Editorial Introduction to Volume I 13house and kitchen. The Ministry promotes a variety of integrated models across
the country, involving mixtures of biogas digesters, fruit and vegetable gardens,
underground water tanks, solar greenhouses, solar stoves and heaters, and pigs and
poultry. These are fitted to local conditions. Whole integrated systems are now
being demonstrated across many regions of China, and altogether 8.5 million
households have biogas digesters. The target for the coming decade is the construc-
tion of another one million digesters per year. As the systems of waste digestion
and energy production are substituting for fuelwood, coal or inefficient crop-
residue burning, the benefits for the natural environment are substantial – each
digester saves the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes of wood per year, or 3–5mu of forest.
Each year, these biogas digesters are effectively preventing 6–7 million tonnes of
carbon from being emitted to the atmosphere.
Biotechnology remains a controversial topic in agricultural development. Some
believe it represents huge risks to agricultural and natural systems; others indicate
that such new technologies are essential for agricultural development. Neither view
is entirely correct, as biotechnology, and particularly genetic modification, is not
one thing, but a wide variety of technologies that represent different potential
benefits and risks. Thus assessment should be on a case-by-case basis so that useful
technologies are able to be used by farmers, and potentially harmful ones not
approved for cultivation. In this paper, Doreen Mnyulwa and Julius Mugwagwa
review agricultural biotechnology and its safety mechanisms across southern Africa.
Only in South Africa itself have GM crops been commercially cultivated to date,
and these are already proving beneficial to small farmers. Some of these technolo-
gies have been developed within South Africa with domestic government support.
Yet the murky interface between food aid, international politics, science and regu-
lations remains complex, particularly over the potential ‘dumping’ of GM food aid
to the region.
The final chapter of this volume is drawn from Michael Bell’s excellent account
of the transformations brought about by the Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI).
Formed to develop and spread new ideas for sustainable farming, this organization
is run by farmers for themselves. They saw that big agriculture was no longer the
success it made itself out to be, and realized they needed to help themselves by
developing new ways of collaborating and generating new effective farming meth-
ods. But PFI is about much more than that. Bell begins by recalling a conversation
with Dick Thompson, who has more than 20 years of innovation on his farm.
Thompson says you should ‘get along, but don’t go along’. Get along by working
with others, emphasizing the importance of communication and dialogue. Don’t
go along by not just following what others do – then adapt, change, evolve and be
in control. This suggests a very different model for post- or non-modern agricul-
ture. Not the land of monocultures and monologues, of simple diffusion of ideas
and adoption of without thinking. Here is an approach to cultivation that embraces
the creativity of difference and openness, a project that will never be finished. As
Bell says, ‘let us put the culture back in agriculture of all farms and all places’.