With rivers bursting their banks along the fertile plains south of the Himalayas, India ordered the army to help evacuate people from some of the worst-hit areas.

"I have not seen such flooding in the last 24 years. It’s a sheet of water everywhere," said Santosh Mishra, a resident of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh. "There are no signs of houses, temples or trees," he told the local Sahara Samay television channel.

Some14 million people in India and five million in Bangladesh have been displaced or marooned by the flooding, according to government figures. At least 132 people have died in recent days because of the floods in India and 46 more in Bangladesh.

"The situation is grim," said Bhumidhar Barman, a minister in the Assam state Government.

The monsoon season in South Asia runs from June to September and is vital to agriculture.

But the monsoons are dangerous; last year more than 1000 people died, most by drowning, landslides, house collapses or electrocution. In New Delhi, India’s Meteorological Department said unusual monsoon patterns this year had led to heavier rains. "We’ve been getting constant rainfall in these areas for nearly 20 days," said department spokesman BP Yadav.

Some 100,000 displaced people were staying in government relief camps in Assam, while hundreds of thousands more sought shelter on higher ground, setting up makeshift dwellings. Millions of people have been cut off from the rest of the country.

Medical teams were trying to visit regions by boat to ensure there were no outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera.

In Uttar Pradesh, the army was called in to help evacuate people from 500 villages under water, said Diwakar Tripathi, a senior government official. Huge amounts of crops had been destroyed.

"I think in Australia, we could get engagement with some of the more local countries and then extend to the Americas and then possibly one day go globally.

"To move through the region and to the international stage would be an enormous step forward."

Chinese Finance Minister Jin Renqing said his country supported the use of market-based emissions trading as a method of controlling climate change, but emphasised that China expected developed nations to carry the burden.

"Greenhouse gas is a serious challenge for us, but the source of most of the greenhouse gas produced came from developed countries," he said.

"Although China is now the biggest consumer of oil in the world, the per capita petrol consumption in China is one of the lowest in the world."

Mr Jin said China’s dependence on imported energy could be overstated. He noted that China imported only 10 per cent of its energy needs.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt said the US was committed to working through the UN to develop a response to climate change beyond the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. A summit in Bali is scheduled to develop a new framework.

He said the US and China remained committed to the Asia Pacific Partnership on climate change, which also includes Japan, India, Korea and Australia.

Glaciers lost to Asian pollution

The report triggered an appeal from UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner, who urged the international community "to ever greater action" on tackling climate change.

Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, used an innovative technique to explore the Asian Brown Cloud. The plume sprawls across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It spews from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants, forests or fields that are being burned for agriculture, and wood and dung which are burned for fuel.

Emissions of carbon gases are known to be the big drivers of global warming, but the role of particulate pollution, such as brown clouds, is unclear.

Particulates, also called aerosols, cool the land or sea beneath them because they filter out sunlight, a process known as global dimming. But what they do to the air around them has been poorly researched. Some aerosols absorb sunlight and thus warm the atmosphere locally, while others reflect and scatter the light.

Professor Ramanathan’s team used three unmanned aircraft fitted with 15 instruments to monitor temperature, clouds, humidity and aerosols. The remote-controlled craft carried out 18 missions in March 2006, flying in a vertical stack over the Indian Ocean.

The planes flew simultaneously through the Brown Cloud at heights of 500m, 1500m and 3000m. They discovered that the cloud boosted the effect of solar heating on the air around it by nearly 50 per cent because its particles are soot, which is black and thus absorbs sunlight.

The researchers crunched data from greenhouse gases and from the brown clouds in a computer model of climate change.

The simulation estimated that, since 1950, South Asia’s atmosphere has warmed by 0.25C per decade at altitudes ranging from 2000m to 5000m above sea level — the height where thousands of Himalayan glaciers are located.

As much as half of this warming could be attributed to the effects of brown clouds, Professor Ramanathan said. "It is frightening, but I also look at the positive side, because it shows a way out of the conundrum," he said.

Roughly 60 per cent of the soot in South Asia comes from biofuel cooking and biomass burning, which could be eased by helping the rural poor get bottled gas or solar cookers, he said.

Professor Ramanathan’s data has been validated with measurements taken on the ground and in space by NASA

Perfecto referred to the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic as “ridiculous.” She blames corporate interests in agriculture and research for the widely held assumption that you need to have these inputs to produce food.

Catherine Badgley, a research scientist in the Museum of Paleontology is a co-author of the paper. Badgley and Perfecto decided to look more deeply into organic farming when they were visiting farms in Southern Michigan and were struck by how much food organic farmers were producing. The researchers set about compiling data from published literature to investigate the two chief objections to organic farming – low yields and lack of organically acceptable nitrogen sources – objections that now seem invalid.

According to Perfecto, organic agriculture is ideally suited to the developing world because farmers in developing countries often do not have access to the expensive fertilisers and pesticides that farmers in developed countries use to produce high yields. Perfecto argues that a switch to organic farming in developing countries could rapidly improve yields.

The research used a global data set of 293 examples to compare the yields of organic versus conventional or low intensive food production. The researchers then estimated the average yield ratio of different food categories for the developed and developing world. This data was used to model the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base.

The results from the scientific modelling indicates that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population – and potentially an even larger population – without increasing the agricultural land base. This shows that organic farming could contribute significantly to the global food supply and at the same time reduce the negative environmental impact currently associated with agriculture.

The study joins an increasing body of research highlighting the benefits of organic farming. Last year another report had a similar message. After studying more than 280 projects in 57 of the world’s poorest countries, researchers found that organic farming could increase crop yields by 79 per cent.

Co-author of the 2006 report, Professor Jules Pretty from the University of Essex, told the BBC that methods without an adverse affect on local biodiversity allowed farmers to benefit from growing crops in healthy soil. It also reduces water useage.

“Soils that are higher in organic matter are better at holding water” Professor Pretty said. “If you have diverse and higher soil quality then it is better prepared to deal with drought conditions when access to water becomes a critical issue.”

Conventional farming is far more damaging to the environment – exacerbating soil erosion, greenhouse gas pollution, pest resistance and loss of biodiversity. The essentials of a healthy environment such as a stable climate, and clean air and water, are being lost through unsustainable farming practices.

Organic farming is less harmful to the environment, produces food with greater nutritional value and, as mounting scientific evidence shows, can triple yields. This could create dramatic changes in the developing world, where malnutrition and hunger are rife. As New Scientist commented back in 2001:

"Low-tech ‘sustainable agriculture,’ shunning chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more…
A new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the world’s hungry live and work… It is time for the major agricultural research centres and their funding agencies to join the revolution."

More support is needed in the developing world to empower communities to make the switch to organic methods and reap the benefits.

More information on the study can be found here.