JAJJAL VILLAGE, INDIA-Four decades after the so-called Green Revolution enabled this vast nation to feed itself, some farmers are turning their backs on modern agricultural methods-the use of modified seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides-in favor of organic farming. This is not a matter of producing gourmet food for environmentally attuned consumers but rather something of a life-and-death choice in villages like this one, where the benefits of the Green Revolution have been coupled with unanticipated harmful consequences from chemical pollution.

As driving their actions, the new organic farmers cite the rising costs of seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, and concerns that decades of chemical use is ruining the soil. But many are also revolting against what they see as the environmental degradation that has come with the new farming techniques, particularly the serious pollution of drinking water that village residents blame for causing cancer and other diseases.

"People are fed up with chemical farming," says Amarjit Sharma, a farmer for 30 years who began organic farming four years ago. "The earth is now addicted to the use of these chemicals."

For now, their numbers are small, perhaps 5 percent of farmers around the agricultural region in the Punjab state, known for its cotton production. But this is a trend that could become important if their numbers grow and cut into India's agricultural productivity in an era of tightening global food supplies.

Starting in 1965, India's Green Revolution transformed the country's few fertile regions into veritable breadbaskets, quadrupling India's output of wheat and rice. The revolution brought new irrigation techniques, hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and mechanization. Punjab's farmers became heroes of a self-sufficient India no longer dependent upon shipments of foreign grain and making a clean cut with a past full of mass starvation and food aid from the United States.

Full Story: http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2008/07/07/the-...

DQ's notes:  Are we helping feed the world or helping poison it?  Last month at the U.N. food summit in Rome the World Bank pledged $1.2 billion in grants to help with the food crisis in Africa, most of which is earmarked for chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops.  Though those in industry would have us believe that only large scale use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMO crops have a chance at solving the problem, those outside industry say that the grants by the World Bank are no more than a subsidy to the chemical industry and that small scale organic farming offers a safer and more efficient solution.

See:  Small Farms Best for Environment: Organic Group http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_13332.cfm