The Economist on ‘Fair Trade’ by Dan Mitchell, New York Times

[applegrove]

The Economist on ‘Fair Trade’
By DAN MITCHELL
New York Times
Published: December 16, 2006

"BUY organic, destroy the rainforest,” The Economist said last week, eliciting howls of protest from food-activist bloggers (economist.com).

.............SKIP

Organic farming uses “several times as much land as is currently cultivated,” which is a net loss for the environment, the article states. If the world’s farms all switched to organic production, there “wouldn’t be much room left for the rainforest.”

“Nonsense,” wrote Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University who writes the blog U.S. Food Policy. Mr. Wilde was less than convinced by the scant evidence the magazine offered for its conclusion that organic farming destroys rain forests (usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com).

“This is a recycled version of the argument the agro-business-funded Hudson Institute has been making for years,” wrote Samuel Fromartz in the comments section of Gristmill, a blog about the environment (gristmill.grist.org).


.....SNIP"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/business/16online.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[Warpy]

1. The unnamed author is ASSuming a lot

For instance, he's ASSuming there will be no pest control, ASSuming there will not be adequate fertilizer if chemicals are dropped, and ASSuming organically cultivated plants will be starved by the proliferation of weeds in the absence of herbicides.

Exactly the opposite has been true for farmers who have switched to the organic methods. Yields per acre have actually increased slightly once the organic system has been well established. The land is improved year to year once it's no longer been "mined." Beneficial insects and birds take care of the pests. The weeds are controlled by mechanical means.

Dont'cha just love it when conservatives try to threaten disaster by speaking from ignorance?

[applegrove]

2. The economist doesn't always take such the conservative side. What

a let down. To be parroting something from a right wing think tank.

[Warpy]

3. If he'd been confining his remarks to the Amazon basin

he might have had a point, albeit a convoluted one.

The only way the extremely poor rainforest soil can possibly be farmed for more than two seasons is through chemical agriculture. The soil is thin and extremely poor. Slash and burn farming only manages two or three crops before the soil gives out and the farmers have to move on to slash and burn some more.

The only things that grow well in that region are the indigenous plants.

[applegrove]

4. I agree. Places like the USA or China have hundreds of feet of soil

to dig up and till. In the Southern Hemisphere they often have just inches.