Mr. Niggli, you are regarded as a scientific pioneer in organic farming.

What would achieve a greater sustainability effect: should we promote large-scale global organic farming on a small scale, or would it be better to change conventional agriculture on a smaller scale, which accounts for over 98 percent of the world's cultivated land?

Organic farming is only a niche in Europe and worldwide.

The important challenge is how to make conventional agriculture much more sustainable.

We cannot daydream and be happy in the biobubble!

If you switch completely to organic farming, productivity drops sharply.

Then you would have to import a lot more food and thus export environmental impacts to other countries.

An increase in the area under cultivation would endanger raised bogs and green spaces around the world.

That would have catastrophic effects on biodiversity, and the associated release of carbon would be a giant step backwards in climate policy.

The combination of high productivity and high ecological sustainability is the way we have to go today.

It takes more than organic

So organic farming alone cannot feed the world?

No.

It would only be possible if consumption changes completely globally, which is not an agricultural problem but a social challenge.

Organic farming originated in Central Europe in the temperate zones and cannot be imposed as a blueprint on all forms of cultivation, societies and systems.

I cannot go along with the many discussions that are being conducted by organic associations: "We can feed the world" is a misleading, false discussion.

You can use individual techniques of organic farming, but these have been used in individual countries for centuries.

Would it help if we all followed a vegan diet, as is now sometimes being calculated in studies?

Vegan diet only helps to break certain spikes.

Meat consumption in Central Europe is about 60 percent too high in relation to ecology, health and global food security.

We grow crops for livestock on 12 percent of the world's agricultural land.

The vegan helps this grain go straight into the human diet.

But with an all-vegan diet, we would compound the disaster — we couldn't feed the world's population.

After all, animals use two things: firstly, the grassland with two-thirds of the farmed area.

Because nothing else grows there, animal husbandry is appropriate to the location.

The second is grain by-products that are only used as animal feed.

So total veganism doesn't save the world either?

That's the problem, why good ideas suddenly become sectarian: If you want to derive a globally valid law from a good motive, it becomes ideological.

And that has partly happened to organic farming too — some people want to transfer their idea to everyone.

The shortcoming of organic farming is the lower productivity: the yield per area is reduced by up to 50 percent for wheat or potatoes, for example.

Yield losses could be compensated for by larger organic areas.

But wouldn't it be more sustainable instead to intensively farm a smaller area and thus gain more natural space?

This segregation of production and ecology does not work, because very intensive areas, even if they are only partial areas, pollute the groundwater, for example, and erode the soil.

The damage to the environment is less widespread, but very intensive on a small scale.

Therefore, one has the idea today that the entire agricultural area, which takes up a lot of space, should be managed more carefully.

Fungicides are also used in organic farming – for example, copper in potato cultivation pollutes the groundwater.

Is organic really gentle?