The Future of Food...

Welcome! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed so you never miss an article on health, nutrition or green living.

An estimated 80% of all food on grocery store shelves contains genetically engineered soy, corn or Canola—even foods you wouldn’t expect to contain them, like spaghetti sauce. If you haven’t yet seen “The Future of Food,” please take the time to watch this feature-length documentary investigating the disturbing truth behind the genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.

I’ve been in a lengthy online disagreement on a Change.org forum with a proponent of genetically engineered (GM) crops, and it seems that there are a lot of myths about our ability to “feed the world.” Many people think that without high-tech inputs like genetically engineered crops, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, we will have widespread famine as the global population mushrooms to 8 billion people over the coming decades. Nothing could be further from the truth…

According to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) 2007 report, “Current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people projected to inhabit the planet by 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.”

But, the growing push toward industrial agriculture and globalization—with an emphasis on export crops, genetically modified crops, and rapid expansion of biofuel crops (sugar cane, corn, soybean, oil palm, eucalyptus, etc.)—is increasingly reshaping the world’s agriculture and food supply, with potentially severe economic, social, and ecological impacts and risks. After all, none of these commodity crops actually feed people the diverse, nutritious diet that we need to be healthy.

Furthermore, the industrial farming practices currently in use today (including industrial organic farming to a lesser degree) release tons of harmful carbon dioxide and nitrogen into the atmosphere, promote soil erosion, salinization, desertification and loss of soil fertility. The UNFAO estimates that over 25 percent of arable land in the world is already compromised by these problems, especially in more arid regions and in sloped terrain.

Globally, the Green Revolution, while enhancing crop production, has proven to be unsustainable as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, favored wealthier farmers, and left many poor farmers deeper in debt. The new Green Revolution proposed for Africa via the multi-institutional Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) appears destined to repeat the tragic record left by the fertilizer-dependent “miracle seeds” used in Latin America and Asia, by increasing dependency on fossil fuels, foreign inputs and patent-protected GM plant varieties which poor farmers cannot afford (for example, fertilizer costs went up approximately 270 percent last year), and on foreign aid.

So, How Do We “Feed the World?”
North Dakota organic farmer and sustainable farming activist Fred Kirschenmann, refutes the notion that all-out, high-input production for the global marketplace is the only way to feed the world. Kirschenmann even wonders if “feeding the world” should be our goal.

“‘Feeding the world’ suggests that someone will take responsibility for feeding someone else, and therefore make them dependent. Under those terms, there can be no food security,” he writes. “‘Keeping the world fed’ suggests that people will be empowered to feed themselves. That is essential to long-term food security.”

Critics of sustainable farming often argue that such methods can’t keep up the pace of producing enough food to feed an ever-expanding human population. But Kirschenmann maintains that we need alternatives to the industrial model because it is quickly destroying the fragile ecological balances and using up the natural resources upon which farming depends.

” … the real problem with the unprecedented increase in human population is that it has led to the disruption and deterioration of the natural functioning of earth’s biotic community, and that is what threatens our future—not lack of production,” he points out.

Reining in population growth, of course, is part of the solution. But the other major piece of the puzzle is to find ways of farming that mirror the evolutionary stability of the ecological neighborhoods in which we live, and that enhance rather than deplete our resources.

After examining ag-related controversies ranging from global climate change to the role of livestock, Kirschenmann argues that organic farms “… integrated into local ecologies and rooted in local communities, can do a better job of keeping the world fed than large, corporate farms owned by distant investors.”

He concludes: “The best way to achieve food security is through food locally produced by local people with local control.”

The Case for Agroecological and Organic Farming
Can organic, smallholder farming do much to feed an increasingly hungry world? Almost everyone assumes that it can’t. It is seen as something purely for the health-conscious Western middle classes. But the counter-intuitive truth is very different.

Study after study shows that organic techniques can provide much more food per acre in developing countries than conventional chemical-based agriculture. One report—published last year by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)—found that 114 projects, covering nearly two million African farmers, more than doubled their yields by introducing organic or near-organic practices.

Numerous field trials in the U.S. and the U.K have shown that organic farming practices produce commodity yields comparable to conventional, but even if the yields are somewhat reduced compared to crops farmed with fossil-fuel dependent machines and chemicals, the improvement in carbon sequestration, soil fertility, moisture holding capacity and nutrition-density improves cumulatively with each season, and this has many very important benefits over industrial agriculture.

Agroecological, organic techniques like polycultural plantings, rotation crops, cover crops and animal manures are particularly advantageous in regions that lack money, technology and fossil fuels for industrial approaches. Going organic will also pay long-term dividends, for it builds up soil where conventional farming depletes it, prevents exposure to toxic pesticides, sequesters tons of carbon which offsets global warming, and stores more water in the ground in what will be an increasingly thirsty world.

Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University, who has studied the issue for more than 20 years, says: “Methods used by organic farmers can dramatically increase yields over those achieved by low-intensity conventional agriculture.” Even more important, as the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development points out, going organic almost always boosts the incomes of small Third World farmers, because they no longer have to buy costly inputs.

Poor farmers around the world are lifting themselves out of poverty by going organic. Small-scale farmers all over the world have stopped forking out for expensive, toxic chemicals and patented, genetically modified seeds in favor of traditional methods of growing which they haven’t used for decades.

The result? Small communities are re-learning how to manage their natural resources, meaning they produce more reliable, bigger crops and a better living wage with less toxic pollution. For many of the world’s 1.4 billion small-scale farmers, the benefit of organics is clear: better food, security and a better life.

A New Way for the Post-Fossil Fuel World
“The commercial industrial technologies that are used in agriculture today to feed the world… are not inherently sustainable,” Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro told the Greenpeace Business Conference recently. “They have not worked well to promote either self-sufficiency or food security in developing countries.” Feeding the world sustainably “is out of the question with current agricultural practice,” Shapiro told the Society of Environmental Journalists in 1995. “Loss of topsoil, of salinity of soil as a result of irrigation, and ultimate reliance on petrochemicals … are, obviously, not renewable. That clearly isn’t sustainable.”

But do we really need to embark upon another risky technological, industrial fix to solve the mistakes of a previous one? Instead, we should be looking for solutions that are based on ecological and biological principles and have significantly fewer environmental and social costs. There is such an alternative that has been pioneered by organic farmers and permaculture smallholders.

In contrast to the industrial/monoculture approach advocated by Monsanto and the GM seed industry, organic agriculture is described by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) as “a holistic production management system which promotes and enhances agro-ecosystem health, including biodiversity, biological cycles, and soil biological activity.”

According to Miguel A. Altieri, professor of agroecology at the University of California at Berkeley, “Food systems must become less dependent on fossil fuels, more resilient in the face of climate change, and able to contribute to the Government’s pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Farming based on organic principles can deliver against all three challenges.”

Last year, the world’s biggest and most authoritative study—the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)—backed organic agriculture as part of a “radical change” in the way the world grows its food. Certainly, the present over-concentration on intensive agriculture has not succeeded even in reducing the number of people going hungry—this year it topped one billion for the first time.

Technology will of course be important to the looming food crisis, but the search for a “silver bullet” like genetic modification to solve all these problems is a dangerous distraction. The solutions are already largely available; it’s now about the political will to implement them.

The question then, is not “how to feed the world,” but rather, how can we develop sustainable farming methods that have the potential to help the world feed and sustain itself.

7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis – from Yes! Magazine
“The official prescriptions for solving the world food crisis call for more subsidies for industrialized nations, more food aid, and more so-called Green (or Gene) Revolutions. Expecting the institutions that built the current flawed food system to solve the food crisis is like asking an arsonist to put out a forest fire. When the world food crisis exploded in early 2008, ADM’s profits increased by 38 percent, Cargill’s by 128 percent, and Mosaic Fertilizer (a Cargill subsidiary) by a whopping 1,615 percent!

For decades, family farmers the world over have resisted this corporate control. They have worked to diversify crops, protect soil and native seeds, and conserve nature. They have established local gardens, businesses, and community-based food systems. These strategies are effective. They need to be given a chance to work.

The solutions to the food crisis are those that make the lives of family farmers easier: re-regulate the market, reduce the power of the agri-foods industrial complex, and build ecologically resilient family agriculture. Here are some of the needed steps:

1. Support domestic food production.

2. Stabilize and guarantee fair prices to farmers and consumers by re-establishing floor prices and publicly owned national grain reserves. Establish living wages for workers on farms, in processing facilities, and in supermarkets.

3. Halt agrofuels expansion.

4. Curb speculation in food.

5. Promote a return to smallholder farming. On a pound-per-acre basis, family farms are more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And they use less oil. Because 75 percent of the world’s poor are farmers, this will address poverty, too.

6. Support agro-ecological and organic food production.

7. Food sovereignty: Recognize the right of all people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound methods and their own food systems.