I commented back that gardeners can and should use manure in their gardens--but they should only use composted manure on crops already in the field.  If you want to use raw manure, it's better to spread it in the fall or very early spring to give it time to mellow.  Raw manure can burn plants with the excess nitrogen, and it can contaminate crops if there are pathogens in it.

But manure is one of nature's very best fertilizers--it's the cycle of life, folks, and broken-down plant and animal debris (including sh*t) is what makes this planet tick.  All those little soil microbes and earthworms are here to help that breaking down process--making the nutrients in waste and decaying matter available to grow more life (and veggies!).

Think of using manure on your crops like using a distinfectant in your kitchen.  Not exactly the same--but the idea is that you do not want it directly on your food, and you want to exercise care in the use of it.  Just because eating or drinking bleach or other disinfectants can make you sick doesn't mean you shouldn't use them--only that you should use them wisely.

But many of the salmonella, e. coli, and other food-borne illness outbreaks aren't even caused by farmers directly applying raw manure to their fields.  They're caused by contaminated raw manure being tracked into fields by domesticated or wild animals or even on the boots of farmers or fieldworkers or by contaminated raw manure getting into the irrigation supply.

The theory about the 2006 outbreak in spinach was that the contaminated manure was tracked into the fields by wild pigs that broke into a feedlot.  The pigs didn't have the pathogen--the cows did.  But the pigs got the contaminated cow poop on their hooves and tracked it into the spinach fields and/or irrigation supply.

One of the best things we can do to control contamination on produce is to practice better and safer ways of raising animals for food.  If we're going to eat meat, we need to give these animals more room, better care, and a more natural diet so that they're not always getting sick and then making us sick when their brains or poop get mixed up with our food supply because we're doing it on such a huge scale we can't possibly check it all.  I know it may be un-American to suggest we get smaller and less efficient, but sometimes smaller and less efficient is safer and healthier.

(I would also argue that small farms are more efficient--but the marketing end is what makes them seem less so--markets are generally owned and operated by those who buy big and sell big and don't want to deal with the little guys.)

I spoke with a woman at a farmers market conference last spring who allowed her chickens to roam in her asparagus patch eating bugs and fertilizing the asparagus at the same time.  She picked and washed and ate the asparagus and never became ill.

Though I would not recommend letting chickens or other livestock into the garden near or during harvest time, this woman probably never got sick because she took good care of her chickens, allowed them a good diet and plenty of exercise, and they didn't have salmonella (this is why I'm skeptical of the chicken advertised as being fed a "vegetarian diet" like that's somehow better and safer--chickens are not vegetarians!).

The reason for all the "cook thoroughly" warning labels on our food nowadays is that the USDA knows that the food supply is dirty, and they know there's not much they can do about it except tell us to be really careful eating that dangerous stuff called "food."

I do not believe that the government is going to be especially effective in cleaning up our food supply--the meat packing industry is getting to be so powerful and consolidated that most legislation would trickle off their backs like so much water off a duck's--they can afford to just pay the fine or pay the inspector to look the other way.

Typically the legislation that uninformed folks think will make their food supply safer just ends up putting unnecessary burdens on the backs of the little guys who are already making a healthier, safer product, and often forces them out of the business.

So it's really up to consumers to make smarter choices and ask informed questions of those who grow and sell food.  It's a lot easier to get straight answers in a timely fashion from those who are direct-marketing to you through a CSA or farmers market or roadside stand.

A lot of people will pay extra for the organic label on their food because they believe it's a safer, healthier product.  But "organic" has become industrial--it is done on the same large scale as conventional crops.  So, the safer, healthier bet is more likely from your neighbor's backyard or your local farmers market.

In addition, as an ecological urban gardener, I had a "down to earth" concern. I recently heard Daniel Harder, Ph.D., Executive Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz Arboretum, speak about the LBAM. (See my earlier post on his trip to New Zealand to investigate the moth.) He has checked LBAM traps and found that the pheremones used attract not only LBAM, but other insects as well. Thus, blanketing urban areas with pheremones to disrupt LBAM mating could have also disrupted life cycles of other insects. These effects are simply unknown at this point, but it is possible that the pheremones would have reduced populations of "good" insects I rely on to control pests in my own garden.

This, unfortunately, is the approach of industrial agriculture. Find a "problem" and "fix it." Other consequences be damned. If other problems arise (and they always do in interconnected ecosystems), then fix those problems when they arise. I'm glad that in this case the over-reaction to LBAM has been stopped, and urban gardeners will not be subjected to ecosystem-disrupting pheremones.

One final point is important. Why did I just write "over-reaction" to LBAM? For two reasons. First, there is no evidence that LBAM actually is an agricultural pest in California. Court decisions in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties halted spraying in those counties based on a simple piece of logic: the State failed to demonstrate that crops had been damaged by LBAM. Given that entomologists believe LBAM has probably been in California for decades and was only recently identified, if it were to become a pest it would have done so by now.

The second reason the State and Federal government over-reacted is quite simple. Dr. Harder mentioned that the LBAM's natural habitat is in cooler regions, such as along the California coast. I was curious about his assertion and checked it out. Maps available from the State's website on LBAM clearly show that the only places LBAM has been found is along the coast, where weather is cooler. In other words, it doesn't appear to pose any risk at all for agriculture in the Central Valley, California's agricultural workhorse.

This really got my curiousity up, so I looked even further. A quick internet search found an article on LBAM distribution: The Bionomics, Distribution and Host Range of the Light Brown Apple Moth, Epiphyas Postvittana (Walk.) (Tortricidae), by W. Danthanarayana, published in 1975 (Australian Journal of Zoology 23(3), 419 - 437 ). The following sentence from the abstract seemed critical [Farenheit temperatures added]:

No eggs hatched at > 31.3ºC [88ºF]; the upper threshold for larval and pupal development was 31-32ºC [89.6ºF].

It's clear why LBAM hasn't been found in the Central Valley and why it does not pose a risk there to agriculture. Temperatures in the Central Valley regularly exceed 90ºF in spring, summer and early fall.

So, given that LBAM has not yet become an agricultural pest in California, and isn't likely to spread to California's agricultural heartland, why are the State of California and the Federal government so concerned? My theory is that it's marketing, pure and simple. Other countries (Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Europe) have the LBAM but it isn't a major pest. Yet, in the U.S., it has been declared a Class A pest, meaning that extreme efforts will be made to keep it out of the U.S. Why? As long as it isn't in the U.S., crops from the U.S. can be marketed abroad as "LBAM free." This probably means exporters can get a slight price premium or a marketing edge for U.S. products over the same product from a non-LBAM-free country. As long as the U.S. government can convince people that the LBAM is a dangerous pest, and that U.S. agricultural exports are free of LBAM, industrial agriculture can market its products better.

Stephen Dubner, co-author of the book Freakonomics, recently wrote in his blog about trying to make orange sherbet with his children (Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores?). Apparently, he wasn't very good at it, spending far more than is reasonable for ingredients and making a product that wasn't very good. This isn't surprising, of course, for a first effort. What is surprising is that he used his first-time-effort failure to introduce an argument that eating locally produced food is inefficient due to lack of scale and specialization. In the process he exhibits an appalling ignorance of the locavore (local food) movement and industrial agriculture, plus he makes egregious rhetorical leaps. Let's take a look.

First, let's look at what the local food movement is. In short, the concept behind local food is that by eating local food, consumers have a better chance of knowing their food producers, knowing how their food is grown and processed, and will have access to fresher food. Locally produced food might be food you grow yourself, but a standard rule of thumb is that it is food produced within 100 miles. Part of the local food argument is that transportation costs associated with moving food hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from farm or factory to consumers is wasteful and costly.

Dubner focuses his argument around four points:

To eat locally grown food or, even better, food that you’ve grown yourself, seems as if it should be 1) more delicious; 2) more nutritious; 3) cheaper; and 4) better for the environment. But is it?

Let's take a look at his answers. First, does local food taste better?

1) “Deliciousness” is subjective. But one obvious point is that no one person can grow or produce all the things she would like to eat. As a kid who grew up on a small farm, I can tell you that after I had my fill of corn and asparagus and raspberries, all I really wanted was a Big Mac.

True, what is delicious is subjective at the individual level. But, it's easy to make it objective by surveying people's individual assessments and comparing averages. Given the explosion in farmers' markets the past few years, and the fact that people are willing to pay higher out-of-pocket costs for food at these markets, there must be something that they are willing to pay a premium for. One of these things is certainly the better tasting food. I invite Dubner to go try some locally produced food and see for himself.

But, it's important to note the rhetorical tricks he uses here, what I call switch-and-bait. He completely changes the topic, arguing that people can't grow all the things they would like to eat. While this is true for all but those dedicated to self-sufficiency, it has nothing to do with how food tastes. More importantly, it has nothing to do with the local food movement. Almost no one suggests that everyone should grow all their own food. While I encourage people to grow some of their own food, I also encourage people to trade with others, in part so no one needs to grow all their own food (see Cherries and communities). Another trick is to redefine delicious from its usual meaning of how something tastes to something possible only with dietary variety. He does this explicitly elsewhere in his essay, saying "...variety, which in my book means more deliciousness... ".

What does Dubner say about nutrition?

2) There’s a lot to be said for the nutritional value of home-grown food. But again, since one person can grow only so much variety, there are bound to be big nutritional gaps in her diet that will need to be filled in.

Apparently he agrees with me that locally produced food is often, if not usually, more nutritious. Again, however, for inexplicable reasons, he raises the straw man argument that individuals cannot raise all their own food and would thus be short of nutrients. While I don't advocate growing all your own food, some people in cities come quite close to that. So, it is possible to have a delicious and nutritious diet if you choose to grow most of your own food, even in urban areas. (This is very difficult in some urban environments, which is one reason I don't advocate it for everyone.) A better solution for most people is to produce some of their own food and to trade with others who produce other things. It's not difficult to get variety in your diet. In fact, my experience is that since I've been eating more locally, my personal dietary variety has increased. For example, I used to eat apples and oranges year-round. When they weren't available from local sources, apples were readily available from Washington state or New Zealand and oranges were available from Florida or Chile. However, by eating locally available fruits, I now eat more berries (homegrown) and stone fruit (amazing sweet, juicy and flavorful fruit from farmers' markets). So, eating locally can easily improve dietary variety and, by Dubner's argument, nutrition.

However, the important nutrition argument is this: Locally grown food is usually more nutritous for two reasons. First, it is harvested when it is riper, because it doesn't need to be shipped hundreds of miles. More time growing increases nutrition. Second, food loses nutritional value once it is harvested. Thus, shipping time and sitting around in grocery stores reduces nutritional value. The ultimate in taste and nutrition, in my book, is what I grow in my own yard. This is the ultimate in local food. In fact, often my harvest only leaves my garden in my belly. Eating ripe food within seconds of harvest is a treat that is hard to beat! This is one good reason to grow some of your own food.

Now let's take a look at what he says about cost, since "cheap food" is industrial agriculture's main argument.

3) Is it cheaper to grow your own food? It’s not impossible but, as my little ice cream story above illustrates, there are huge inefficiencies at work here. ...

Notice, again, that he's not talking about locally produced food, but only the extreme case of growing your own food. There are obvious advantages to scale of production as found in industrial agriculture. But, this doesn't mean that the lower cost at the checkstand makes industrial food really cheaper. One of the main advantages of scale in industrial agriculture is that it concentrates power and money, two things to which politicians pay close attention. Thanks to agribusiness lobbying, taxpayers provide MASSIVE subsidies to industrial agriculture through direct subsidies (ever hear of the Farm Bill?), water projects that provide underpriced water, food safety regulations that benefit large producers over small, agricultural research that primarily benefits large producers, protectionist trade policies, patent rules and liability laws that favor genetic modification of seeds over traditional seed saving practices, and pest monitoring and control programs. Urban producers, especially those who grow their own food, have to compete against these subsidized producers on a playing field tilted steeply in favor of the large producers. Now add in the market externalities of industrial agriculture (Dubner writes about economics; surely he's heard of these). These include pollution of soil and waterways that alter or destroy natural ecosystems, often putting commercial fisheries out of business. Poor quality food and poor dietary practices promoted by industrial agriculture increase healthcare costs. Let's not forget the unexpensed capital depletion costs from soil erosion, overuse of underground water and reliance on underpriced oil. Total it all up and industrial agriculture isn't so cheap.

But, it doesn't end there. Locally produced food (and I'm not talking just about what you grow yourself) is often more labor intensive and often pays better wages than industrial agriculture, so it will be more costly at the checkstand. Organic and other ecologically sensitive practices often used in local food production also raise the dollar cost of food. But, these factors reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce external market costs. Since these cost savings don't appear in the market price, consumers have to pay a higher price. In short, the costs that industrial agriculture shifts to others outside the marketplace are often born by local producers. What's fascinating to me is that more and more consumers are willing to pay a higher price at the market. Maybe they know something Dubner doesn't.

So, what about the purported environmental benefits of local food? Can Dubner shred those arguments?

4) But growing your own food has to be good for the environment, right? Well, keeping in mind the transportation inefficiencies mentioned above, consider the “food miles” argument and a recent article in Environmental Science and Technology by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie-Mellon:

We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

I'm a numbers guy by training and by inclination, and I think these are fantastic statistics! Isn't it great that we can have a major effect on our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by simply eating less red meat and more chicken and fish? These numbers also support the case for more local production. Isn't it great that we can reduce food-related GHG emissions by up to 4% by producing locally? At a time when we are struggling to find ways to stop increasing GHG emissions, it's good to know that we have a way to decrease emissions. But, it gets even better. Another 7% of costs (making up the total 11%) can potentially be reduced by reducing other transportation costs (presumably costs of shipping all those GMO seeds, chemicals and fuel). While not all local production would eliminate all of these costs, some of these costs would be reduced, especially in cases where producers use more labor intensive and more organic methods. Finally, if 83% of typical food-related GHG emissions come from the production phase of agriculture, labor intensive methods that use less fuel can save phenomenal amount of GHG emissions. Given that my backyard food production is done completely with my own labor and no tractors or chemicals, the more food I produce, the lower my carbon footprint.

These data, Dubner concludes, make "a pretty strong argument against the perceived environmental and economic benefits of locavore behavior." Huh? Apparently, he believes that specialization in industrial agriculture makes efficient use of resources, missing a couple of key points. First, rather than efficient use, how about simply not using resources in the first place? By substituting local production for distant production and shifting to more labor intensive and organic methods, we can simply stop using much of the carbon-generating fossil fuels that he wants to use more efficiently. Second, it's unclear why he thinks that local production means a lack of specialization, so they are inefficient. Perhaps he actually believes his straw-man argument that local food means everyone should produce their own food. But local producers, even home gardeners and preservers, usually specialize. A quick visit to a good farmers market would show him that vendors specialize, some in particular fruits, some in particular vegetables, some in flowers, some in honey, some in breads, vinegars, fish, beef, cheese, seedlings, dried fruits, jams, etc. He is absolutely right about one thing: specialization is more efficient. But he's wrong in his assumption that local food production isn't specialized already.

There is one more area that Dubner completely misses the boat on. It's what I call the human side of local food. When I'm at the farmers' market, I talk to other shoppers and to vendors. When I'm sharing my garden surplus with family and friends, neighbors and coworkers, I'm having a great time, often learning new things, sometimes receiving some of their surplus in return. When I'm gardening, I have fun. I hope to gawd Dubner had fun with his children while making sherbet. Hopefully, his children learned something from the process. Hopefully, they learned more than what Dubner learned: If at first you don't succeed, go buy something at the market. Life isn't perfection, it's a series of mistakes. The whole point of trying something new is to learn from it, providing an opportunity to do better next time.

Sadly, he dismisses these things because they aren't measurable:

"The extra benefit of growing your own food only works out if you count the unquantifiables such as the sense of accomplishment, learning, exercise, suntan, etc."

While I disagree that local food works out only if I count these things, I certainly do count them. I simply cannot center my life around efficiency, following the "dismal science" that dismisses the things that make my life worth living. One of the commenters on his post at the NY Times said it much more succinctly than I can:

You raise your own children?! How efficient is that?
Aldous H.

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-2432253857028677659&hl=de 

However, in the bigger picture this isn't a small issue. California--or at least the industrial agriculture part of it, including both corporate agribusiness and the State Department of Agriculture--is in a bit of a panic because of something called the light brown apple moth (LBAM). Quite a controversy has erupted, because the State has begun spraying urban areas (that's right, not farms, but cities) to attempt to eliminate the moth. Spraying occured last year in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties and is scheduled for all of the SF Bay Area, including San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, for later this summer. The State is focusing on the issue of whether the spray is harmful to humans and pets, concluding it is not. But, the real issue is whether the spraying is even necessary at all. 

It would appear from the evidence that the State didn't bother doing it's homework on this issue, and has simply charged into the spraying program without answering the most basic of questions: Is the LBAM a pest worth worrying about? Noted experts seem to think not:

• James Carey, UC Davis entomologist, believes the moth has been in California for years, likely for decades, not having become a major pest in that time.
• Daniel Harder, Executive Director of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, and horticultural consultant Jeff Rosendale found that the LBAM isn't a pest in New Zealand.

Unlike the State, Dr. Harder and Mr. Rosendale did their homework, actually visiting New Zealand to find out how LBAM is controlled and whether it is a problem. In their summary report (1), they wrote "There is no evidence of biological or environmental threat from LBAM in New Zealand." Given the State's ambitious effort to eradicate the LBAM, their findings are sobering:

• The LBAM isn't considered a problem in New Zealand, despite having been in that country over 100 years ago.
• It is controlled readily using insect growth regulators (IRGs) derived from natural sources.
• New Zealand has never attemped widespread eradication of LBAM, nor does it use the methods being used by the State of California.

I was never worried about the LBAM, even after reading initial newspaper reports of what a damaging pest it was. Despite the high number of fruit and vegetable crops I grow that were supposedly vulnerable to the LBAM, I simply assumed it wouldn't be a major problem, due to natural predators in my garden and the fact that I don't do large mono cropping that would support a large pest population. Based on the Harder & Rosendale report, I was right.

 It appears that the State is simply wasting taxpayer dollars to, once again, subsidize corporate agriculture. If it weren't for the the State's willingness to subsidize industrial agriculture by shifting the perceived risk of LBAM onto taxpayers and urban residents, this likely wouldn't be happening at all. If it had to pay for this itself, industrial agriculture would have done its homework to see if this was really an issue. A simple cost-benefit analysis would have shown that this wasn't worth the trouble.

Now all I worry about is the possible health effects of the sprays the state will be using this summer. Previous spraying resulted in reports of problems for those with asthma, a condition that I have. So, I do not look forward to being sprayed on some hot August night when summer temperatures require me to have my window open and my ceiling fan on.

1. Daniel Harder & Jeff Rosendale (2008). Integrated Pest Management Practices for the Light Brown Apple Moth in New Zealand: Implications for California.

There is a rarely mentioned epidemic raging in the world today, one that is crippling children in more than 100 countries. In extreme cases the disease starts with a fever, which is followed by vomiting, delirium and spreading pain. Within days of being infected, the motor-neurone cells in victims’ spines cease to function properly.

Pain intensifies as victims’ limbs are paralysed. In the very worst cases, their chests are also paralysed, which prevents them from breathing. Even when the children recover, the illness often returns in later life. Health authorities say it has no cure. The number of cases increased by over 250 per cent worldwide between 1996 and 2003.

It is a disease with a long history and many names. The condition’s official name now is ‘Acute Flaccid Paralysis’ but it was once known as ‘infantile paralysis’/ ‘poliomyelitis’ (polio for short). Some people called it ‘the crippler’.

A shot in the dark Polio is a devastating disease; the preferred method for fighting it is vaccination. Yet there is a mass of historic evidence that suggests it is not caused by a virus but by industrial and agricultural pollution.

Have you got a solution to world hunger? Me neither. But that doesn't mean I remain neutral or am not interested in the subject.

(smile)

Sometimes I feel a bit like a contestant at a beauty pageant when these kinds of topics come up

Hello Everyone!! I just want to say what a thrill it is to be here, and I want to let you know that I believe passionately, WITH ALL MY BEING, that we should find a way to feed the world!!!!

Key: "We are the World" music, and, please, turn up the volume so that we don't have to listen to the rest of her speech!

Yes, I am off on another political rant. I clicked over to the Tierney Lab, and at the risk of sanctimonious beauty queen platitudes, here I am posting another open letter to another New York Times columnist.

Key: Big sparkly toothed smile and demure batting of eyelashes...

...

Open Letter to John Tierney

I like John Tierney's labs. He is an interesting cat. His reports on science are often designed to provoke, but they are also, inevitably, intriguing.

The following letter is my response to a post yesterday called "Greens and Hunger".

• See: Tierney Lab: Putting Ideas in Science to the Test : http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/greens-and-hunger/

The gist of Tierney's argument seems to be that environmentalists would rather let all the hungry people in developing countries starve, than give an inch on agricultural solutions like modified high-yield grains. He quotes extensively from one of the older darlings of GM agri-business, who tells us that the Greens have been campaigning against his research into specialty grains and crop solutions, and are undermining his lobby-power with large NGO aid organizations, and the World Bank.

Tierney concludes the post by suggesting that the Greens seem to be more concerned about global warming than mass starvation and human suffering.

May 20, 2008

John,

I enjoy following your Tierney Lab entries, and the way you test the ideas in science with your blog/column, but I have long felt that whenever you are asked to weigh in on environmental issues, you slip into logical fallacies and rhetorical flourishes that confound both the science and the "test".

This entry is one of the most egregious examples.

The environmental concerns about the lobbying and the influence of people like Borlaug do not fall into the category of "status quo" advocacy, and certainly cannot be accurately described as a decision to ignore the hungry in Africa, in favour of funding global warming solutions.

You, and many of the anti-environmentalists in your blog's comment section, completely ignore how capital-intensive, industrial farming---and the consequent global market-trade in food---pose a significant threat to both the world's hungry and the global climate.

As usual, conservative thinkers want to see the market as a transparent, non-ideological tool.

In contrast, the left-leaning environmentalist asks that you look at how the long-standing, complicated relationship between free-market capitalism and farming has contributed to problems in the past, and how the global trade in food production has resulted in serious down-side repercussions that continue to affect us today.

Yes, market-driven agricultural innovations have led to many good things, and certainly they have helped us produce more food, more efficiently than pre-industrial methods.

But the costs are adding up, too, and proper scientific analysis does not simply ignore nor demean empirically measurable by-products and side-effects, as if they didn't exist.

History teaches us that the kind of intensive, monoculture/pesticide and herbicide dependant farming that Borlaug and his colleagues promote may threaten long-term sustainable farming methods, for instance; and are at least as likely to squeeze out the majority of small farmers, as they are to save them and their families from hunger during times of drought or unstable conditions.

The majority of the world's hungry are rural, and they come from communities generally made up of small near-subsistence farmers, who currently eke out a modest living or try to keep their families fed on small plots of land.

The "high yield" cash-crops that Borlaug and others propose (particularly those peddaling GM grain-types whose patents mean that the small farmer is not allowed to re-seed from their own supplies) do not help any of the farmers who are at or barely above subsistence production.

These solutions only make sense in a capital market: A farmer must grow enough of a surplus to make the profit that will allow him/her to ship the grain to international distribution ports, and to purchase the fertilizers, the pesticides and the next year's seeds. With this increased emphasis on a market-return, comes an increase in intensive, one-crop farming, and with intensive farming comes the need to make or borrow enough money to purchase, make repairs to, or up grade sophisticated mechanical equipment.

Remember: most of these people Borlaug is supposed to be saving from hunger have no access to credit, and probably have been using an ox to pull a rudimentary plough. When they could afford the ox, that is.

The problems with your sure-fire market solution don't stop there. Depending on how much land he/she owns or rents, the small farmer may no longer be able to set aside space for the family's other food crops, or for grazing the family's animals. So they are often forced to purchase basic foodstuffs that they used to grow themselves.

...and we haven't even got into the problem of shipping their product through an unstable region, often without paved roads, in order to have it arrive at a large market, where they can cash in.

That is where ideology clouds in.

Where do all of the production, distribution, and market factors come into the elusive equation: "more grain = fewer people hungry"?

The market is not liberating the food. It is monetizing it. The new "solution" that Borlaug and his ilk propose, and that the left-leaning environmentalist rejects, simply shifts the dynamic of dependency. It doesn't necessarily offer a way to feed the hungry; nor does it offer the ordinary farmer sudden, hard-earned self-sufficiency.

In the new paradigm, growing food for profit and trade has now replaced growing food to feed one's family.  Each farming family---even assuming that the majority can afford to set up the new kinds of farms necessary to implement the capital intensive, GM patented solution---is now dependant on the demands of the market, rather than the land.

And, make no mistake, the market places its own sets of demands and comes equipped with an ideological agenda.

Rising and falling grain prices, market speculation, escalating transportation costs, regional transportation infrastructure and stability, trade subsidies and dumping, hoarding, storage problems, processing, and surplus monopolies... such concerns leave the new high-yield croppers as open to marketplace caprice as they were to the havoc wreaked by locusts and grasshoppers, fungus, tribal conflict, or too little rain. 

Just ask my uncle...and he had the money and the know how to invest in and develop a large-scale factory-style farm!

Sure, the agricultural "economy" that Borlaug and his proponents adhere to looks great on paper. Ideally, it should lead to more food to feed more peoples. We should be able to get more product from less land.

But we should know better than to think that high-yield, surplus-geared market solutions provide a panacea for food production.

Look at what factory farming and monoculture has done to farming here in North America: both at the human level and at the environmental level.

We all know about the costs. The demands of/on large-scale industrial farms lead to soil leaching, pollution, and region-wide socio-economic disruptions that, inevitably, result in massive rural depopulation, and a wave of migration to urban centres... 

Not to mention the inevitable oligopolies and monopolies that rise to control food supplies.

The global free-market trade in food, as it now plays out, provides absurd "efficiencies" that see a salmon caught in Siberia make its way down to a Chinese port to be "processed," after which it is shipped across two oceans to a packaging plant in Newfoundland so that it can be reprocessed, branded, and re-packaged before being trucked half way across the continent, to be dumped into an industrial-zone wearhouse on the out-skirts of Montreal. Then it is tracked, coded and distributed in more trucks, making their slow way through city traffic, until this Siberian fish can be shelved in bright chilled displays at my local supermarket.... Where, finally, it slips into my cart and eventually onto my dinner plate.

Just think of the carbon "foot-print" that one poor fish left in its wake. No one can tell me that is the most efficient way for me to have supper!

... even if it is, for some inexplicable reason, apparently the cheapest way... well, according to the current calculations of the Market, anyways.

This is the Market we are supposed to trust as the solution to the famines facing Africa and Asia?

This is the Market that is supposed to reward those small rural farmers with huge profits. Bringing them into the global marketplace, and offering them everything they need to feed their families, so they no longer have to bother with growing it?

"No more famine," they are promised. If only they trust global trade and give the farm over to this new product.

"Plant this one high-yield grain and leave all the other foodstuffs for other people to worry about."

"Don't worry, you can buy whatever else you will need, at our store."

How many developing countries currently feed the Western appetite, acting as a net exporter of foodstuffs, while their own people go hungry?

And, if that is not enough, the factory farming monopolies and this market-generated "cheapness" with regard to the global food supply leaves all of us---the poor rural folk in Africa, and the upper-middle class North American yuppie alike---heavily dependant on others for the majority of our food.

This global trade, consolodated as it is in the hands of a few large companies, leaves everyone vulnerable to food supply contamination, artificial shortages, and price manipulation.

Any solution that requires intensive monoculture farming, then, comes with a number of significant risks, including the fact that intensive industrial farming makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be independent and self-sufficient when it comes to the most basic of necessities: gathering food.

Yes, we need to help rural, poor constituencies like the African farmers, so that they can cope with their farming problems, and find better, sustainable solutions for blight, locusts, and drought.

Drought hearty grains are part of the solution. But not when they come with a GM patented dependency leash, or come attached to monoculture and industrial farming practices.

What Africa's hungry do NOT need, is to be forced off small, diversified family farms because large-scale industrial agribusiness has driven down the price for any modest surplus they used sell at local markets.

As a libertarian, I would have expected you to recognize the danger of the solution these scientists offer when it comes to the very concept of self-sufficiency.

If there are 100 million poor farming families in the developing world, only a small portion of them will be able to remain on the new large-scale, capital intensive, heavily mechanized farms that arise from Borlaug's solution.

Far more often, farmers will be (and already have been) forced into the shantytowns around cities.

In search of money to buy food.

Abandoning ways to produce food.

Profit-driven, non-subsistence land-use has already worked to force rural families off the land. Farms or hunting lands are arbitrarily confiscated, or lost to war. Perfectly good agricultural land is overrun by people hoping to cash in on higher land values, capital resource exploitation, and other alternative land uses. Sometimes the farms are gobbled up when they can't compete with large-scale agribusiness, sometimes they are lost to drought, sometimes to civil war and coercion, and sometimes they are destroyed for tourist resorts and expensive vacation homes. 

The poorest countries in Africa and South East Asia are a wash in hunger zones and refugee camps, where people are starving for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the earth's ability to sustain them (witness the shift in land use from rice growing to tourism, the drowning of vast sections of the Yangzee valley for electricity, and the squeeze of small fishermen from commercial fisheries and aquaculture businesses throughout South and East Asia; or Brazil's cattle ranch clearing in the Amazon basin; or the conflict in Darfur, which many say arose at least partially over access to prime grazing land and water).

To the environmentalist, then, the tragedy of hunger is two fold. On the one hand, there are all the pitfalls I have described above. On the other, there is the history of environmental devastation left in the wake of proposed solutions like those of the GM crop innovators. Because, as the profit margins for each large-scale farming operation decline (the inevitable result of over-harvesting or over irrigating, salt leaching from excessive fertilizers, pesticide and herbicide water contamination, or over grazing), profit-seeking businesses leave a barren wasteland in their wake, and they move on to the next field, or they clear the next section of forest.

In each case, the poor people we are trying to help...that subsistence usually agrarian family who is so often hungry... are still hungry, but now they and their families cannot eke out a even a subsistence living, even in the good years.

Forced off their land, they become completely dependant on food aid. At the mercy of the monopolies and the market.

.....

Okay. I will admit, the environmentalist/liberal argument presented here, as a counterpoint, may not be any more objective than your analysis.

But, perhaps you will agree: A proper scientific hypothesis arises from thinking about many possible outcomes (good and bad), and all science labs need a cogent thoughtful hypothesis, before they set out to conduct their experiments.

***

Some Resources for More Information on Subsistence Farming

and Possible Solutions to Hunger

At present almost 80% of Africa's population is engaged in farming - mostly subsistence. But despite this huge presence on the land, food security continues to remain elusive due to worn out soils and tiny plot sizes.

 

• http://www.just1world.org/food-and-hunger.htm  Just1World looks at how local infrastructure, good governance, functioning civil institutions (like communications, banking, and policing), land ownership, and local agricultural research and education are fundamental to improving agriculture in Africa.

The [farmer's] journey of 900k (560 miles) meant 17 days on the road to reach his destination. In that time he was stopped 10 times by local officials whom he had to bribe in order to be allowed to move on. And at the end of his ordeal he found that the roads had been so rough that many of his grain sacks had burst open. However, his problems didn't end there. Selling in Ethiopia is also made hazardous by the fact that there is no legal system to enforce contracts and very few traders have bank accounts.

 

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/2008/mar/20/livelihoods.katinepartners  The Guardian (UK) has an informative article on a specific Katine project in Uganda. Again, small scale local solutions are presented after studying how best to serve the farmers in question. When high-yield crop specialization is encouraged, it is to the benefit of the subsistence farmer's family. They will be able to feed themselves with the cassava and groundnuts, and can easily sell excess on the local market... an absolute necessity, when transportation infrastructure puts the "international" market in grains out of reach.

•  http://www.actionaid.org.uk/1715/ethiopia.html  Actionaid also works with local farmers, who can indeed benefit from Western research into crops and agricultural techniques, but who need local solutions (including simple micro-credit loans and a way to purchase basic seeds, or help building a mill, so that separating the seed from the husk and grinding seeds will not be so time consuming). They do not need agribusiness propaganda and patented GM high-yield enticements that chain them to a product.

Planting legumes such as ground nuts, beans, and pigeon peas were fixing nitrogen into the soil of some of the fields that I visited, which would be rotated out with a maize crop the next year. In amongst the maize were pumpkin plants and other vegetables. Small trees in the fields helped to prevent soil erosion, and provided fuel for cooking and wood for posts and tools. A long row of tall grass at the edge of the family plot, helped to ensure that the newly enriched soil did not wash away in the heavy rains.

 

•  http://www.untotheleast.com/blog/2006_01_29_archive.html  This lovely blog follows the author's time in Africa from 2006-2007, and covers many of the inter-related problems the farming people of various countries face. In one entry on subsistence farming, the author talks about the risks that face the young, who want to leave the poverty and the hunger on subsistence farms, but who find their only options are abject poverty in the city's slums, or "subsistence employment" (making less than 80 cents a day picking tea leaves for a plantation, for instance). In contrast, the author describes a rural community that benefited from an ADRA Canada aid program designed to help farmers find simple and affordable steps to improve soil quality.

This week's Lancet contains a letter from two researchers at the London School of Hygiene. They present some very sensible arguments about food policy. They observe that "petrol tanks and stomachs were competing well before biofuels were proposed to tackle climate change," since transportation and industrial agriculture are both premised on cheap fossil fuel. One way to tackle the competition for a scarce resource is to change transport policy - a shift towards walking and cycling would reduce both the demand for fossil fuel, and secondarily mean that there were fewer overweight people, thus driving down the need for food. All well and good.

They estimate that a population of a billion people at a healthy body mass index would use a total of 10.5 MJ through the daily business of eating and living.

And then they throw in this grenade. It's worth quoting at length to see the damage that gets done subsequently.

"An obese population of 1 billion people with a stable mean BMI of 29.0 kg/m2 would require an average 7 MJ of food energy per person per day to maintain basal metabolic rate, and 5.4 MJ per person per day for activities of daily living (calculations available from the authors). Compared with the normal weight population, the obese population consumes 18% more food energy."

It's a straightforward comparison between a billion not-quite-overweight people and a billion obese people. Not that there are one billion obese people. The World Health Organisation puts the figure at 300 million. But it's a figure that illustrates the argument around food and fuel use, and its subsequent systemic effects.

So what's the headline of the most emailed article at the BBC yesterday? Obese Blamed for the World's Ills.

Paf. Just like that. A social problem about addiction of both our food production system transport policy to fossil fuel is transformed into a bun-throw at fatties. Obese people are the problem.   more good stuff   here

by WALDEN BELLO

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency. 

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work--many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, "It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this--to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one." Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments--roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support--a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports--much of it subsidized US grain--farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, "The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally."

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001--46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative--food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage--and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself. 

Other Nation articles on the subject...

• "I think that ethanol is the most popular whipping boy in the agricultural world at the moment"

• "So to say that biofuels are the culprit clearly underestimates the demand and really shows a gross misunderstanding of the world food situation,"

• "We have to grow more food. We have to increase yields"

Hint: To increase yields, farmers are forced to buy lots and lots more fertilizers!

Related links:

• Fatal Harvest
• Keep Mine free ...!
• The Center for Food Safety

Related Reading:

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth One
  Industrial agriculture will feed the world

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Two
  Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Three
  Industrial food is cheap

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Four
  Industrial agriculture is efficient

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Five
  Industrial food offers more choices

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Six
  Industrial agriculture benefits the environment and wildlife

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Seven
  Biotechnology will solve the problems of industrial agriculture

See the tags for the answer!

I watched the documentary King Corn last night on the PBS program Independent Lens.

While the subject of corn's place in the industrial food system is complex and could present a real challenge to professional documentary treatments, King Corn benefits from a decidedly small scale inquiry into the matter.

Two young college grads, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, decide that the best way to discover the true nature of corn's importance to America is to grow a single acre of the crop in the midst of Iowa's corn country. They embrace the basic idea of learning by doing, the premise of all college internship projects.

It's amazing to see the kinds of cooperation and access they get by keeping things disarmingly small and, well, goofy. Farmers chuckle at them and then offer up all the assistance they might need to cultivate their corn. By interviewing an assortment of farmers, elevator operators, feed lot owners and even a diabetic cab driver they uncover an everyman's view of corn. They follow instructions for making corn syrup given over the phone by some disembodied expert. Michael Pollan cooperates with them and speaks about the food system. Amazingly, they even get an interview with former Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz.

The two young documentarians leave their sneaker prints all over corn's empire and give us a glimpse at the true cost of cheap and abundant food.

You can download the podcast from the 3cr website.

With oil hitting $110 a barrel, Cuba provides a powerful example of how an industrialized country can survive a so-called “peak oil” scenario, where oil availability goes into an inevitable decline.

When the soviet union collapsed, Cuba lost a huge percentage of its vital oil imports.

The country also lost important trading partners which provided the country's food needs and important export revenue.

Cuba was pushed into an immediate food and energy crisis, a situation compounded by long-standing US embargoes.

After responding to the crisis with a more localised economy and organic food production system, Cuba is now being celebrated as a model of self-sufficiency.

It was the only country in the 2007 World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet report that met a set of criteria for sustainable development.

Roberto Perez is a cuban biologist and permaculturist who is currently touring Australia.

He's been telling audiences about Cuba's experience and what it means for oil-dependant countries like Australia.

More information about Roberto's Australian tour is available at http://www.permaculture.com.au

In Australia, the Murray-Darling River communities are struggling with massive economic, cultural and environmental losses as water is diverted for wasteful industrial agricultural use. The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia's Food Bowl, produces one third of the nation's food. But the government's decision to prioritize irrigated crops and pastures is destroying the watershed and the communities who live there.

It's time for the Australian government, and governments around the world, to put people, communities and the environment first. Instead of crying "drought" it's time we prioritize sustainable water management.

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This has been the framework of Western history in the context of science over the last several decades, but it reflects a Western approach that goes back for centuries. There is a quasi-scientific approach to theology in the West. Certain ideas come up which seem to fit into the existing framework; those ideas gain popularity and are applied widely. Over time, the application of some of those ideas turn out to be healthy and beneficial, and are integrated into Tradition. Those that turn out to be destructive and unhealthy are (hopefully) rejected before too much damage is done. That's painting with a very broad brush, but I think it's a fair assessment.

Every generation is faced with the destructive consequences of certain ideas or a misapplication of them. In the past, people would fight Western battles on Western terms, fighting bad ideas with good ideas. There have always been those who have blamed the West for over-reaching and getting into things we shouldn't, and decide that we're wrong for deconstructing the world and exploiting it. Such resistance has been found within Western culture itself, but generally it was overcome in time through the beneficial applications of those ideas. If, on the other hand, the applications of the idea turned out to be oppressively bad, those bad applications tended to last if there was a broad acknowledgement that either it couldn't be helped or it shouldn't be helped. Things are a little different in today's world; people are quickly made aware of the bad things in the world and are able to react in ways that they weren't in the past. One of the newer responses that people have to the West's overreaching is a rejection of the West wholesale, and turning to Eastern thought and religion. I think a lot of the much-touted Orthodox boomlet is a derivative of this: people see destructive outcomes in the West, and decide that we've gone too far, running to the East where people don't really care for analytical science or theology, never reach into the mysteries of the universe. I was one of those people for a short time. However, as I reflected on the evils of science and theology in the West, I only found reasons not to reject the West.

One of the remarkable things about the West, and the thing that has set us apart from all other cultures in the world in any part of history, is the development of modern science. I think everybody would agree on that. Science, in my opinion, is nothing more than a strong discipline of a culture's knowledge and exploration. Things that were once anecdotal, preserved in oral traditions of extant societies, are now codified, checked and double-checked, and then published for everybody. The largest driving force behind modern science has been self-interest and the felt need to exploit the discoveries that we make. The problems arise when the exploitation fails to take into account some fact that is as of yet unknown. Many people believe that the two - science and exploitation - are indivisible. Understanding only makes people want to use that understanding to their advantage, and people can't be stopped from using it. It goes back to the Garden of Eden - understanding and knowledge were tied together inexorably with sin, or at least an occasion or tendency to sin.

What is the answer? In my opinion, the answer is not to forsake all things Western, but to learn to integrate the best of the West and the East. I think there is a lot to be said for Eastern wisdom, and goodness knows we need it now. As the West gains more tools with which to work, our capacity for good and our capacity for evil has increased exponentially. Now is the time for people to advocate that we start scaling back our mass-scale experimentation, to learn from the mistakes we've made and not try universal exploitation any more. It would be much safer and more productive to begin using agricultural experimentation in a certain, limited location and allow a few generations to pass before it would be brought to the wider public.

As a Westerner, I will assert that the evil is not the science, not the delving into matters unknown, but the exploitation of what we find. Thus, by encouraging science and discovery while also encouraging prudence and patience in applications, we can reap the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. Forsaking the West will only make things worse. Take a moment to see beyond this period in history. Those who see the problems with industrial farming and talk about them are Westerners. The people who choose to buy organic foods are Westerners. The people who seek to correct the destructive ideas are Westerners, just as those who originated the destructive ideas were Western. This is the strength and resilience of the West: when we cause problems, we turn away from them, we fix them as best we can. The only reason that people are now aware of the destructive qualities of modern farming because of the fact that it was attempted. The only reason people are embracing organic foods is because people are aware of the destructive qualities of industrially produced food. However, the West's growing interest in a more natural approach to farming is now combined with increased knowledge on what makes farming work, and what makes it healthy or unhealthy, things that were never known until now. Yes, the West has done things that harmed the earth and ourselves. But with that experience comes wisdom and the ability to turn away from the harmful habits of the past.

Will a wiser approach be adopted in the West? It's too early to tell. Of course, in America there is a lot of resistance to the idea. We're greedy. But there is a strong, flourishing movement which aims to restrain our exploitation of the environment; you see the efforts against global warming, against deforestation, against industrial agriculture. These movements are ten times stronger than they were even a decade ago, and I don't think it's impossible to hope that wisdom will win the day and the West will become a bit more mature in the way we look at each other and the world around us.

It also takes a look at seed saving with one of Australia’s pioneers in the field, Jude Fanton pictured here with a mildew resistant Professor Mary Sheahan's cucumber.

I interviewed Louise Sales, genetic engineering campaigner with Greenpeace. Louise discusses what's been an eventful month in relation to GE crops.

Moratoria in Victoria and NSW will end in February while South Australia took a more cautious approach on GE crops deciding to extend its moratoria.

February also saw several Canadian farmers visit Australia to warn about the perils of adopting GE-canola. I interviewed Canadian National Farmers Union Vice-president and a canola grower, Terry Boehm who talked about how GE seeds and biotech companies are forcing farmers into a relationship he likens to "feudalism".

Jude Fanton, co-founder and director of the Seedsavers Network talked to me about the importance of saving the seeds of hierloom and rare varieties to combat the consolidation of the seed ownership and the ecological risks of genetic monocultures.

You can download the show (after Sunday) or subscribe to the podcast at www.3cr.org.au/podcasts.

It's not often that slaughterhouses allow reporters inside to photograph the proceedings. So I was surprised to this slideshow in North Carolina's Charlotte Observer.

He's watching...even if the USDA isn't
Photo from Mark Lorch's fllickr stream

Actually, I *am* disappointed that this kind of oversight could occur. Honestly, I don't know what the fuck these people are doing. On the one hand, you have small-time meat producers who can't get their product to market because of USDA regulations and on the other, big, USDA-inspected plants where all kinds of shenanigans are going on while the inspection regime is asleep at the wheel.

This is just bullshit.

The man arguably most closely identified with modern industrial agriculture (at least in the U.S.) died in his sleep on February 2. Memorials are predictably very divergent in tone, from those extolling to those decrying the changes wrought under his reign as Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford.

Everybody should support sustainable agriculture because it will help alleviate health problems, environmental pollution and help strengthen communities, as I will show in later posts - but Christians have added incentive to do so, since it is mandated by Biblical principles and through teachings of Jesus.  Why should agriculture be so important to Christians, you may ask.  Well:

 First, agriculture is Biblically relevant - agricultural and food themes are ever present through allegory and metaphor in describing our faith. God is concerned with the way animals are raised and killed, crops are grown and food eaten, which he showed through numerous dietary and agricultural laws and guidelines in the Old Testament. Yes, we have the new covenant with Jesus which allows us freedom in eating choices, but the sentiment behind God's Law in the Old Testament still is important to us today, and was upheld by Jesus in the New Testament.

 Second, agriculture has served as a cleavage between faith and works; our current industrial agriculture does not reflect biblical stewardship principles, it reflects exploitation. It is rife with human rights atrocities from pesticide-laden workers in banana farms to the unfairly shrinking salaries of small American farmers in the face of government-subsidized big agri-businesses. It also damages our environment, which in turn damages us and entire ecosystems. Continually through this blog, I will illustrate some of the biggest negative environmental and human impacts of industrial agriculture and explain why Christians should not support these practices.

Third, agriculture is important because food, the lack thereof and also too much, is a source of much human suffering, which Christians seek to alleviate as Christ did. Food security is an issue for millions of people worldwide. Malnutrition and obesity plague many countries. In America, over 13% of people are food insecure, which means they are unsure of where their next meal is coming from or they are actually hungry, while 60% are obese.[1]  This is important because some people argue that industrial agriculture is good because it feeds more people, ergo, fewer people go hungry. In a later post, I will address the flaws of this statement.