Have you taken note that the Day of Agricultural Workers celebrated on October 9 is no longer called the Harvest Day and peasants are not longer called by this name. Now they are villagers and this is only a beginning, according to Anna Loshchikhina, a columnist of Russkiy Mir. The low-key transition to no-till farming will entail reorientation toward synthetic foods and cause further growth of food prices. Organic foods and a rural way of living will soon become exotics.
The transition to no-till farming commenced in 2000. The key “no-till” principle is not to till the soil after harvesting, but to cover it with crop residues, stubbles or straw instead. This is a good way to withstand erosion, to manage nutrients, to disable weeds and pests and to conserve moisture. The consistent shift of crops or crop rotation is indispensable in this husbandry. The wider the range of shifted crops, the easier it is to manage the system and the higher the crop yield.
Along with such advantages as a higher speed of the sowing, savings on human resources and fuel, accumulation of moisture and higher soil fertility, shortcomings of the new technology are also apparent. They include exorbitant prices on innovative machinery (seed planters, tractors, spraying machines) and burgeoning expenses on chemicals to fight weeds and pests. Yet, according to UN experts, these are “trivial matters” compared to the main challenge in the years to come: skyrocketing demand for food under shrinking tillage caused by climate changes. UN FAO forecasts that by 2015-2018 food prices might grow by 50-100%, which will increase the number of undernourished people in the world from 1.2 billion today to 2.0 billion.
“The problem of providing enough food for people has two main solutions,” says Viktor Dolzhenko, corresponding member of RAAS (Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences). “The first one is organic farming which does not benefit the manufacturer. It has always been the lot of backward nations because of high labor costs and low profits which are not guaranteed. The second profit-making solution is transformation of farming into a sophisticated high tech production. The world opts for the second path. One should be aware, however, that the issue of prices is very tough: in the future the inhabitants of our world will mainly eat artificial foods getting ever more expensive.”
The first signs of agriculture transformation into sophisticated industrial production showed up back in the late 1980’s, when developed nations began a transition from food import to food export. Poor rural nations, on the contrary, began procuring food abroad and that was preposterous! In parallel, a dumping process was gaining momentum, whereby developed nations started reducing crop prices, thus destroying the agriculture of third-world nations.
As a result, most starving people world over, according to the UN statistics, are farmers from developing nations. In an attempt to saturate the national markets with home-grown foods, their governments ban food export aggravating the situation and barring their farmers from entering the world market. It comes out that the food problem can be solved by using high-tech chemicals capable of saturating the market with food.
Bargaining profitable land lease terms from the backward nations, developed countries do not grow food on these lands, however. As was reported by the UN FAO in 2010, companies from developed nations as well as Chinese, Indian, Korean and Saudi Arabian companies buy out or lease plough land in Africa and Latin America. Almost all those lands are used to cultivate bio-fuel crops. Growing energy prices make bio-fuel increasingly popular and this leads to the destruction of traditional organic farming which is almost fully ruined in the poorest African countries. On the other hand, bio fuel produced in Brazil and Argentina successfully competes with that produced by the US.
Chasing super-profits, companies, under the cover of “experiments with innovative technologies”, try chemical additives and synthetic plant growth catalysts which boost crop yield but entail desertification of lands and erosion of the humus. Dried humus makes any farming nonproductive. Therefore high no-till farming technologies may both bring super-profits unheard of in traditional agriculture and ruin the productive soil.
The experts of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Science admit that intensive utilization of chemicals is one of the ways to ensure food security in the mounting race of plough land use efficiency. In other words, the accelerated growth of crops and their yield is also achieved by means of land fertilization with high-tech chemicals. The latter bring profits on an industrial scale, unattainable in organic farming. One can only wonder, whether Russian agriculture will fill the niche of a raw-material food appendage or the niche of a competitive producer in the world division of labor. For now, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, areas for direct seeding account for up to 3 million out of 77 million hectares of crop acreage. They admit at RAAS that companies with the Russian capital deal shortly with the crop lands they lease in CIS or abroad. Thus joint Russian-Kazakh and Russian-Ukrainian ventures that have switched to no-till technologies and are geared towards grain export during only five years have overfed the crop lands near Kokchetav in Kazakhstan and Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine with chemicals to such an extent that they have already abandoned them as barren and nonproductive.
They believe at the Ministry of Agriculture that this is “almost impossible” in Russia. “The capacity of domestic plants, manufacturing mineral fertilizers and pesticides, is sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the agro-industrial complex of Russia,” says Petr Chekmarev. “Therefore foreign competitors have few chances for a successful expansion.” The situation with agricultural machinery is much worse: many see its scarcity as a “natural disincentive” for a triumphant march of no-till technologies. And finally, according to Nikolai Dorogov, director of the land policy department at the Ministry of Agriculture, the Russian regulation demands testing of the zero technology first, which is now happening in Siberia and Krasnodar region. The next stage is the allocation of loaned funds which the experimenters will be bound to use for expert evaluation. Only then will no-till technologies be churned out under the Ministry’s supervision.
On the other hand, they admit at both RAAS and Ministry of Agriculture that they are increasingly often visited by the envoys of the UN and European Commission who promote no-till methods of farming, arguing that “in 30-40 years from now traditional organic farming may well be forgotten,” and so it’s important not to be late and join the ranks of competitive agricultural nations.
Anna Loshchikhina
