Environmental Trust: Organic and agroecological farming in the South

The crisis in Argentina in late 2001 illustrated again a frustrating and unjust reality: there is no direct relationship between the amount of food a country produces and the number of hungry people who live there. In 2001, Argentina harvested enough wheat to meet the needs of both China and India. Yet Argentina's people were hungry. Argentina's status as the world's second largest producer of GM crops - largely for export - could do nothing to solve its very real hunger problems at home. For fifty years conventional agriculture has been getting less and less sustainable. Chemical pesticides, fertilizers and hybrid seeds have destroyed wildlife and crop diversity, poisoned people and ruined the soil. Now that the organic movement is taking off in the industrialised world , governments, international agencies and global agribusiness corporations must stop promoting this destructive system in the South. Instead, there must be coherent and long-term support - in practice as well as in principle - to enable the nascent ecological farming movement in poorer countries to continue to grow into the future.