Africa: Organic farming could be answer to food insecurity

Commercial farmers sometimes fail at organic farming because they switch over too quickly, ditching all chemicals, which is as traumatic for the soil as "a drug addict going cold turkey". This is how Cornelius Oosthuizen, the head of the South African Biofarm Institute's management team, explains why there are relatively few organic farming success stories in South Africa. The South African Biofarm Institute promotes sustainable and profitable biological and organic farming. "Failure occurs when a farmer who has been using chemicals on a farm for a long time suddenly switches to 100 percent organic farming. If you have 1,000 ha of land, you cannot start monoculture organic farming on all the land. One first has to farm biologically. "If you suddenly take away all the chemicals from land that has been chemically farmed, it experiences trauma. It is like a drug addict that goes cold turkey." The soil has to be primed–the micro and macro minerals have to be brought into balance; the ecological system has to be reinstated (there has to be robust insect and worm activity in the soil); and soil erosion has to be countered in various ways. With biological farming, non-harmful chemicals are used while organic farming does not permit the use of any kind of chemicals. This is one of the factors that need to be addressed if South African farmers are to make inroads into organic farming which is not only lucrative but will address the African continent's perennial problem with food security. The international market for organic produce is worth 50 billion dollars annually, but Africa's potential in this field is still largely untapped.