Ditching the EU’s organic targets won’t ease the global food crisis | Letters

You report that the campaign group RePlanet has named for the European Union to ditch its natural and organic targets “in favour of conventional and intensive farming approaches for bigger productivity” (Halt use of biofuels to relieve foodstuff crisis, suggests inexperienced team, 13 July).

Nevertheless, its phone is primarily based on a myth: inspite of receiving significantly less than 1% of world agricultural exploration funding and just 5% of the $700bn in annual agricultural subsidies, agroecology procedures these types of as organic and natural farming are associated with as good and typically greater efficiency as effectively as increased biodiversity, resilience to climate shocks these types of as drought, diminished operating greenhouse gas emissions (a third of which are now manufactured by the food items system) and higher stages of atmospheric carbon absorbed back into soils.

With chemical fertiliser costs doubling or trebling, condemning European meals systems to dependency on hyper-pricey chemical inputs – much of them imported from major global chemical fertiliser exporters these kinds of as Russia and Belarus – can make about as much perception as tying our power method to hyper-highly-priced fossil fuels from the very same nations around the world when renewables have in no way been less expensive and solar power is now, in accordance to the Global Strength Agency, “the cheapest supply of electrical energy in heritage”.
Richard Ewbank
London