Sun shines on organic farming as oil stays high

Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 11 Jul 08;

IN BANGKOK - AT DAYCHA Siripatra's organic farm in central Thailand's Suphamburi province, storks sieve the mud and water, spearing snails in a rice field being readied for planting.

Red ants are busy in the grass and wasps - insect predators that keep 'bad' bugs in check - hum through the air.

Nature is in perfect balance as a man on a tractor does dogged rounds of the muddy field, churning the surface while Mr Daycha inspects rice seedlings to be planted soon in the fertile soil.

Without the aid of chemical fertilisers or pesticides, Mr Daycha, an organic food activist, has been able to achieve an average yield of 7 tonnes per hectare.

The harvest is comparable to yields achieved with the usual heavy doses of chemicals typical of agriculture today as the world's farms struggle to feed six billion people.

Organic farming has become a real alternative thanks to high oil prices, more discerning consumers and wariness of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Petroleum, which forms the basis of chemical fertiliser, has seen its price soaring, thus resulting in the current high price of agricultural produce - in particular grains.

For decades, organic rice has struggled for viability in a market dominated by big agribusinesses and farmers who, since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, have been fed the alleged wonders of the chemical quick fix. But that could finally be changing.

As rice prices shot up to 150 pesos (S$4.50) per kg recently in the Philippines, many in Mindanao's Davao City turned to locally grown organic rice which sells at 35 pesos per kg.

In five days in early June, storekeeper May Fabiolas of Bios Dynamis - a venture of the Don Bosco Foundation for Sustainable Development - sold around 100 bags of organic rice, close to a whole month's sales in normal times.

'There was a significant increase because of the affordability and people are also starting to recognise the importance of eating organic rice,' she told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The low prices were a consequence of the low price of inputs - 195 pesos per sack of organic fertiliser compared with 1,000 pesos per sack of urea fertiliser.

And organic farmers use their own traditional seeds rather than those produced by big corporations.

Activists like Mr Daycha and India's Vandana Shiva, who tirelessly crisscrosses the globe campaigning against what she says are the false promises of companies peddling GMOs, are at the forefront of the organic movement that is now gaining ground.

Mr Daycha has trained scores of farmers and maintains some 1,000 indigenous seeds on his farm.

The hybrid seeds of the Green Revolution came packaged with chemical inputs, he explains. In the process, farmers lost touch with their own indigenous rice growing traditions as well as the fundamentals of natural ecosystems.

'The farmers have lost everything,' Mr Daycha, 60, told The Straits Times. 'They have to put in more and more fertiliser, insecticide and herbicide; it never stops.

'We are a small number trying to develop appropriate technology to compete, and with a little effort we can work with nature and compete.'

Natural adaptation is far superior to artificial manipulation, he says. 'In order to control insect pests, we essentially do nothing. Nature has its own balance.'

Snails are controlled by birds and fish rather than by chemicals which kill much more than the snails.

After the harvest, rice stalks are ploughed into the waterlogged mud and in two weeks ferment with the aid of natural micro-organisms to become part of the soil.

Dr Shiva's Navdanya Farms in the foothills of the Himalayas was once the first and only source of organic produce in select New Delhi markets.

But the market is now growing. American consumers, for instance, spent US$2.7 billion (S$3.7 billion) on organic milk in 2007, up from US$382 million a decade earlier.

Says Dr Shiva: 'The most important thing about ecological farming is it is not about single commodity farming.

'Acre to acre, a small biodiverse farm produces more than an industrial chemical-intensive farm.'

And that includes all manner of food from fish to ducks and chickens, vegetables and fruit.

For years, big agribusiness corporations have been pushing their own seeds or GMOs, which are not adapted to local site-specific conditions and force farmers to buy other inputs from them.

As such, a generation of farmers has been fed the mantra of the technological fix and is 'locked into the paradigm of chemically supported agriculture', says Mr Daycha.

And ecological farming has not been accepted wholesale, as mainstream scientists remain cautious of the movement.

In an e-mail to The Straits Times, Mr Achim Dobermann, deputy director-general of research at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, wrote that successes in organic agriculture were difficult to scale up to millions of farmers.

'What we need is judicious use of those organic nutrient sources that are readily available and economical, and judicious use of mineral fertilisers,' he said.

Bangkok-based Sumiter Singh Broca, a policy officer with the Food and Agricultural Organisation, takes a more open but cautious view, acknowledging that natural pest management does work.

For Dr Shiva, the issue is simple: 'We need more production of food, and that is better done ecologically.'