I recently saw this product in my local supermarket. It looks 'green' - organic compost with all the moisture taken out. You buy a 600g block and can rehydrate it to make 9-10 litres of compost - clearly saving transport costs (and GHG emissions). But it is made from coconut husks - which means it comes from somewhere (sub) tropical. One of the potential problems with export led organic agriculture in the tropics is the danger of mining nutrients from fragile soils. Organic farming works by (re)cycling nutrients - as opposed to importing synthetic ones. If you are exporting nutrients you also need to import them (e.g. through grazing livestock or using the right kind of trees or shrubs that can tap into nutrients locked deeper in the soil that would otherwise be unavailable). To start exporting humus as secondary product (presumably after the coconuts) seems to fundamentally undermine this principal and to jeopardise the sustainability of the farm ecosystem.
2 comments:
I agree that if you export compost you end up depleting nutrients and uundermining local farming efforts.
On the practical side, I'm surpised that it makes sense to export compost to the Netherlands, though. The ground here has pretty extensive organic deposits as a result of all the river flows, and they mined peat north of Utrecht for centuries? Why wouldn't the domestic product be cheaper and better, all things considered?
Although global trade is generally a good thing, the correlary that each country should focus on supplying only the products where they have the best price advantage seems flawed. It seems to encourage countries to become a monoculture, maximally exploiting the few resources where they can be low-cost high-volume producers, whether of natural resources or human labor. The result is that countries don't develop balanced economies with domestic demand for their products: instead it all revolves around trade.
What's your experience: have I got this all wrong?
Not only that but the country is awash with excess manure - produced by its high level of imports of protein-rich livestock feed. (Some of even goes into cement!!). But then who would want smelly pig manure - full of antibiotics - in their balcony planters?
I'll save the trade discussions for another day / blog.
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