...and let Monsanto & brethren destroy the soil with pesticides/chemicals, destroy traditional seed sharing, sue farmers for GMO drift, drive local farmers out of business, and help destroy the planet by carting Frankenfoods for thousands of miles at huge expense in oil and pollution, when they aren't' converting arable land to pesticide/chem-poisoned biofuel crops.
Yes, Monsanto is going to feed the world. Not.
Organic and peasant farmers know more about the forests than you do. They are not the ones destroying forests! Agricultural diversity--40 varieties of potato, for instance--goes hand in hand with forest and other eco-system diversity. Organic farmers and traditional farmers know this better than anybody--the benefits of a diverse system, with forests stabilizing soils and regulating water flow, and forests and meadows providing companion plants--herbs, bee pollination plants, plants that deter pests--to aid crops, and the interconnections of these diverse plants--wild and farmed--with a diverse population of birds, insects and other critters. It is only on Monsanto farms that you see acres and acres of monoculture and lack of diversity.
And you obviously haven't read Michael Pollen's "The Botany of Desire" or any account of the meaning of potato diversity in a thousand years of agriculture in the Andes. If the Irish poor had only known what they were doing by planting only one kind of potato!
As for organic farmers "developing techniques to increase yield," they are already doing so in many places by adopting practices learned from traditional farmers, such as the restoration of healthy soil, good water management, seed saving and seed diversity and natural disease prevention. And you can help them out by buying your produce at your local Farmers' Market! You'll get much better taste and much better nourishment than you will ever get from food that has traveled too far and was not grown in healthy soils to begin with. Or encourage your supermarket to provide local organic food. Many supermarkets are starting to do so. It's in your self-interest to buy local organic food, as to taste and health. And the more healthy local food you buy, the more your local farmers can produce.
You can also start your own veggie garden. Even just a window box can produce beautiful, exceptionally tasty vegetables, if you attend to the soil and companion plants. Nothing like a homegrown tomato! It is truly a bit of paradise to taste one. If you grow too much of one crop, trade it with a neighbor for something else. Plant a fruit tree, if you have the room. Nothing like picking an apple or a peach right off the tree.
Why criticize others who are doing no harm and doing much good? It is senseless. Organic and peasant farmers do NOT clear-cut forests, damage streams and fish habitat, blight forest soils with pesticides, destroy moisture-conserving and carbon-conserving old growth and create monoculture 'forests' (plantations of little trees). They respect the forest-agriculture connection, which has been going on now for about 10,000 years. All traditional farmers know of this connection. It is transglobal corporations that come through with bulldozers, feller-bunchers and poisons! Just as it is transglobal corporations that are gobbling up arable land for biofuel production, and destroying that land. I have a friend from Honduras who owns farm land in Honduras and told me of the dreadful practices of palm oil plantations, which leave the soil dead. DEAD!
Criticize THAT--not poor farmers who are trying to do the right thing by seed-saving! Poor farmers who have luckily inherited knowledge of seed diversity and seed saving from their parents and grandparents back many generations. They KNOW what this means. They know how important it is. Our culture has stripped people of this vital knowledge, and we need to re-learn it. My husband had one grandparent, originally from Italy, who understood things like this, and was a fabulous food gardener. But every other parent and grandparent in my family had lost this knowledge. It is a huge cultural loss, and one that threatens our health, the world food chain and the planet itself. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are KILLING the soil--not to mention ocean life--and global transportation of food is helping to kill the planet itself. We MUST re-learn how to create healthy, local food systems, which absolutely goes hand-in-hand with forest and stream restoration where greedbags have destroyed those parts of the local ecology and its diversity.
Many small farms is how we will feed the world--with each community and region growing its own--as the transglobal corporate system collapses, which it is well on its way to doing. If we still have a viable planet by the end of this century, that is what future people will experience: small farms everywhere, in both urban and rural areas, beautifully diverse farms and gardens, with many streams and forests in rural areas, and many orchards and tree windbreaks and tree water protectors where feasible in urban areas. That is what has to happen if the human race is to survive. The peasant farmer movement in Latin America and parts of Asia is the beginning of it--the restoration of a viable food system like the one that created and sustained human civilization for ten thousand years, prior to the last century.
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