Malaysian Paper Publishes LaRouche-Ally Article on Emergency Food Solutions for the Tropics
The following article by LaRouche collaborator
Mohd Peter Davis was published in full today in the {Malaysia
Star}, a leading Malaysian newspaper. It presents the dramatic
animal production breakthroughs developed in Malaysia by Davis's
associate N. Yogendran, in the context of Helga LaRouche's
Emergency Call to Action to double food production and eliminate
the WTO. The full letter follows, with a note on one error
introduced by the editors of the newspaper:
SEEKING TO BE SELF-SUFFICIENT
By MOHD PETER DAVIS
In light of the global food crisis, the FAO is being
urged to restructure world agriculture and food production. A
Made-in-Malaysia system may be just the answer in the area of
livestock farming.
As the world food crisis threatens billions with hunger and
starvation, an international call has been made for the Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) emergency conference in Rome (June
3 to June 5) to completely restructure world agriculture and
double world food production. Malaysia is beginning to answer
this call with the Deep Tropical animal production system, which
is based on the tremendous all-year-round biomass production from
grass farms in rainforest climates.
Developed from my basic research and pioneered by livestock
entrepreneur N. Yogendran [for some reason, the editors changed
the original, which correctly identified Yogendran as the sole
inventor of this system--MOB], the system can help make our
country self-sufficient in milk, beef, goat and lamb meat and has
the potential to turn the whole of Borneo and the peninsula into
a major world supplier.
Protein Requirement
Human beings have a biological requirement for carbohydrates
(usually supplied by rice, bread and potatoes), fruits and
vegetables (for fibre and vitamins) and protein (best supplied by
fish, milk, eggs and meat). The protein requirement is the most
difficult and expensive to supply. To enjoy a good productive
life, every person needs one gram of protein per kg body weight
per day. A 60kg person therefore needs 60g of protein per day,
which can be supplied for example with 300g meat (chicken, beef
or lamb) or two litres of milk. For a world population of 6.6
billion, that is a tall daily order.
Our Deep Tropical animal production system, which took 20
years to develop from basic research right up to successful
commercial farms, is designed to help meet this challenge and
supplement the milk and meat now produced mainly in temperate
climates by grazing animals on pastures. European-type grazing of
animals in the humid tropics has a sorry history due to four
basic biological problems that have proved extremely difficult to
overcome by conventional farming:
1. Poor productivity of temperate animals and crosses with
tropical animals in the humid tropics;
2. Heat stress;
3. High tropical disease and parasite burden; and
4. Poor nutrition from native grasses and high maintenance
of improved pastures to keep out the jungle plant species.
These problems have prevented Malaysia from becoming
self-sufficient in milk, beef, and mutton. Despite the country's
historically tiny population, now only 27 million, Malaysia has
never been more than 50% self-sufficient in food.
Deep Tropical System
The Deep Tropical system simultaneously solves all these
biological limitations by housing productive temperate breeds in
cool climate barns and hand feeding with young cut grass from
grass farms. This stunningly simple solution improves the health,
nutrition and welfare of what we term happy domestic animals.
Successful models of small-scale commercial Malaysian sheep and
goat farms already exist around Malaysia. The intensive farming
system is now going large-scale.
A RM50mil [$15.4 mil] dairy farm in Pahang has just been
established with pregnant Jersey cows air freighted from
Australia and housed in cool, hygienic climate barns. These are
being fed highly nutritious 35-day-old, fresh-cut grass from a
nearby grass farm. Grass greatly reduces feed costs, is the
natural food of ruminant animals, and is useless as human food or
for anything else. Malaysia's all-year-round perfect rainforest
climate supports the highest rate of biomass production in the
world and with our management techniques, grass grows 91cm in 35
days and can be harvested 10 times per year for up to three years
before ploughing and re-seeding.
The first calves and marketable milk from the new dairy farm
are scheduled in June. Scaling up, a RM1bil [$300 mil] investment
with farms totalling 60,000 cows would lift Malaysian
self-sufficiency in milk from the present 5% to 25%. The same
dairy farms will produce cattle for the prime beef market and
replace 75% of live cattle presently imported for fattening in
Malaysia.
Pilot studies on smaller commercial farms demonstrate that
the Deep Tropical farming system can produce three times more
milk and beef per hectare of land compared to the best New
Zealand grazing farms. Sheep farming based on the same system is
even easier and can be established more rapidly than dairy farms
and with less investment to meet the urgent food demand. The
minimum commercial scale is a 100-sheep farm.
Call for Emergency Action!
Looking to the future, Malaysia can become self-sufficient
in milk and ruminant meat in a remarkably short time with the
Deep Tropical system. The future also looks bright for Malaysian
and Indonesian Borneo with vast lands for Deep Tropical farming
to supply top quality milk and halal meat for world markets.
In the face of food riots in 40 countries and mass
starvation threatening developing countries on a scale never
before seen in history, an urgent call to double world food
production is receiving tremendous support from governments and
institutions around the world. Leading the call for the FAO Rome
Conference is Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller
Institute and chairperson of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement
(BueSo) in Germany. "Food is something you eat; food is what you
offer your neighbour. Don't speculate: double food production,
eliminate both the World Trade Organisation and the diversion of
food to biofuels!"
At the request of 82 countries, the United Nations Human
Rights Council held a Special Session in Geneva on May 22 to
discuss the world food crisis. The initiating countries come from
the Non-Aligned Movement, the African Group, the Organisation of
the Islamic Conference and the Group of Arab States, and at least
15 other countries, including China and Italy. Their pre-meeting
statement is inspiring: "The world can produce enough food to
feed twice the entire global population. Therefore, in a world
overflowing with riches, hunger is not inevitable. It is a
violation of human rights."
In an unusually bold statement on April 25, Nina Fedoroff,
editor of the prestigious journal {Science} wrote: "There is an
acute need for another jump in global agricultural productivity a
second Green Revolution. Can it happen? Will it happen?"
However, these growing humanitarian calls to defend the
welfare of the world's population are not universally shared.
Ever since the false theory of Thomas Malthus 200 years ago --
that the Earth is overpopulated and (population) must be reduced
to protect the food supply -- evil people have used this flimsy
excuse to hold back development and decrease population in poor
countries.
Throughout history, mankind's creative discoveries and
inventions have enabled the human population to expand by leaps
and bounds above the population of wild animals. The graph of
world population since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years
ago is really the chart of wave upon wave of scientific,
technological and social breakthroughs to the present day. With
only a few million people on Earth before agriculture, the world
population grew to 300 million by the time of Jesus and leapt
magnificently following the European Renaissance and the rise of
modern science and technology to the 6.6 billion people we have
today. It's predicted to rise to nine billion by 2050. In the
post-World War 2 recovery, world food production doubled in 17
years up to 1970. The Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s
involving hybrid super seeds enabled China and India to become
self-sufficient and major exporters of rice.
Scientific Food Production
The developing green agricultural revolution with
genetically improved crops and domestic animals, combined with
the rapid development of nuclear power with its cheap and
abundant electricity and desalinated water, was well on target to
eliminate world hunger. But then everything began to grind to a
halt! Scientific progress from the 1970s was systematically
sabotaged by the internationally coordinated anti-nuclear,
anti-pesticide, anti-technology campaign of the green environment
movement. This was followed in 1995 by the World Trade
Organisation's insistence, against all humanitarian arguments,
that free trade is more important than food.
Now, with our agriculture shattered and biofuels destroying
anywhere between 10% and 20% of world food, we have ended up with
todays completely unnecessary man-made humanitarian catastrophe
with millions facing hunger and starvation. Malaysia only
produces half of its food and is also directly threatened with
starvation, as during the Japanese Occupation when the food ships
were stopped by war-time naval blockade. History must not be
allowed to repeat itself.
Mohd Peter Davis is an agricultural scientist from the Institute
of Advanced Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
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