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>The answer, of course, is that throughout those many centuries the vast
>majority of people lived at the edge of starvation; only very recently has
a
>decent life become available to more than a tiny elite.

i wonder what the vast majority of the world who now  suffer from
malnutrition think about that.
you are living in the richest most armed country of the world , your
perspective is little bit distorted. where does this opulence comes from?


 And that decent life
>is made possible by applied science and technology

the improvement seen when we started to use chemicals was an artificicial
boost to the lost of fertility that started to affect the soils since we
started to till the ground. The problem is that this boost had a short live,
depleting even farther the level  of fertility. The same way that by
whipping an exausted horse you can manage to make it run till it die.
That his my problem with technology , it have the hability to mask the
symptoms , to give the illusion of POWER over the world..
Now after application of Lliebig principles to the care of the earth , the
lost of fertility and lost of topsoil is reaching  an alarming  rate,
rendering soils more and more dependant to chemicals applications.

-- including modern
>agriculture, which relies crucially on chemicals that developing countries
>cannot afford.

it is precisely that ,they can't afford it but got hooked by the mirages of
production and indebt themselves to be able to eat. That dependancy help the
occidental  fertilisers companies to make profits with chemicals that have
been banned by occidental countries ( like DDT)


Happilly there is a growing number of farmers in poor countries that don't
buy the DREAM. they are creating alternative to the hopeless loss of
fertility of the soils . to the growing desertification
 I  have seen with my eyes , examples in India of very poor farms making
oasis of productive greenery in the middle of the desertified mountains of
Kerala . And they don't do that out of luxuary  but out of the necessity
because they are well aware of the bottomless trap  of the occidental  way .

 I have  seen a field of pigeon peas taller than a man grown in untilled
ground while just on the other side of the fence the neighbour's chemically
farmed pigeon peas were half that size ( really)

.I just met in Vancouver a vietnamese business man working in the import
export of fruit who spend half his time in his own native land demonstrating
to farmers around him how to bring back the full potential of fertility
without any chemicals or tilling of the ground.

there is a group of peoples in the south of europe who want to sow hectares
and hectares of desertified land to make a green belt to stop the extension
of the sahara .after the abuse of centuries of logging and  farming
 chemicals being the last straw).
http://www.mir.org/greenbelt/english/index.htm

i think there is no time to argue  for me if the scientific farming is wrong
or if  it is going to save us from that reality ( and Gordon it is not a
doom and gloom end of the world kind of thing ,it is a steady sure
process  ). the demonstration have been made that its impact on the health
of the world is desastrous. It is time to go to do real work

 Now, finally, genetic modification -- which can substitute for
>some of the expensive chemicals used in the West -- offers a hope of
escape.
>And what is the response of the supposed friends of the poor?

the poor don't need the support of friends. the peoples in India that work
with natural farming refused categorically to be helped to establish their
alternative school to  teach the poorest caste of tribal peoples to take
care of ,themselves and  to protect their native land against the
colonisation of the chemical farmers coming from the plains ( pushed by the
loss of fertility).
 It just makes sense , they don't need the support of foreigners to heal
THEIR relationship with the earth ( be a scientist or a charity
organisation). They need to be left alone and they let know that to the
numerous agriculture universities peoples  who want to visit them .
 a time is going to come where the experts on any fields are going to beg
the peoples who live the real life how they can do that too.
jean-claude