the plea for a greener revolution

Getting food on the table - the plea for a greener revolution


"GROWING up in farming country, I once fancied I knew something about where food comes from.


As a teenager I looked forward to the ritual of harvest and the windfall of pocket money earned stooking sheaves of oats or picking cherries.


For a time home was a dairy farm, where sweet-faced cows would present themselves each morning for a daily miracle of mucky production, culminating in a vat brimming with pure creamy milk and the appearance of the tanker to take it all away.


A treat was to accompany dad to the stockyards on sale day and perch on the top rung above the mob, soaking up the drama of the bidding between men in hats. While not quite fathoming the stakes, plainly the difference between a good price and a bad one would long reverberate.


It seemed the fate of farmers rested almost entirely on vagaries of seasons, weather and markets. These dominated the prayers of the faithful come Sunday morning, and the church was always full.


Years later, interviewing farmers in foreign fields, I realised how little I really knew of the intricate, invisible, imperative machinery underpinning the success of the First World farming enterprise: infrastructure and information, policy and process, systems and science. Sometimes it's only in their absence that such things come into view.


'Why don't you warehouse grain from the good years for the hungry ones?' Because we have no silos, no safe storage, and no money to build them, explains the Afghan farmer. Similarly, precious water is lost from ancient underground karez systems because of the lack of resources to reconstruct and better regulate them.


In Africa, as rains vanish, soils diminish and traditional crops fail, 'why not diversify, try new ones?' That would require new seed - and the knowledge to nurture it.


In other places, such as the lush highlands of Papua New Guinea, crops might thrive. But impoverished farmers have no roads to get their produce to town markets. Instead the town stores offer anaemic, expensive, imported fruit and vegetables to undernourished populations.


These are parables of food insecurity, footnotes in a narrative which looms as a horror story as the global population heads towards an anticipated 9 billion by 2050.


The converging threats of population growth, climate change, volatile markets and unsustainable use of resources are now being shouted loud by leading scientists urging governments to work together to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed.


They want food on the table at international forums - on the agenda, not the buffet. There is, they insist, little time to waste in ushering in a new agricultural revolution, one which echoes the bumper yields of 1960-90, but without the associated environmental costs.


'The next 60 years will require as much food as we have ever produced in human history,' says Dr Megan Clark, chief executive of Australia's CSIRO and one of the high-powered coterie of scientific leaders spearheading the international food production reform effort.


In the same time frame, climate change threatens to erode productivity, with more frequent devastating droughts and floods forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.


Producing and distributing food through merely ratcheting up the scale and pace of existing systems is no solution. 'You've got agriculture now contributing on average around 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions - through land clearing, fertilisers etc,' Dr Clark says. More of the same risks a self-defeating spiral.  ---------------- "


(My note:  There is a lot more to this article.  Please use the link and read it.)


http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/opinion/comment/getting-food-on-the-table-the-plea-for-a-greener-revolution/2429132.aspx


tags:
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