Ardent promoters of organic farming consider that present day organic agriculture, which is a mix of traditional wisdom and modern science, can herald the complete development of rural areas, especially in developing countries like India where the large chunk of farmers are small, with minimal resources and limited access to water. As per the International Federation for Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) “Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people; combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved”. Organic agriculture is thus based on four principles:
Principle of health: It should sustain and enhance the health of soil, plant, animal, human and planet as one and indivisible.
Principle of ecology: It should be based on living ecological systems and cycles, work with them, emulate them and help sustain them.
Principle of fairness: It should build on relationships that ensure fairness with regard to the common environment and life opportunities.
Principle of care: It should be managed in a precautionary and responsible manner to protect the health and well-being of current and future generations.
The World of Organic Agriculture: According to latest FiBL-IFOAM survey by H Willer, et al., 2013, ‘The World of Organic Agriculture: Statistics and Emerging Trends’, organic agriculture is being practiced on 37.2 mha in 162 countries (0.9 per cent of total agricultural land). Apart from agricultural land, there are further organic areas, most of these being areas of wild collection—aquaculture, forests, and grazing areas on nonagricultural land. They constitute 32.5 mha. In total, 69.7 mha (agricultural and non-agricultural areas) are organic. There were 1.8 million producers in 2011. Thirty-four per cent of the world’s organic producers are in Asia, followed by Africa (30 per cent), and Europe (16 per cent). The countries with the most farmers are India (547591, 2012), Uganda (188625, 2010), and Mexico (169570, 2010) (ibid.). Organic food and beverage market was worth 63 billion US dollars in 2011. Demand for organic products is mainly in North America and Europe; these two regions comprise more than 90 per cent of sales with US being the single largest market.
Organic Agriculture in India: By March 2012, India had brought approximately 5.56 mha land under organic certification process with major share of 4.48 mha under wild harvest collection in forests and 1.08 mha under regular cultivation, spread over almost all states and union territories. In all 5.47 lakh farmers and wild collectors have produced approximately 2.8 mt of more than 250 organic commodities valued at Rs. 5000 crores. Organic cotton and its value added products, basmati rice, soybean, sugar, tea, honey, spices and dry fruits are important categories being exported to other countries. During the year 2011, India was the second largest exporter of organic tea, after China, 6th largest exporter of organic soybeans and 7th largest exporter of organic sugar.
Organic Agriculture and Productivity: Since the advent of organic farming in the recent years there had been concerns on the production potential of the system. But the results of long term experiments released during the last 10 years from world over have proved otherwise. In irrigated conditions organic farming may be yielding 5 to 12 per cent less than their conventional counterparts but under rain-fed and water deficit conditions organic system yields 7 to 15 per cent more.
Six years of experimenting, comparing two models of organic management with only-chemical and chemical-and-organic combination under 4 crop husbandry systems was undertaken at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). The study titled ‘Evaluation of crop production systems using locally available biological inputs’, by O P Rupela, et al. in 2006, published in Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems, revealed that although, maximisation of yields can be achieved by the combined use of chemical fertilisers and organic inputs/practices (integrated agriculture), but this combination may not be affordable for small and marginal farmers in rain-fed areas (Fig. 1 and 2).
The low cost organic approaches can be an attractive choice, particularly when their strategic application results in yield levels at par with conventional system. The two organic models studied in the experiment yielded comparable results, and were in fact 25 per cent more profitable than the conventional system. Pest and disease management was also effective and low cost with biological approaches. Soil fertility and soil nutrient balance was certainly on a significantly higher side in organic system and offer longer sustainability under Indian conditions, typical of small and marginal farmers.
Reviewing 154 growing seasons’ worth of data (B Halweil, 2006, ‘Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?’, World Watch Magazine) on various crops grown on rain-fed and irrigated land in the United States, University of California, agricultural scientist Bill Liebhardt found that organic corn yields were 94 per cent of conventional yields, organic wheat yields were 97 per cent, and organic soybean yields were 94 per cent. Organic tomatoes showed no yield difference. More importantly, in the poorer nations where most of the world’s hungry live, the yield gaps completely disappear. University of Essex researchers Jules Pretty and Rachel Hine looked at over 200 agricultural projects in the developing world that converted to organic and ecological approaches, and found that for all the projects—involving 9 million farms on nearly 30 mha, yields increased an average of 93 per cent.
A seven-year study from Maikaal project in Khargone District in central India (J Frank et al., 2009, ‘The Impact of Organic Cotton Farming on the Livelihoods of Smallholders – Evidence from the Maikaal bioRe project in Central India’, Organic Farming Newsletter) involving 1,000 farmers, cultivating 3,200 hectares found that average yields for cotton, wheat, chili, and soybean were as much as 20 per cent higher on the organic farms than on nearby conventionally managed ones. Farmers and agricultural scientists ascribed the higher yields in the dry region to the emphasis on cover crops, compost, manure, and other practices that increased organic matter, helping the retention of water in the soils apart from providing adequate nutrients.
Organic Agriculture and Profitability: Recently a study was conducted in Maharashtra to assess the impact of organic farming on economics of sugarcane cultivation in Maharashtra (K G Kshirsagar, 2007, ‘Impact of Organic Sugarcane Farming on Economics and Water Use Efficiency in Maharashtra’, Artha Vijnana). The research was based on primary data collected from two districts covering 142 farmers, 72 growing organic sugarcane and 70 growing inorganic sugarcane. The study found that organic cultivation enhances human labour employment by 16.9 per cent and cost of cultivation is lower by 14.24 per cent as compared to conventional farming. Although the yield from the organic crop was 6.79 per cent lower than the conventional crop, it was more than compensated by the price premium received and yield stability observed on organic farms.
In a paper by Tej Pratap et al., 2009, titled ‘Organic Farmers Speak on Economics and Beyond’, Westville Publishing House; based on a nationwide survey of organic farmers indicates favourable economics through a cost-benefit analysis. Farmers in 5 out of 7 states are better placed so far as organic farming is concerned. The returns are higher in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. In Karnataka organic farmers had 4-35 per cent higher returns. In Kerala the differentials ranged between 4-37 per cent in favour of inorganic farmers. In Maharashtra the difference in net profit was more than 100 per cent in case of soybean. Cotton farmers were enjoying a comfortable profit margin. The profit differential in Rajasthan ranged from 12-59 per cent in favour of organic farmers. In another study by Ramesh et al., 2010, ‘Status of organic farming in India: Productivity vs Profitability’, Current Science; it has been reported that, although the productivity of crops in organic farming is lower by 9.2 per cent compared to conventional farming, there was a significant reduction in the average cost of cultivation by 11.7 per cent compared to conventional farming.
Conventionalisation of Organic agriculture: Since its re-emergence during the last decade of the twentieth century, organic agriculture was promoted as a self generating and self sustaining enterprise with total reliance on on-farm resources coupled with practices like crop rotations, inter-cropping, multi-cropping, integration of legumes in cropping systems and integration of cattle. But of late, in its quest to compete with the conventional agriculture in terms of productivity and to make the practices relevant to present day scenario, the system has started accepting the importance of off-farm inputs and use of industry produced inputs in the form of commercially produced composts, biostimulants, botanical extracts, biofertilisers and biopesticides etc. To cater to the growing demand, a new set of organic input industry has started to grow. The trend might have added to the acceptability of the system by farmers and policy makers, but it is a matter of concern for the original promoters of the organic, in whose wisdom it is a natural cycles based, natural resource dependent and self generating production enterprise.
Ardent promoters of organic farming term it as conventionalisation of organic agriculture and caution that with such developments, organic farming may transform into a slightly modified version of modern conventional agriculture, replicating the same history, resulting in many of the same social, technical and economic ills. Conventionalisation of organic farming is now increasingly seen as problematic, since organic farming has received public support for its potential to contribute to environmental protection and rural development. However, if organic farming increasingly comes to resemble conventional farming and this potential contribution is jeopardised, organic farming may lose the support it currently receives from both consumers and policy makers.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.