GM Cassava to help Africa's poor.

[chimpkin]

Organic agriculture is how almost everybody farmed until the mid twentieth century. It works just fine.

Hmm, from what I can tell, the answer as to why the starving millions aren't fed is politics, not lack of production capacity:

The world's food supply is abundant, not scarce. The world production of grain and many other foods is sufficient to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day... According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 78 percent of all malnourished children aged under five live in countries with food surpluses (in 1997).

http://www.psrast.org/nowohu.htm

And earlier I noted 80% of the grain produced in the US gets fed to livestock, which most people probably consume more of here than is good for them.

Organic *does*, in some cases, require crop rotation: fallowing, usually one year out of four. This is how Europe went from having poor rocky soil to really good soil, over lifetimes. If someone knows if there's been a way developed to get around the need to fallow a field...

I note we started out with wonderful topsoil and have about six inches of it left in many places.

 

[Skeptical]

iceaura

Modern organic agriculture is quite different. Sure, it works just fine. So does conventional. They have different advantages. Organic is cheaper for small scale farmers such as Africans. It produces much greater profits, which is great for the multi-national multi-billion dollar corporate food companies that produce most of the organic food in the west.

Chimpkin

The reason certain people starve is not lack of food. It is lack of money to buy food. Sending American food surpluses to Africa will not solve the problem, since the Africans cannot buy it. American farmers, transport operators etc will not send it without payment.

 

[iceaura]

If someone knows if there's been a way developed to get around the need to fallow a field...

The observation that natural prairie needs no fallowing to be productive - more productive than a field of corn - leads to the suggestion that mixed cropping and inter-larded "rotation" might fill the role.

Among others, there's a guy in the midwest named Wes Jackson who has been trying to figure out this approach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wes_Jackson