of crops with minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels is now a boutique industry for the rich. However, it has a lot of features that could make it a viable and attractive option for large parts of the developing world and it could provide much needed resilience in the face of climate variability and other shocks that will certainly shake the world in the future.

Wait, rich world niche ecoagriculture should be adopted in the developing world so that African farmers too can be resilient in the face of climate change? Surely there’s something of Alice in Wonderland’s surreal world about this way of putting things. Maybe I’m missing something. But no, here’s something from earlier in the piece.

Farm conservation schemes in the USA put tens of billions of dollars into the hands of farmers who adapt their farming to favour wildlife. The critical question is whether these multi-functional farming systems are a luxury that only the rich world can afford or whether they might be a model for diversifying the livelihoods of poor people in the developing world and maybe make them more resilient to the economic, climatic and pandemic-induced shocks that they will confront in coming decades.

Right, so US farm conservation schemes are going to teach African and Asian and Latin American subsistence farmers about diversification. Well, that’s something I’d pay money to see.

I suppose the point struggling to come through is that agricultural development in the South should not put all its eggs in the efficiency basket. It’s a good point, which could have been better made. The developing world doesn’t need to look at rich world organic farming for a model. All it has to do is look at itself.