Posts from the ‘ Agriculture ’ Category

“It is not possible to know what is possible,” says Frances Moore Lappé, author of the best-seller Diet for a Small Planet and 18 other books on hunger, poverty and environmental crises.  The story of Yacouba Sawadogo, an indefatigable farmer in Burkina Faso in West Africa, is a striking testimony to this notion.  Burkina Faso lies in a region of Africa known as the Sahel, a semi-arid zone between the Sahara desert and the lush savannas of Central and Southern Africa.  From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, due to global warming, this region experienced the rapid encroachment of the Sahara desert.  This resulted in a famine that killed 100,000 people and left another 750,000 people on food aid.  Millions of residents in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mauritania abandoned their engulfed farms and moved to nearby cities, putting further pressures on resources. read more…

Over the past few decades, there has been a cloud around organic farming in India. The dominant perception has been that organic farms are more susceptible to infestation and are low yielding.  The perception is only natural.  India’s green revolution, which began in the 1960s, introduced high yielding hybrids of wheat and rice that saved the country from mass famine and provided tremendous food security.  However, these very hybrids required high levels of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to succeed. read more…