Bangladesh: ploughing
Today's agriculture industry is more like mining than farming. Its system compromises the very earth on which all our future food needs depend. The failures of the current approach to farming threaten the rich and the poor.
Rather than growing food to meet the needs of local communities for a healthy, diverse diet, industrial agriculture produces crops to sell on world markets. While world crop production has trebled since the 1950s, more people go hungry now than 20 years ago. Small family farmers are driven off their land and local people cannot afford to buy what is grown. Too often, the result is a downward spiral of environmental destruction, poverty and hunger.
Hunger and poverty go hand-in-hand. Technological 'solutions' like genetic engineering (GE) overshadow the real social and environmental problems that cause hunger. These issues include who grows our food, how and where it is grown, how it is distributed, and who has access to it.
So what can reverse the devastation caused by the agriculture industry and ensure that the world can feed itself in the future? Funded by Greenpeace, Bread for the World and the UK Department for International Development, Essex University researchers undertook the largest ever study of environmentally and socially responsible farming. The study includes projects on more than four million farms in 52 countries. It explores how the world's poor can feed themselves using cheap, locally-available technologies that will not damage the environment. The findings are dramatic: switching to these farming methods improves harvests for these farmers by an average of 73%.
The three documented examples in this report-from India, Kenya and Bangladesh- show how creativity and ecological understanding lead to an agriculture that fosters biological and cultural diversity.
Read the report: Recipes against hunger, PDF (3Mb)
