Subject: Re: Sustainable Ag Week - 7/1/94 (fwd)
From: [email-masked] (Lawrence F. London, Jr.)
Date: 4 Jul 1994 15:44:15 -0000
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 04 Jul 94 05:16 PDT
From:[email-masked]
To: "Recipients of conference susag.news" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Sustainable Ag Week - 7/1/94

Referring to "Sustainable Ag Week - 7/1/94" from [email-masked] on 
01.07.1994:
> Sustainable Agriculture Week
> July 1, 1994
> - ORGANIC TAKES ROOT IN MEXICO OUT OF NECESSITY

That is nice that more people seem to begin to understand this! 

Together with some campesinos and campesinas I started organic agriculture 
in a remote rainforest place in southeastern Nicaragua 12 years ago (first 
organic agriculture-project in Nicaragua!), and a lot of people always 
asked (especially visitors from Europe and Northern America, of course), 
whether it was a good idea to start such an exotic thing (Northern 
hippie ideas) in a Third World country, where people have the problem to 
produce enough to eat, and - as EVERYONE knows - organic agriculture 
produces less ... And they asked whether it was not a pretty luxurious 
idea to produce health food for starving children or so ...

It cost us a lot of time and effort to explain that we did not farm 
organically to produce healthfood, tolerating smaller harvests, but that we 
started the organic way for one main reason: to produce MORE.

The necessity of a destroyed agro-environment as it is the rainforest after 
20 years of unadequate cultivation (very often earlier!) is to be farmed 
organically (main accent on organic agroforestry under these 
circumstances); that is the only way to produce anything in the future, to 
improve yields and to come back to a stable agro-situation.

Our interim success after more or less 5 years of organic agroforestry was 
an increase in for instance corn yields of 100%, still growing, and  
campesino people in that region are working to improve this and to speed it 
up, for instance with additional green manure.

Therefore it is nice that Northern experts start to forget this stupid 
argument of organic agriculture producing less and organic agriculture in 
the Third World being a luxury idea or being done only for export to 
Northern health food markets. Organic agriculture is an answer to food 
shortage, which in the majority of cases is a result of bad Northern 
agricultural methods, applied without thinking to Third World conditions. 
(And of course of criminal economical habits, too.)

Gerd Schnepel
MAILBOX y Elba Rivera & Gerd Schnepel y CORREO ELECTRONICO
- auch/also/tambien [email-masked] & [email-masked]
- Fax +49-7157-7137
H_y_p_e_r_B_r_i_e_f_k_a_s_t_e_n