Word: corns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Joseph Odiambo walks decisively past eight plots of corn and comes to a stop in front of the ninth. Where the other plants towered sugar-cane thick with broad crisp blades, here the plants are skinny and stunted, draped with yellow-tinged leaves. The contrast is deliberate, an advertisement for the wares Odiambo sells from his roadside supply shop in western Kenya. While the shopkeeper's robust plots were planted with commercial seed and carefully nurtured with inorganic fertilizer, his sickly specimens are the result of seeds sown in the bare ground. "We wanted to have a control plot...
...case for organic farming is a strong one. A 22-year study led by David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, that was published in 2005, found that organic farms produced just as much corn and soybeans as conventional farms. While they required more labor, the cost was more than offset by savings in commercial nitrogen, insecticides and herbicides. In Africa, where labor is cheap and capital scarce, the benefits would be magnified. According to Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, past green revolutions boosted production of wheat and rice at the expense of other food. Using land...
...hasn't changed in over a century is a feature, not a bug. It provides an opportunity to replace industrial farming with organic practices that can be just as productive, but far more sustainable. At the St. Jude Family project in southern Uganda, double-decker animal pens open onto corn, cabbage, bananas and crawling green beans. The earth is contoured to reduce runoff and erosion. Spring onions serve as natural pest control. Legumes fix nitrogen to the soil. Cow manure produces biogas for the farm's stove. Farm owner Josephine Kizza says her project has introduced organic techniques...
...indeed have become an environmental problem," says DeVries. "In Africa we're seeing that underutilization is the problem." When degraded soil blows away, frustrated farmers turn to the forests for more land. A farmer applying as little as a coke-bottle cap of fertilizer for each stalk of corn could potentially triple his yields - and benefit the environment. "We're not going to deny Africa these technologies," he says. "How could...
Eighteen months ago, when the world was awash in asset bubbles, there was perhaps no market more overheated than commodities. Prices of everything from iron ore to palm oil to corn reached dizzying heights. Crude oil nearly quintupled in five years; rice tripled in only five months. World Bank President Robert Zoellick called rising food and oil prices a "man-made catastrophe" that had the potential to quickly erase years of progress in overcoming poverty. Pundits dusted off Malthusian theories that the planet was physically unable to support the burgeoning appetites of an increasingly wealthy global population...