That was the key point of a new publication from the UN Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) titled“Trade and Environment Review 2013: Wake Up Before It’s Too Late,” which included contributions from more than 60 experts around the world.
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UN Report Says Small-Scale Organic Farming Only Way to Feed the World
Even as the United States government continues to push for the use of more chemically-intensive and corporate-dominated farming methods such as GMOs and monoculture-based crops, the United Nations is once against sounding the alarm about the urgent need to return to (and develop) a more sustainable, natural and organic system.
The cover of the report looks like that of a blockbuster documentary or Hollywood movie, and the dramatic nature of the title cannot be understated: The time is now to switch back to our natural farming roots.
The New UN Farming Report “Wake Up Before It’s Too Late.”
The New UN Farming Report “Wake Up Before It’s Too Late.” Click here to read it.
The findings on the report seem to echo those of a December 2010 UN Report in many ways, one that essentially said organic and small-scale farming is the answer for “feeding the world,” not GMOs and monocultures.
According to the new UN report, major changes are needed in our food, agriculture and trade systems, with a shift toward local small-scale farmers and food systems recommended.
Diversity of farms, reducing the use of fertilizer and other changes are desperately needed according to the report, which was highlighted in this article from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
It also said that global trade rules should be reformed in order to work toward these ends, which is unfortunately the opposite of what mega-trade deals like the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the U.S.-EU Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are seeking to accomplish.
The Institute noted that these pending deals are “primarily designed to strengthen the hold of multinational corporate and financial firms on the global economy…” rather than the reflect the urgent need for a shift in agriculture described in the new report.
Even global security may be at stake according to the report, as food prices (and food price speculating) continue to rise.
“This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high-external-input-dependent industrial production toward mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers,” the report concludes.
You can read more about the report from the Institute by visiting their website here.
25 Comments on "UN Report Says Small-Scale Organic Farming Only Way to Feed the World"
makati1 on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 6:50 am
Permaculture on an individual scale would work, if everyone did their share. The millions of tons of food wasted by corporate farming,shipping, etc every year would feed a lot of people. If the obese had to work for every calorie, they would not be obese with health problems and a short life.
But, it will never be. Those who waste the most are too lazy to feed themselves. Their day of reckoning is fast approaching. Wait and see.
Cloggie on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 7:09 am
After three seasons of experience in maintaining a vegetable garden, where most effort consisted in removing trees and digging out the stumps (currently busy with the last one) and carting in several m3 of compost, I can confirm that there is nothing easier than growing your own food. Farmers never had high social recognition and there is a reason for that. It doesn’t even take much time once you have everything in place. The job is rewarding, requires physical exercise and gives a strong feeling of security.
But there is another argument, the rapid increasing of life expectancy:
http://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/lebenserwartung-wird-90-jahre-uebersteigen-a-1135715.html
(scroll down for table)
In the Netherlands shortly after the war, without any social security worth mentioning, the males had to work 6 days a week until 65 and next on average could live another 3 years until death.
According to the latest figures, Dutch males will live until 84.
Who is going to pay for that? How about these dinosaurs feeding themselves?
http://tinyurl.com/jmklel2
Midnight Oil on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 7:59 am
Better for them to devise an edible lawn grass that can be grown without ff inputs….
No way modern Americans will grow a significant portion of their food diet.
Read a book of a household that tore up their lawn and attempted to “farm,” still depended on staple crops like rice, wheat for calories.
Oh, now I remember, the book was Paradise Lot and another was by Novella Carpenter Farm City
She was in Oakland CA and raised beds, small livestock (don’t name them or they are pets, not food) and some raised beds. Nothing that could support her and her family.
Nice books to read!
Ghung on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 9:50 am
Until industrial/factory food systems begin to fail, or until that food gets prohibitively expensive, the majority of folks won’t even begin to consider small scale agriculture for producing even a fraction of what they eat, collectively. This will be a forced transition with many failures and casualties.
Case-in-point: This winter I raised a dozen young roosters for the freezer along with this year’s egg-laying hens. Likely cost to raise these meat birds was 2-3 dollars a pound. This week, I can get 10 pound bags of cut up processed chicken for $4.68, or ~47 cents a pound at our local market. Not many folks would bother with the trouble and expense of raising their own meat birds. By the time doing so will be preferable or necessary, most folks will be starving and begging the government for a handout. Few people care if the meat I raise is far superior to what they got in the store. When they find that their choices have become drastically limited, most will not be in a position to do a damn thing about it.
As with much of the less-developed world, protein will be in short supply and expensive. First-worlders feel entitled to having a surplus of just about everything. They won’t react well to having to compete for, or (god forbid) having to produce their own fare.
This year, the only crop we had a real surplus of was beans (vegetable-based protein); something I did as a sort of experiment. What I didn’t sell or give away was either canned (energy intensive) or dried and shelled. We ended up with about 50 pounds of dried beans and another 10 pounds of seed stock for this year’s crop. While doing this is quite labor-intensive, I have no doubt we could scale up quite a bit if needed, but wouldn’t have a large surplus for others outside of our immediate family.
It isn’t how much food one can produce for one’s own use. It’s how much surplus the so-called “small organic” producer can produce to keep the neighbors fed. This requires a culture of distributed small-scale agriculture that doesn’t exist these days compared to the past. In the US, about 2% of the population is involved in feeding the rest.
The transition will be a bitch.
brough on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 10:04 am
Cloggie, always good to here from fellow veg. gardeners, especially when they are working under same environmental constaints (ie latitude, rainfall and tempertures). Been at it 10 years now, always learning and optimising the plot for maximum yield. But the UN are living in a complete fantasy if they think the human race can be saved from peak oil by smallholder farming. As you know it is possible to grow a vast range of fruit and veg. on our small plots that makes north European human existence possible, with one notable exception our carbohydrate intake. In order to grow wheat for making bread and pasta we need either the use of oil for use in tractors or the organisation of labour on a massive scale (ie a peasant or fuedal based economy). Those humans that live in more equitorial regions with high rainfall and all the year round growing season should be OK. Those humans that live in arid regions with an unreliable climate will be history.
aspera on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 10:19 am
ghung: Yes, “The transition will be a bitch.” And not everyone will make it through. We used to call similar situations a famine, common until just over a century ago (how quickly we forget how extraordinary life is these days).
Only thing I’d change is that instead of saying people won’t change until it’s too late, maybe reframe as “what are the conditions under which people would change before being forced to.” Everything about the future is an hypothesis. I hypothesize that there may be more than one way that people could come to growing a subsistence-level amount of their own food.
After all, a number of people here claim to be doing that very thing, without being forced to, and ahead of a collapse.
As Boulding said, “If it exists, then it is possible.”
penury on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 10:21 am
The only two problems I can see with this is,1. not enough land available. 2. Not enough people who now or care about producing food. Combine the two problems and the solution appears simple. The on coming die off will open more spaces and the reduced population will go back to hunting and gathering. Just hope you are not what they are hunting and gathering.
GregT on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 10:44 am
My wife and myself took a ‘course’ last summer with a local indigenous first nations woman. We spent several days foraging throughout several local ecosystems in search of edible leaves, berries, fruits, mushrooms, shoots, and roots. There is a plethora of naturally occurring food available here, if one knows what to look for. I will admit however, that much of it does require an acquired taste. The indigenous peoples of the area survived here for at least 20,000 years. They did not grow their own food.
The effects of climate change, invasive species, habitat loss, and dead and dying ocean ecosystems, will make life unbearable for most in the not so distant future. No amount of alternate electric energy production is going to change the declining path that we are already on.
Cloggie on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 10:51 am
@brough – never eat bread or anything from wheat. Pasta I can do without.
After three years I brought to a success:
– potatos (very easy)
– beans (very easy)
– peas (very easy)
– beets
– carrots
– onions
Failure: cabbage, really needs good dung.
No problem in getting this one filled:
http://www.mediamarkt.nl/nl/product/_bosch-gsn58aw41-1351302.html
Love the freezer, will likely buy a second one this year.
This season I’ll have a greenhouse and will really pay attention to fertilizing and more crop diversity. More onions for soup (more soup in general). And herbs, like mint for tea.
Will have much more soil available after cleaning up (100 m2). Have 3 composters installed of 800 liter each, to the hilt filled with leaves from last autumn.
And I want to try this space saving method of growing potatoes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm4QcPQV0Xs
Apneaman on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 11:09 am
Clog, here’s what many rural Canadians think about vegetarians.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/usedphotosna/39214236_614.jpg
GregT on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 11:19 am
The biggest problem with meat around these parts, is keeping it out of the vegetable gardens.
Apneaman on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 11:57 am
Greg, last year, after I completely gave up on this civilization and species, I gave up on my living super cheap and low eco impact experiment too. I still live on the cheap so I don’t have to go to work, but I’m really only spending 3-4 K more per year. I eat meat 1-3 times a day with anything that grows and is green. Once a month or so I’ll gorge on Pizza or Chinese food, but that’s it. I ate the “All N American Industrial Diet” for most of my life and it made me sick, lumpy, bloated and tired. My diet’s not perfectly clean, but I eat clean enough so I no longer feel and look like that, plus it’s helped with my lucrative modeling career for the covers of womens romance novels.
peakyeast on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 12:13 pm
IF enough people make their own food here in Denmark the government will tax it heavily.
They have already been considering counting trees in peoples garden and tax them for their theoretical heating value…
Davy on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 12:53 pm
It will not be long before we will be relying on an industrial agriculture with is vertical and horizontal arrangements in decline. This arrangement is currently all inclusive with large diversified global agribusiness. Any talk about feeding the world without this arrangement is hopium noise. You are not going to feed 7bil without it. What is tragic is this arrangement is unsustainable and without replacement.
What is vital is any effort at permaculture or hobby farming. Gardens, orchards, animal husbandry must become part of our lives just like it was 100 years ago before modernism phased its ubiquitous presence away to the vast monocultures of the world that began the separation of our food system from our life system. As modern life decays into a post modern world we will struggle to eat what is available. Much of it will still be industrial but increasingly out of necessity local food will reappear. It is here now but it can’t compete. One day it will be essential. When will this happen? The way population is growing and the pace of stagflation of the global economy this points to an intersecting point within a decade. Diminishing returns and climate disturbance is just now ready to strike our global food system hard. Beat the rush and learn to help feed yourself now. It is not economic yet but by the time it is it will be well worth the effort.
JuanP on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 1:10 pm
We could do it if it weren’t for our nature. We have enough resources. We would need to radically change the societies we live in. It will happen whether we like it or not. The transition will be a bitch. I am now teaching people how to grow food on a regular basis and it is not easy, but if we could force people to do what they need to do it would be easier. I believe hunger and desperation will be great motivators. Sooner or later this change will happen. Most people will resist it with all their might. We should have started the transition half a century ago. There is a lot of pain, suffering and hunger in our future.
Learn to grow food now in any way you can. Everyone on this forum can buy a fluorescent light fixture and grow some hydroponic lettuce using the Kratky method or grow sprouts or microgreens indoors. If you have a balcony get into vertical gardening. If you have access to a yard build some raised beds or a food forest; you don’t have to own it. Join a community garden. Help a local school, church or hospital run a food garden. Share your knowledge and skills with relatives, friends and neighbors. Volunteer at a local organic farm. Learn how to eat, cook and preserve locally grown food. There are many options. I do all the things mentioned above. I am not special. You may not be able to do all of the above but whatever you can do is better than doing nothing.
BobInget on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 2:56 pm
As a small organic blueberry farmer myself, I wonder.
Most farmers in America and Canada are, like myself aging out. (I’m 82)
In USA’s and Canada’s Mid-West a person can fly for a hour without spotting anything resembling a city. Only grains, grains, grains.
Dry-land and irrigated, a thousand miles of grains.
California’s Central Valley, soon to be scoured of undocumented migrant labor, produces America’s
veggies and fruits on Millions of acres.
https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/D2C6B629-1528-3CA0-8554-A1AE22052EBC
There are apartment complexes in China that house more people then Alaska. Where are they to farm anything more then one or two pot(ed) herbs.
Sissyfuss on Wed, 22nd Feb 2017 5:24 pm
Bobin, they will simply move in with relatives in Hongcouver.
Cloggie on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 4:53 am
but I eat clean enough so I no longer feel and look like that, plus it’s helped with my lucrative modeling career for the covers of womens romance novels.
Diagnosis: heaumeau. The anal porn now falls into place.
Cloggie on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 5:03 am
Bobin, they will simply move in with relatives in Hongcouver.
After the take-over of Vancouver, Seattle is next:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouvers-new-tax-pushes-chinese-buyers-to-seattle-toronto/article33211473/
Mexicans and Chinese will be fighting each other over the West Coast land grab, resulting in this map:
https://s17.postimg.org/6wwnomfpb/worldmap.jpg
And folks like Siss and Greg will sit on their hands and do nothing and sell their attitude as “spirituality”, secretly hoping that they are going to be bailed out again, like in 1776 by the Mother Civilization:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgSRXjsaYwg
brough on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 6:33 am
Cloggie, potatoes are good to fill your carbohydrate quota, but have fundamental problems when compared to cereal crops. This is caused by the high water content of both tubers and foliage. A very narrow growing window as foliage can be killed off by unexpected spring frosts resulting in split tubers that are difficult to store. Potatoes require more space and protection for storage than grain or flour. Also are susceptible to frost damage and fungal degradation (blight)in storage. These factors make potatoes less attractive to transport and trade for other goods.
On saying that, I’m a great potato fan and was probably a corner stone of the industrial revolution, freeing agricultural workers from the fields to work in factories and coal mines. Re:- Cabbage problem, sounds like ‘cabbage root fly’ a problem with most garden barasicas. Don’t use the horrible chemicals used by the farming industry. Can be solved by placing a small mat 8cm x 8cm with slit cut to the centre around the base of the young plants. I use roofing felt.
Apneaman on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 7:24 am
clog, the more sexy Asian girls the better. The’re very submissive and like to be tied up and have hot candle wax dripped on their creamy bodies. Wooo Weeeeeeee I luvssssssss me some sweet asian pussy.
“Me love you long time white boy”
Jupidu on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 9:11 am
@makati1
“If the obese had to work for every calorie, they would not be obese with health problems and a short life.”
The problem of the obese is less the reduced exercise but above all the reduced nutrient density in the (degenerated) food, especially in the US because of all the GMOs and the use of a lot of chemicals (destroying soil life). They have to eat a lot more food so their body gets all the nutrients he needs.
Organic farming can produce more at lower costs and with better quality:
Keys To Building a Healthy Soil (58min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
How and why it works (soil life will do the job – for free or a little bit to eat):
The Roots of Your Profits – Dr Elaine Ingham (1h36)
youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
It’s not only an energy or money problem wit conventional agriculture. It’s also a health problem:
“Phytochemical richness declined from 10% to 50% in 43 fruits, vegetables and grains from 1950 to 1999.”
Origin:
GFE 2016 – Dr. Fred Provenza ‘Web of Life’ (at 48:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYXF0l18ciI
“David Thomas, “A study on the mineral depletion of the foods available to us as a nation over the period 1940 to 1991″, Nutrition and headth 2003; 17:85-115”: Reduced nutrient density in vegetables and meat.
‘Regenerating Our Resources’ – Gabe Brown (regenerative farmer, North Dakota, USA) (at 40:20)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oxMTLzlP-4
Jupidu on Thu, 23rd Feb 2017 9:29 am
Another miracle:
Higher yields with a fraction of seeds (only necessary premise: organic farming; it’s even possible with modern varieties) – this is also true for other crops, e.g. wheat:
Dr. Willem A. Stoop about SRI (System of rice intensification)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTwFm1_3wk4
Some explanations to SRI (Chapter 16 and 27):
“Food Futures now”, Mae-Wan Ho, March 2008
http://web.archive.org/web/20161121124210/http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Food_Futures_Now.pdf
A Lisa on Fri, 26th May 2017 11:09 am
https://thoughtscapism.com/2015/09/21/myth-un-calls-for-small-scale-organic-farming/
onlooker on Fri, 26th May 2017 11:28 am
You are not going to feed 7bil without it. What is tragic is this arrangement is unsustainable and without replacement. —
Yep, two main reasons. The synthetic fertilizers have contributed so much extra nitrogen/carbon, that without it, crops would not be as plentiful regardless of any replacing methods. Second the land and soil is denuded and dead in many areas leaving little thriving topsoil. And the top soil is continuously being eroded from wind and water because we have cut down so much forest area around the world. Read Final Empire by William Kotke. So like many of our other problems, solutions can work but not at the scale of 7.5 billion. Notice, I have not even mentioned AGW