Organic Agriculture and Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Main Potentials and Challenges. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 53(9): 917-928. Organic Agriculture and Undernourishment in Developing Countries: Main Potentials and Challenges

While much has been published on the advantages of organic agriculture, less has addressed its potentials and challenges to fight undernourishment in developing countries. This article aims at reviewing the main potentials and challenges of this approach when dealing with “undernourishment” as a multi-faceted concept in developing countries. Accordingly, two main issues of the concept which are “food security” and “food safety” are discussed in the context of both developed and developing countries to understand their different food policies’ priorities. Next, the main potentials, challenges and tradeoffs of the organic approach are scrutinized to understand whether the approach is capable to provide a secure or safe food production system and therefore to understand whether it can meet the food policies’ priorities in developing countries. With respect to food security, the article concludes that conventional and biotechnological approaches still appear to produce higher yields though considering many advantages of organic agriculture, it could, in long run, be more conducive than now to meet food security. Hence, we still need both conventional and 1 Corresponding author. Email: [email protected], Tel. +32 (0)9 264 46 95. Fax +32 (0)9 264 49 85. 2 biotechnological approaches to feed the hungers in developing countries. Accordingly, the article emphasizes on providing farmers in developing countries with the possibility of implementing different approaches. Therefore, policy makers should be aware of a realistic and gradual transition from the other approaches to the organic that should be projected only in “long run”, and after conducting a series of risk assessment studies on the bases of both ‘crop-case” and “region-case”.