With the arrival of 2009, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80 percent of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to the International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization, and shifts to grain crops for animal feed.
Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty, and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.
Dr. Bob Watson, chief scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the U.K., places the blame for the food price spikes on several factors: grain being shifted to animal feed, drought, increased use of grains for biofuels and speculation in food crops. While proponents assert that industrial agriculture is the only hope to end the food crisis, it appears that industrial agriculture is causing the food crisis.
A study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development found, that as industrial farming practices are adopted in countries like India, small farmers and landless peasants are forced off the land. Hundreds of vegetables and weeds that were part of the traditional diet are wiped out by mono-cultures and herbicides used on the Genetically Modified crops. Thus, as Margaret Visser tells us, more rice and wheat produced in India really means less food and less nutrition.
In 1995 Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro addressed the Society of Environmental Journalists stating, “The commercial industrial technologies (the Green Revolution) that are used in agriculture today to feed the world ... are not inherently sustainable.” Even Shapiro, was admitting the Green Revolution would fail. As George Kent notes in The Political Economy of Hunger, “the benefits of Green Revolution yields went into the mouths of rich world denizens, in the form of meat and processed foods.”
IAASTD concluded that small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems should be the focus of efforts to get better quality food in the right places. Farmers need better access to knowledge, technology and credit, but was biotechnology ‘the technology’? Watson told the U.K. Daily Mail, “Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no.”
Study after study indicates small-scale, integrated organic/low input sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value locally, where it is needed.
A 15-year study at the Rodale Institute showed similar yields for conventionally raised vs. organic corn and soy, with soil fertility being consistently higher in the organic systems.
The Broadbalk study in the U.K., ongoing for over 150 years, shows higher yields in integrated organic systems over conventional systems with soil fertility remarkably in the organic system.
In This Organic Life, Joan Dye Gussow notes that prior to World War II, even with its harsh climate, Montana produced 70 percent of its own food, including fruit, sustainably, organically on small farms.
The advantage of integrated organic and sustainable systems is even more apparent in the Global South where most farms are an acre or less. While “yield” per acre can be higher on large conventional farms, “total output” per acre, the sum of everything the farmer produces, is according to Peter Rosset in The Ecologist, far higher on small farms. More food, more nutrition, more animal feed.
Gardeners are familiar with the Three Sisters— corn, beans, and squash—three food crops that thrive together. This system of intercropping, has long been practiced by small scale indigenous farmers. Integrating livestock, manure, and crop rotation makes the system even more productive in terms of food per acre.
According to Rosset, economists at the World Bank realize that redistribution of land to small farmers would promote greater food production, yet due to corporate and political pressure, the industrial farming model is promoted as the standard that will “feed the world.” Helena Norberg-Hodge notes that the industrial food system became dominated by the “need for corporate profits, not the need to feed the global population.”
Industrial farming has been an abysmal failure at feeding the world. The best hope, according to the IAASTD report, long-term research and countless generations of indigenous farmers, lies with “small scale farmers in diverse eco-systems.”
As for the U.S., we need sensible food policy: less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer-owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel, and an end to food price speculation. That is a “change we can believe in.”
The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’
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Billhook Posted 10:08 am
03 Jan 2009
As a farmer, I'm writing to identify further aspects of the problem that are critical to its resolution.
People working the sheep farms and mountain common grazing here in Wales, just two generations ago, used to get about 60% of the retail price of their stock.
Now we are lucky to get 13%.
Even with subsidies (ending in 2012) we don't make the minimum wage for the hours we work -
We are, effectively, being suppressed in favour of industrialized livestock production abroad. The prices paid here reflect those imports' minimized production costs - which include practices that are both unethical and illegal here.
For example, to avoid the cost of annually dagging their flocks (shearing off shit-caked wool to avoid maggot attacks), it's been standard practice in some countries to skin the area (without anaesthetic) so that surviving ewes will have only wool-free scar tissue.
Those businesses can profitably undercut sustainable EU production costs while sending their meat halfway round the world.
Further raising the bar here for ethical and sustainable production standards will not help - it will only drive more small farms out of business while large concerns just set the costs against tax and swallow the failing small farms.
What is required is the reform of trade rules, from the vicious farce of "free" trade NOT to the gross follies of trade protectionism,
but rather to what should be called "Trade Stewardship."
This is about evaluating the sustainability of agricultural practices and, where particular imports are indexed significantly higher than the mean of the home product they are actively encouraged, but they are tarriffed if indexed significantly lower.
I suggest that there is no more powerful dynamic than trade, and the changes you propose will not only prove unachievable without the above reform of trade terms,
even if they were somehow achieved within USA your newly trained legions of farmers would promptly be put out of business by unsustainable cheap imports.
Is it time for Grist as a whole to face this fact that there is simply no prospect of "Sustainability Within One Country"
however great that country may believe itself to be ?
Surely the critical role for President Obama is not primarily within the US;
it is to help achieve the equitable and sustainable international agreements whereby all nations may start to optimize our common global interdependence.
Without those global agreements, local and national efforts, however laudable, are just pissing into the wind.
Regards,
Billhook
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Avelhingst Posted 12:16 pm
03 Jan 2009
Likewise, manufacturers of agricultural produce - be it food or fibre - have long, long practiced the art of increasing the bottom line at share-holder pleasing rates against the producers of the agricultural goods they buy. They are increasingly good at it - from manipulating pricing structures to fighting country-of-origin labeling (this pertains to the United States). In fact, I find it patently absurd that labeling laws are so lax in the United States; not only does a manufacturer obfuscate about origins, but certain information on food is prohibited (another subject for another time).
However, if I were to critique this ideal of a wonderful future fed from small, mixed, prosperous farmsteads, it would be education and literacy. The complexity of a farm increases exponentially with every added layer; to profitably, ethically, and humanely operate such an enterprise requires vast quantities of knowledge built over years of experience and education and other forms of informal knowledge exchange. Parceling out good land to small-holders is one thing, but such a scheme can only succeed if it contains a strong component for education.
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amazingdrx Posted 11:35 pm
03 Jan 2009
"...just two generations ago, used to get about 60% of the retail price of their stock.
Now we are lucky to get 13%."
Do bottomline considerations of "free" trade skimming scams justify the cruelty to animals and humans? Does the divine right of capital exclude any other value system? Evidently so.
The scammers have produced orders of magnitude of worthless electronic "paper" over and above any real economic value of labor and goods actually traded, some portion of that constitutes their "profits". Meanwhile, we the people are on the hook for the whole imaginary mess.
These experts seem to have pre-taxed everyone's income for the next century or so, taken the skim, and merrily jet setted their way offshore with the loot.
Maybe we could bring back debtor's prison just for these billionaire scammers? I bet they would give back the cash after a few years, just to get out.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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