Lomborg: Organic Fad Worsens Hunger
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
At the American Institute for Economic Research, Bjorn Lomborg explains why the "organic" food fad of the West now poses a global food supply threat:
Please consider reading the whole thing and passing it along: Lomborg further elaborates Sri Lanka's plight, and notes that, without input from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, "going organic globally can only feed about half the current world population."Long simply a fashionable trend for the world's 1 percent, environmentalists have increasingly peddled the beguiling idea that organic farming can solve hunger. The European Union is actively pushing for a tripling of organic farming on the continent by 2030, while a majority of Germans actually think organic farming can help feed the world.
Image by Robert Wiedemann, via Unsplash, license.
However, research conclusively shows that organic farming produces much less food than conventional farming per acre. Moreover, organic farming requires farmers to rotate soil out of production for pasture, fallow or cover crops, reducing its effectiveness. In total, organic approaches produce between a quarter and half less food than conventional, scientific-driven agriculture.
This not only makes organic food more expensive, but it means that organic farmers would need much more land to feed the same number of people as today -- possibly almost twice the area. Given that agriculture currently uses 40 percent of Earth's ice-free land, switching to organics would mean destroying large swathes of nature for less effective production.
The catastrophe unfolding in Sri Lanka provides a sobering lesson. The government last year enforced a full transition to organic farming, appointing organics gurus as agricultural advisers, including some who claimed dubious links between agricultural chemicals and health problems. Despite extravagant claims that organic methods could produce comparable yields to conventional farming, within months the policy produced nothing but misery, with some food prices quintupling. [bold added]
This is a timely warning, given that Putin's war has endangered agricultural supplies from Ukraine and Russia, which together account for a quarter of the world's grain, not to mention other necessities.
-- CAV
3 comments:
Gus Van Horn quoted:
"going organic globally can only feed about half the current world population."
As my programming friends are fond of saying, that's a feature, not a bug.
I wonder how much of the the disaster-mongering over the last 50 years, starting with Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" and continuing unabated into the climate change present were actually fantasy-projection on the part of the Left?
The World Economic Forum and various other depopulation fanatics know that their programs are going to cause misery, hunger, and even death. They just don't want the rest of us to catch on to their game until it becomes irreversible.
Now that they control the international levers of power, they no longer have to 'wait until the right virus comes along.' Heck, with Gain of Function, they can create the damn thing.
How prescient was Rand when she wrote, "They don't want to live. They want you to die.
c andrew
Hi Gus,
Just a quick follow-up. Lomborg notes that prior to the organic farming fetish, Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production for decades.
The same situation was true for Ethiopia prior to the Marxist imposition of collectivized farming practices in the 1970s. Marxism did more and more lasting damage to Ethiopia's agricultural sector than did Mussolini's war.
Just goes to show the truth of the adage that most environmentalists are communists with a green rind.
c andrew
C.,
For some of the leaders of these movements, I have no doubt that starvation is a feature, and not a bug.
Gus
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