You report that the marketing campaign group RePlanet has named for the European Union to ditch its natural targets “in favour of conventional and intensive farming procedures for larger productivity” (Halt use of biofuels to simplicity food disaster, suggests inexperienced group, 13 July).
Nonetheless, its get in touch with is primarily based on a myth: in spite of obtaining less than 1% of world wide agricultural exploration funding and just 5% of the $700bn in yearly agricultural subsidies, agroecology methods these kinds of as organic farming are connected with as great and usually greater productiveness as well as enhanced biodiversity, resilience to local climate shocks these kinds of as drought, decreased working greenhouse gasoline emissions (a third of which are now developed by the foodstuff system) and higher stages of atmospheric carbon absorbed back into soils.
With chemical fertiliser costs doubling or trebling, condemning European meals devices to dependency on hyper-high priced chemical inputs – substantially of them imported from major global chemical fertiliser exporters this sort of as Russia and Belarus – can make about as considerably feeling as tying our vitality process to hyper-high priced fossil fuels from the exact nations when renewables have in no way been more affordable and photo voltaic power is now, in accordance to the International Electricity Agency, “the least expensive resource of electric power in history”.
Richard Ewbank
London