Traditional agriculture

Are farmers going to run out of water? - this talk was broadcast at various dates during December 2003 on the World Business Report programme of the BBC World Service, as part of a series of six talks by Edward Goldsmith.

Do we need small farms? - this talk was broadcast at various dates during December 2003 on the World Business Report programme of the BBC World Service, as part of a series of six talks by Edward Goldsmith.

How to feed people under a regime of climate change - Modern agriculture is not only highly vulnerable to climate change, it is also a major cause of climate change due to its emissions of greenhouse gases and its damaging effects on soil and freshwater resources. A combination of traditional agricultural knowledge and techniques, combined with newly emerging sustainable technologies, may hold the answers we need. Published in World Affairs Journal, winter 2003. Reprinted in Surviving the Century - facing climate chaos and other global challenges, edited by Herbert Girardet (Earthscan, May 2007).

Unhygienic? Or just small scale? - an article for The Doomsday Funbook (Jon Carpenter Books, February 2006), written in June 2001. "Throughout the world today governments, in accordance with WTO legislation, are imposing costly installations on small food producers on the premise that their activities are not hygienic, which few can afford and which thereby pushes many of them out of business", yet "it is the big intensive food producers, not the small ones, that are responsible for the epidemic of food poisoning and, probably, for the growing incidence of other diseases as well."

Unhygienic - or just small-scale? (short version) - this essay explores the way in which food hygiene regulations are pushing small, safe, traditional high quality food producers out of business by imposing inappropriate and wildly expensive requirements - while industrial food producers reap the benefits.

Traditional agriculture in Sri Lanka - EG interviews Mudyanse Tennekoon. "Farmer Tennekoon is a prophet, a prophet of traditional rural life in Sri Lanka. He is also a farmer and lives in a small village in the Kurenegala district of the island. In recent years he has become quite well known among those people who recognise the destructiveness and counter-productiveness of the modern system of intensive agriculture which the international institutions - FAO and the Word Bank in particular - are imposing on Sri Lanka."

Global warming will make traditional climatic knowledge irrelevant. Tribal peoples have an unparallelled understanding of their environment, which is key to the sustainable agriculture and lifestyles which they have pursued for generations. But with climate change, weather patterns and ecosystems face disruption. Could traditional tribal knowledge, of such huge potential value for sustainable living, be made obsolete by global warming?

The lessons of traditional irrigation - "Modern irrigation schemes in tropical areas are, almost without exception, social, ecological and economic disasters. They necessarily lead to the flooding of vast areas of forest and agricultural land, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and the spreading of waterborne diseases like malaria and schistosomiasis ...". Published in The Ecologist Vol. 28 No. 3, May-June 1998.

To keep to the Way society must be able to correct any divergence from it - chapter 65 of The Way: An Ecological World View, originally published in 1992. This text is taken from the revised and enlarged edition, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.

The lessons of traditional irrigation agriculture: learning to live with nature - published as Chapter 26 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

Traditional irrigation in Mesopotamia - Published as Chapter 25 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

Traditional irrigation in the dry zone of Sri Lanka - Published as Chapter 24 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

The traditional irrigation system of the Chagga of Kilimanjaro - Published as Chapter 23 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

The traditional irrigation system of the Sonjo of Tanzania - Published as Chapter 22 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

The qanats of Iran - Published as Chapter 21 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

Can prosperity be brought to Fatehpur? - Article by Edward Goldsmith published in the Ecologist Quarterly No. 2, summer 1978. Poverty is caused, not by lack of goods and money, but by the destruction of ecological capital. It follows that the solution to poverty is not 'development' but to rebuild ecological capital.