Despite growing concerns over high food prices due to current agricultural practices unable to meet demand, can we ever redesign our global agricultural industry to be more Earth-friendly while increasing yields to meet future demands?
By: Ringo Bones
The first quarter of 2008 will probably forever be remembered for incidents of food riots that occurred in various parts of the world due to escalating food prices. A number of factors are to blame like the NYSE ‘s shift from futures trading of food crops to commodities trading which made food prices open to speculative trading “abuse”. Then there’s the recently increased food demand from China and India due to a growing middle class that’s recently blessed with increased purchasing power ready to outbid their poorer brethren. The largely ill conceived biofuels industry backed up by the vested interest of political lobbyist has also been diverting food crops from the world’s poor to the rich man’s car. Unfair and price distorting trade practices like agricultural subsidies are also to blame. But most of all, the root cause of our agricultural industry unable to meet growing demand and keeping food prices reasonable is the lack of farming investments since 1998. Agricultural science has since languished due to lack of investment funds, not to mention the funds just needed to upgrade the agricultural technology that we already have just to maintain global food security.
Farming and agricultural science has always been perceived as “unsexy”, that’s why scientists that had great contributions to the science of food production had been denied the fame they rightfully deserved despite getting accolades like Nobel Prizes and such. This is the reason why George Washington Carver (pioneering research made America one of the world’s largest potato producer) and Norman Borlaug (father of the post-WWII Green Revolution) are about as well known as Nikola Tesla (invented AC mains electricity) and Alfred Wegener (first to theorize about continental drift). Especially in most American public schools. But can we make our existing food production practices more Earth-friendly by making it less mechanized and dependent on agricultural chemicals while increasing yields? And the thorniest question of all, should we abandon genetically modified crops because they’re use is too risky for the environment despite their manufacturer’s claim of safety?
Maybe its high time for agricultural science to develop agricultural technologies that require little or no use of farm chemicals that have an adverse effect on the environment. Nutrient-bloom inducing fertilizers that contaminate rivers and groundwater tables are a case in point. Not to mention pesticides and weed killers that are lethal to both pests and symbiotic organisms. Though genetically engineered food crops might seem a sensible choice, it’s the company that’s presently has a monopoly on them – namely the Monsanto Company – that might prevent GM crops from ever becoming commonplace. The reason behind the overwhelming majority of people resisting GM crops is mostly due to Monsanto’s “sins committed during the Vietnam War” by producing the defoliant Agent Orange whose unforeseen side-effects on both people and the environment still linger till this day. Thus making Monsanto currently one of the most hated companies on the face of the planet.
Despite of the daunting obstacles, we can always be optimistic because science had always rescued us from impending doom, even ones that are of our own making. If we haven’t developed ways to extract heating oil from crude oil, whales would have been hunted virtually to extinction long ago. But now, the race is on to end our addiction to crude oil from ruining our delicate climate.
Without the first “Green Revolution” which was spearheaded by Norman Borlaug, billions of people would have died unnecessarily during the 20th Century. And yet the race to technologically develop the next Green Revolution that’s kinder and gentler to our environment while keeping the whole or humanity reasonably fed has just reluctantly been started. Like in the various organic agriculture / organic farming schemes throughout the world.
Showing posts with label Agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agriculture. Show all posts
Monday, September 29, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
Of Salinization and Agricultural Land Mismanagement
Despite the 5,000 year –or so – history of agriculture, does our contemporary agricultural community take heed on the lessons learned from the past on the causes of agricultural topsoil salinization?
By: Ringo Bones and Vanessa Uy
The serious – though preventable – problem of agricultural topsoil salinization is as old as the practice of agriculture itself, it seems like we at the present are not trying as hard as we should in preventing such problems. Especially by ignoring on what we had learned in the past about the phenomena of salinization and doing it in our peril. Is the problem still relevant in 2008 given we had learned so much before?
The Girsu Documents of southern Iran, which dates back 4,300 years, showed accounts on the progressive salinization of cultivated lands. The documents mentioned how the rich farmlands of Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, were ruined by irrigating them using the brackish water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Wheat was once cultivated on a large scale but by 2,400 BC farmers turned to barley, which is more salt tolerant, as an alternative crop. Seasonal floods, which raised the water table, increasingly salted the topsoil. By 2,000 BC, even barley began to fail. Eventually the land was abandoned and the water table dropped, leaving a salt saturated desert where no crops can grow.
Typical of the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Middle East, as in any dry area, there is relatively prodigious amount of salt in the ground because rain water, or even water in the surface soil, evaporates before the salty minerals has a chance to leach out. Therefore, any rise in the water table will lift up the salty water up to the surface soil. Seasonal floods, which cover large areas with standing water, can also cause such a rise. Our “start up” farming methods of centuries past has actively created such a situation in arid regions for centuries by digging a number of irrigation canals which continually silt up and overflow onto the surrounding land. Furthermore, in very hot and arid lands, the thirsty soil can actually suck up salty water from below via capillary action during the long, dry spells.
Despite the great havoc wreaked on the land before we learned better agricultural management, there is still hope that some areas – seemingly beyond salvation – may yet be brought back to full productivity via proper irrigation. A cause for hope is the fact that in most arid regions, rain has not yet leached the valuable surface minerals from the topsoil. At the same time, however, there is a concern that conventional irrigation methods will raise the water table and in doing so bring increasing amounts of harmful salt to the fertile surface through capillary action.
Years ago, a program was tried in Afghanistan (this was before the Soviet invasion and the subsequent Taliban takeovers) to combat and reverse salinization by flushing the fields with water to wash out the crystallized salt. And also deep drainage ditches were dug to assure that the water table stays below a safe minimum. Additionally, tamarisk trees were also planted. Tamarisk trees are salt tolerant plants and are being used to restore Afghan soil and these trees also sop up excess water thus guarding against further salinization.
The agricultural regions surrounding the Aral Sea and the Aral Sea itself was also a relatively recent victim of agricultural farmland mismanagement. Several rivers that fed the Aral Sea were diverted by the then Soviet Union to cotton fields used in the large scale production of nitrocellulose or guncotton (smokeless powder) to beef up the nation’s Cold War era arsenal. It was only in the last couple of years or so that existing programs were seriously involved in restoring the Aral Sea and the surrounding communities. Like the International Aral Sea Rehabilitation Fund – have shown favorable progress. But their work won’t be easy because the agricultural lands surrounding the Aral Sea not only suffer from salinization, but also contaminated with toxic pesticide residue left over from the chemically intensive Soviet era agricultural methods.
By: Ringo Bones and Vanessa Uy
The serious – though preventable – problem of agricultural topsoil salinization is as old as the practice of agriculture itself, it seems like we at the present are not trying as hard as we should in preventing such problems. Especially by ignoring on what we had learned in the past about the phenomena of salinization and doing it in our peril. Is the problem still relevant in 2008 given we had learned so much before?
The Girsu Documents of southern Iran, which dates back 4,300 years, showed accounts on the progressive salinization of cultivated lands. The documents mentioned how the rich farmlands of Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, were ruined by irrigating them using the brackish water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Wheat was once cultivated on a large scale but by 2,400 BC farmers turned to barley, which is more salt tolerant, as an alternative crop. Seasonal floods, which raised the water table, increasingly salted the topsoil. By 2,000 BC, even barley began to fail. Eventually the land was abandoned and the water table dropped, leaving a salt saturated desert where no crops can grow.
Typical of the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Middle East, as in any dry area, there is relatively prodigious amount of salt in the ground because rain water, or even water in the surface soil, evaporates before the salty minerals has a chance to leach out. Therefore, any rise in the water table will lift up the salty water up to the surface soil. Seasonal floods, which cover large areas with standing water, can also cause such a rise. Our “start up” farming methods of centuries past has actively created such a situation in arid regions for centuries by digging a number of irrigation canals which continually silt up and overflow onto the surrounding land. Furthermore, in very hot and arid lands, the thirsty soil can actually suck up salty water from below via capillary action during the long, dry spells.
Despite the great havoc wreaked on the land before we learned better agricultural management, there is still hope that some areas – seemingly beyond salvation – may yet be brought back to full productivity via proper irrigation. A cause for hope is the fact that in most arid regions, rain has not yet leached the valuable surface minerals from the topsoil. At the same time, however, there is a concern that conventional irrigation methods will raise the water table and in doing so bring increasing amounts of harmful salt to the fertile surface through capillary action.
Years ago, a program was tried in Afghanistan (this was before the Soviet invasion and the subsequent Taliban takeovers) to combat and reverse salinization by flushing the fields with water to wash out the crystallized salt. And also deep drainage ditches were dug to assure that the water table stays below a safe minimum. Additionally, tamarisk trees were also planted. Tamarisk trees are salt tolerant plants and are being used to restore Afghan soil and these trees also sop up excess water thus guarding against further salinization.
The agricultural regions surrounding the Aral Sea and the Aral Sea itself was also a relatively recent victim of agricultural farmland mismanagement. Several rivers that fed the Aral Sea were diverted by the then Soviet Union to cotton fields used in the large scale production of nitrocellulose or guncotton (smokeless powder) to beef up the nation’s Cold War era arsenal. It was only in the last couple of years or so that existing programs were seriously involved in restoring the Aral Sea and the surrounding communities. Like the International Aral Sea Rehabilitation Fund – have shown favorable progress. But their work won’t be easy because the agricultural lands surrounding the Aral Sea not only suffer from salinization, but also contaminated with toxic pesticide residue left over from the chemically intensive Soviet era agricultural methods.
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