U.N. Report Advocates Death of Corporate Agriculture

A "groundbreaking" U.N. report says we need to ditch corporate agriculture in order to feed the world's hungry masses.

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course -- and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

If you are highly skeptical of this idea, you have good reason to be. This has been tried in Zimbabwe where the despotic Mugabe regime seized white-owned commercial farms and broke them up into small lots.

Out of some 6,000 large white-owned commercial farms in 2000, less than 300 remain, with half of those facing eviction orders...

Here are the devastating results.

Just look at the figures:

Between 2000 and 2008, production of maize declined 79 per cent, wheat 90 per cent, soya beans 66 per cent, citrus 50 per cent, fresh produce 61 per cent, dairy 59 per cent, beef 67 per cent, coffee 92 per cent, tea 40 per cent. Only tobacco, a major foreign currency generator, has rebounded markedly in the last year from a nearly 80 per cent decline.