The question of nutrition and environmental protection

The Swiss agricultural scientist Urs Niggli rejects the idea that the high price segment “organic” in the field of nutrition is at the expense of the nutritional basis of the world’s poor (“No people are starving in Africa because we eat organic products”, in: “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” of 8 August 2022).
  In the meantime – to give an example – almost 20 million hectares of the best Ukrainian soils are being used by Western investors with state-of-the-art technology to export cheap grain to the Maghreb and Africa. The World Agricultural Report of 2008 criticises this development, which, starting from agrarian priority areas with the most modern technology, damages indigenous agriculture in the Maghreb and Africa and thus destroys previous forms of local supply.
  This has created the vulnerabilities to disruption that are now playing out, for example, in the Ukraine war. However, one should not only mention the war in Ukraine, but also the destruction of Iraqi grain crops in the Iraq war, the destruction in Libya and Syria, especially since the agriculture of these countries was not only damaged by cheap imports, but also directly and specifically by military means.
  The question of nutrition is linked to the question of ecology. This is not only about the deterioration of the natural bases of production in connection with the global underpayment of agriculture, but also about the climate as one of the repercussions that show the unsustainable use of the economic bases of production and life.
  The question is, why not start with the obvious possibilities of social and economic reorganisation in favour of sufficient incomes for peasant agriculture or with the recultivation of the destroyed natural basis (greening of deserts)? The proposal to genetically reorganise nature instead is surprisingly “conventional.”  •