Some background ... 

There was a movie that came out recently called "Kiss the Ground" which demonstrated that the industrial, one-crop method of agriculture depletes the soil of nutrients and you end up with less nutritious food, a requirement of increasing pesticide and increasing fertilizer requirements.  I've noticed this with carrots from supermarkets which taste like you are eating bark vs carrots from places with good soils where the carrots are so sweet it's like eating candy. One thing the movie stated was that although it was more energy dense for food supply, better at carbon capture, and created better foods, it was more energy intensive to harvest. 

My father (Martin Ottenheimer) has been working as a cultural Anthropologist in the Comoros and a professor at Kansas State University (KSU)  since about the 1960s. He has been telling very interesting stories about not just his trips to the Comoros but also how as a professor at a University which focused on agricultural and industrial baking he would often intersect with those who came to KSU to promote industrial farming practices. One story he often told was how he was recruited by USAID to promote "best practices" agriculture to foreign countries and the story went something like this ...

"I was told that the goal wasn't to understand how to make their farming practices better, i.e. manage runoff from an effective hill-based system that had lasted thousands of years, but to get them to adopt corporate manufacturing practices and sell them corporate-made pesticides which would get them to buy corporate-made seed which was pesticide resistant, which would also require corporate-manufactured fertilizers. Once you get them hooked on these corporate created seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers then you've setup an ongoing revenue stream for these companies" 

My father said "no thanks" and would sometimes also talk about how some of the folks he talked to in the Comoros majored in agriculture and/or ran farms. 

This year (2023) was in the Comoro Islands and as we were exploring various farms I noticed that 100% of them were following the "Kiss the Ground" and modern methods of best practice for that energy dense agriculture of multi-crop growing patterns. You'd have mango, lemon, coconut, cassava, banana, pineapple, etc.... all growing in the same field with things like some of the unripe mangos which might fall from the trees, decay and feed the nearby plants. Not only was the crop density and quality high but the insect density was high as well with things like monstrously large bees flying around.  And the quality of the fruits/vegetables/spices was some of the best I'd ever had. 

I asked my father if he helped the Comoros resist the trap of monoculture agriculture and so remain able to have a self-sustained agriculture, skip the degradation of soil quality, and eroding of pest management that so many other countries experienced that trapped them into dependency; but he said it was too long ago and couldn't remember; but that it was reasonable to assume that was the case. 

Whatever the root cause (pun intended) was - it was great to see a country with a volcanic soil that many western textbooks will say "is low-quality" and yet have a self-sustaining agriculture with practices that are creating some of the most outstanding foods on the planet.