Soil Not Oil: Why We Need to Kick Petroleum Out of Our Farms

By Vandana Shiva, South End Press. Posted December 3, 2008.

Diversity and decentralization are the dual principles needed to build economies beyond oil and to deal with the climate vulnerability that is the legacy of the age of oil. In addition to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, biodiverse organic farming also produces more food and higher incomes. As David Pimentel has pointed out: "Organic farming approaches for maize and beans in the US not only use an average of 30% less fossil energy but also conserve more water in the soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality, and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does."

After Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998, farmers who practiced biodiverse organic farming found they had suffered less damage than those who practiced chemical agriculture. The ecologically farmed plots had on average more topsoil, greater soil moisture, and less erosion, and the farmers experienced less severe economic losses.

Fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture moves carbon from the soil to the atmosphere. Ecological agriculture takes carbon from the atmosphere and puts it back in the soil. If 10,000 medium-sized US farms converted to organic farming, the emissions reduction would be equivalent to removing over 1 million cars from the road. If all US croplands became organic it would increase soil-carbon storage by 367 million tons and would cut nitrogen oxide emissions dramatically. Organic agriculture contributes directly and indirectly to reducing CO2 emissions and mitigating the negative consequences of climate change.

Navdanya's work over the past 20 years has shown that we can grow more food and provide higher incomes to farmers without destroying the environment and killing peasants. We can lower the costs of production while increasing output. We have done this successfully on thousands of farms and have created a fair, just, and sustainable economy. The epidemic of farmer suicides in India is concentrated in regions where chemical intensification has increased costs of production. Farmers in these regions have become dependent on non-renewable seeds, and monoculture cash-crops are facing a decline in prices due to globalization. This is affecting farmers' incomes, leading to debt and suicides. High costs of production are the most significant reason for rural indebtedness.

Biodiverse organic farming creates a debt-free, suicide-free, productive alternative to industrialized corporate agriculture and brings about a number of benefits. It leads to increased farm productivity and farm incomes, while lowering costs of production. Pesticide-free and chemical-free production and processing bring safe and healthy food to consumers. We must protect the environment, farmers' livelihoods, public health, and people's right to food.

We do not need to go the Monsanto way. We can go the Navdanya way. We do not need to end up in food dictatorship and food slavery. We can create our food freedom. Biodiverse, organic, and local food systems help mitigate climate change by lowering greenhouse gas emissions and increasing absorption of CO2 by plants and by the soil.

Organic farming is based on the recycling of organic matter; industrial agriculture is based on chemical fertilizers that emit nitrous oxides. Industrial agriculture dispossesses small farmers and converts small farms to large holdings that need mechanization, which further contributes to CO2 emissions. Small, biodiverse, organic farms, especially in third world countries, can be totally fossil fuel-free. The energy for farming operations comes from animals.

Soil fertility is built by recycling organic matter to feed soil organisms. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiverse systems are also more resilient to droughts and floods because they have a higher water-holding capacity, making them more adaptable to the effects of climate change. Navdanya's study on climate change and organic farming has indicated that organic farming increases carbon absorption by up to 55 percent and water-holding capacity by 10 percent.

The environmental advantages of small-scale, biodiverse organic farms do not come at the expense of food security. Biodiverse organic farms produce more food and higher incomes than industrial monocultures. Mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and increasing food security go hand in hand.

The conventional measures of productivity focus on labor as the major input (and the direct labor on the farm at that) and externalize many energy and resource inputs. This biased productivity pushes farmers off the land and replaces them with chemicals and machines, which in turn contribute to greenhouse gases and climate change. Further, industrial agriculture focuses on producing a single crop that can be globally traded as a commodity. The focus on "yield" of individual commodities creates what I have called a "monoculture of the mind." The promotion of so-called high-yielding varieties leads to the displacement of biodiversity. It also destroys the ecological functions of biodiversity. The loss of diverse outputs is never taken into account by the one-dimensional calculus of productivity.

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Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science,

Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books.

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