• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2025

help-circle


  • Another reason to why we should be depaving and creating sustainable organic agriculture everywhere

    “The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture uses 10 times more energy than it produces. It uses 10 times more water than biodiverse farming with water-prudent crops and organic practices use. In fact, when assessed from nature’s economy, biodiverse, ecological farms have much higher productivity than large-scale, industrial, monoculture farms. The illusion of efficiency is produced by externalizing the ecological costs.” / “…a polyculture [crop diversity] system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5,900 units of food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them. A common argument used to promote industrial agriculture is that only it and industrial breeding can maintain the increased food productivity needed for a growing population. However, since resources, not labor, are the limiting actor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labor productivity, which is the relevant measure. What is needed is more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. A 66-fold decrease of food producing capacity in the context of resources use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water, and biodiversity to feed the world.” (from the book “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace” by Vandana Shiva)