Many farmers in developing nations can double food production within a decade by shifting to ecological agriculture in stead os using chemical fertilizers (kunstgødning) and pesticides, a UN report showed on Tuesday.
Insect-trapping plants in Kenya and Bangladesh’s use of ducks to eat weeds (ukrudt) in rice paddies are among examples of steps taken to increase food for a world population that the United Nations says will be 7 billion this year and 9 billion by 2050.
“Agriculture is at a crossroads”, according to the study by Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
De Schutter said promoting natural production techniques is the only sustainable way to guard against future crises and stop food prices increasing in-line with oil.
– We set up our farming techniques in the 1920s when we thought there would be a never-ending supply of cheap oil, he said, adding: – Now we are facing a situation where expensive oil and gas and the influence of climate change on yields are scaring us.
– Developing farming in a way which makes it less addicted to (afhængig af) fossil energy is much more promising. In developing countries, we may have to leapfrog (springe over) the stage of industrial agriculture and find ways to produce that are less addicted to fossil fuels,he noted.
– There is a very close correlation between the price of oil and the price of food, so I fear that the next few months will be extremely difficult, he said.
De Schutter argued that the advent of hedge funds and pensions funds through commodity market indices had skewed (forvredet) agricultural commodity trading, making markets volatile and increasingly detaching them from the physical state of food supply and demand.
– It is now resulting in a speculative bubble that is artificially (kunstigt) inflating the price of food commodities, de Schutter explained.
Kilde: www.worldbanjk.org
