Is Organic Farming an Unjustified Luxury in a World with too many hungry People?

Summary

The soaring food prices on the global markets over the past one to two years have given proponents of classical Green Revolution thinking an opportunity to renew their claims that high input agriculture based on chemical fertilizer and pesticides is the blanket solution for poor countries and farmers. This situation has also led others to question whether we should abandon all the environmental considerations in agricultural policies over the last 25 years, and relieve the regulatory burden on agriculture, and put food production in full throttle like in the good old days in the 1970s. However, as always, the solutions proposed depend on the perception of the problem. In fact, there is little evidence that just producing more food in the North will help solve the food insecurity in the South in a sustainable way. Nor is it evident that returning to subsi-dized artificial fertilizers in the South would make any significant contribution to addressing the food insecurity among those communities of the South that are currently food insecure.