THE United Nations has recognised its global warming campaign is going cold and adopted a replacement cause, agroecology, that’s being masked as a “sustainable agriculture” movement. But the new strategy poses genuine threats to modern industrial farming methods and global food production, critical to feeding the world’s growing population, according to WA farmer Leon Bradley.
Mr Bradley, a long-serving member of the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of WA, is concerned about the UN’s latest attempts to find relevance, through startling claims unveiled by the UN Human Rights Council in March.
He says agroecology is being touted as the silver bullet for the looming increase in food demand but falls well short of the mark.
A new report from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food claims eco-farming by small scale farmers can double the world’s food production in ten years.
The study is based on an “extensive review” of recent scientific literature and calls for a fundamental shift towards agroecology to boost food production for the world’s poorest people.
“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available,” says the report’s author Olivier De Schutter.
“Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production where the hungry live - especially in unfavorable environments.”
Agroecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems, which the UN says can help put an end to food crises and address climate-change and poverty challenges.
The farming method enhances soil productivity and protects the crops against pests by relying on the natural environment such as beneficial trees, plants, animals and insects.
But Mr Bradley is not impressed by the report's suggestion that pre-industrial agriculture was a more sustainable food production method.
He said the report implied that the only hope for the world’s industrialised farmers was to revert to peasant farming systems and give up current practices involving the use of fertilisers, chemicals, machinery, fungicides, Genetically Modified crops and other proven production tools.
“This is a new strategy adopted by the UN because they know the global warming threat is not working any more,” he said.
“It’s an acknowledgement that they are copping a beating on global warming and now they are probably hedging their strategies, as the air leaks from the climate crisis balloon.
“It also demonstrates that there is no way to satisfy the demands of environmentalists, as their claims are inordinate and no concession will satisfy them.”
Mr Bradley said the UN claimed in 2003 there would be 50 million global climate refugees by the year 2010 but over the past decade that prediction had subsequently been proven wrong by 50 million.
Rather than losing population, all of those countries have increased their population numbers, he said.
Mr Bradley said the truth was slowly catching up with the UN and its doomsday climate change warnings, forcing them to move onto another agenda that potentially “could do just as much damage”.
The UN Human Rights Council released its Right to Food Report in Geneva on March 8.
Mr Bradley said the report would act as a catalyst for setting new strategies as the organisation moved “out from underneath the collapsing CO2 scare”.
Its new target is modernised farming methods but the alternative, sustainable farming, presents its own set of problematic issues, he said, in particular for lowering food productivity and increasing costs.
“If we abandon industrial farming it places the welfare of billions of people at risk of hunger and starvation,” he said.
“The resultant insufficiency of food supply will satisfy the UN’s agenda but will fill not bellies.”
In the report, Mr Bradley said the UN had “ramped up” the percentage of CO2 emitted by agriculture as a means of scaring politicians and paving the way for more Non Government Organisation (NGO) intervention throughout the world.
He said the previous estimate of world-wide, man-made CO2 emissions from agriculture was 20 percent but the UN was now claiming agriculture to be responsible for 40 to 50 percent.
But he said the UN’s calculations included food transportation and processing in its inflated figure.
“They want us to go back to back yard farming and use cow manure for fertiliser and chooks to kill the insects,” he said.
Mr Bradley said the Australian Federal government’s proposed carbon tax was an ideal example of irrational policy based on flawed logic, flowing from through from UN recommendations.
He said farmers and consumers could be “blown away” by the government if the decision making process was allowed to go unchecked and the UN’s flawed strategy implemented.
Mr Bradley said the UN would enlist the support of NGO’s, to operate as foot soldiers for its latest campaign to bring down modern farming and reduce food productivity.
He warned that NGO’s like Greenpeace would insert themselves in the government’s regulatory processes and bypass democratic citizens’ processes, to carry out the strategy.
“If anyone took any notice of this it would be a substantial threat,” he said.
“NGO’s like Greenpeace are very effective at driving up costs and inhibiting the world’s ability to produce an abundance of food at a lower cost.”
In commenting on the release of his report, Mr De Schutter said agroecological projects had shown an average crop yield increase of 80 percent in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116pc for all African projects.
He said recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3-10 years.
“Conventional farming relies on expensive inputs, fuels climate change and is not resilient to climatic shocks, De Schutter said.
“It simply is not the best choice anymore today.
“A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the positive impacts of agroecology on food production, poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation and this is what is needed in a world of limited resources.
“Malawi, a country that launched a massive chemical fertilizer subsidy program a few years ago, is now implementing agroecology, benefiting more than 1.3 million of the poorest people, with maize yields increasing from 1 ton/ha to 2-3 tons/ha.”
The report also says projects in Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh recorded up to 92pc reduction in insecticide use for rice, leading to important savings for poor farmers.
Mr De Schutter said the farming approach was also gaining ground in developed countries such as the US, Germany or France.
However, he said despite its impressive potential in realising the right to food for all, agroecology was still insufficiently backed by ambitious public policies and consequently “hardly goes beyond the experimental stage”.
The PGA said if agroecology was producing better results than conventional agriculture, public policies would not be necessary to promote its uptake.
Mr De Schutter said hunger and climate change would not be solved with industrial farming on large plantations.
He said the solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.
“If key stakeholders support the measures identified in the report, we can see a doubling of food production within five to 10 years in some regions where the hungry live,” he said.
“Whether or not we will succeed this transition will depend on our ability to learn faster from recent innovations.
“We need to go fast if we want to avoid repeated food and climate disasters in the 21st century.”
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