Poor Cambodians make big gains with organic farming

[jpak]

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=f777d3ad-990a-472c-9f2e-e6bf52cc15e1

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The story of leap-frog technology is a common one throughout the developing world.

Scores of societies are rocketing from isolation -- from conditions, especially in rural areas, that were little better than feudal Europe -- straight into the information age. They're skipping right over the half-century or more of ubiquitous land lines -- which changed our lives in rich countries -- and embracing cellphones and even wireless computer networks.

But a sizable number of small-scale farmers in the Kingdom of Cambodia are not leaping into today's chemically dependent monocultures. Rather, they're using intelligent low-tech to take them straight to what many believe should become the norm of the future -- modern, high-yield, organic farming.

About 50,000 farm families in 15 of Cambodia's 20 provinces are learning to double and triple their yields and diversify their harvests without the high-cost, high-risk chemical and mechanical inputs found on most modern farms almost everywhere else.

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[muntrv]

1. Organic farms are in great demand. Whole Foods has to import organic

foods from overseas since there are not enough organic farms in the USA. Saw this on NEWSHOUR recently.

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. What a marvellous development. I hope the State Department doesn't

bomb them back to the stone age at the behest of Monsanto, claiming they're hiding weapons of mass destruction in their paddy- fields.

[kestrel91316]

3. It appears that Cambodian farmers are a hell of a lot more enlightened

than most American farmers.

My country embarrasses me more and more every day.