What is, or will be, “an overhyped footnote in the history books?”
The answer, according to a powerful piece by Anna Lappé in the Journal “Foreign Policy” is “industrial agriculture”
And what is the future? “Agroecological agriculture”.
Why? Because with agroecological approaches, “farmers gain knowledge, including knowledge about ways to adapt to changing climate and to share their knowledge with each other. Farmers become less dependent on distant, centralized suppliers of high-priced biotech seeds and chemical inputs and therefore less vulnerable to their notoriously unstable prices. Though perhaps harder to measure, this independence may be the most critical advantages of agroecological farming.“
Independent farmers! Now you're talking. Ms Lappé's piece is a thunderous riposte to a piece of flummery by Robert Paarlberg in the same journal, entitled “Attention Whole Foods shoppers”. It only takes Ms Lappé a few hundred words to show that black is black and white is white. Mighty stuff.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/29/dont_panic_go_organic?page=0,0
