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P a g e
Reading Test 9
SECTION 1
Organic farming and chemical fertilisers
A
The world's population continues to climb. And despite the rise of high-tech agriculture,
800 million people don't get enough to eat. Clearly it's time to rethink the food we eat and
where it comes from. Feeding 9 billion people will take more than the same old farming
practices, especially if we want to do it without felling rainforests and planting every last
scrap of prairie. Finding food for all those people will tax predicting farmers'
—and
researchers'
—ingenuity to the limit. Yet already, precious aquifers that provide irrigation
water for some of the world's most productive farmlands are drying up or filling with
seawater, and arable land in China is eroding to create vast dust storms that redden
sunsets as far away as North America. "Agriculture must become the solution to
environmental problems in 50 years. If we don't have systems that make the environment
better not just hold the fort-then we're in trouble," says Kenneth Cassman, an agronomist
at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. That view was echoed in January by the Curry
report, a government panel that surveyed the future of farming and food in Britain.
B
It's easy to say agriculture has to do better, but what should this friendly farming of the
future look like? Concerned consumers come up short at this point, facing what appears
to be an ever-widening ideological divide. In one corner are the techno-optimists who put
their faith in genetically modified crops, improved agrochemicals and computer-enhanced
machinery; in the other are advocates of organic farming, who reject artificial chemicals
and embrace back-to-nature techniques such as composting. Both sides cite plausible
science to back their claims to the moral high ground, and both bring enough passion to
the debate for many people to come away thinking we're faced with a stark choice
between two mutually incompatible options.
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