(Read Postcard #1 here.)
The Road From Green Revolution to Fatal Harvest
There are so many criticisms around the current global food system that for a while I started wondering if in fact it had already collapsed and I was studying a post-apocalyptic food system.
The difficulty with data around the food system is a little like data around climate change, only much more fragmented and fast-moving. If a group of scientists make a claim, it's fairly easy to find a Bjorn Lomborg-type claiming it ain't so, you're just fear-mongering. Discerning the truth of what's going on with the global food system at the numbers and science level requires a lot of time and energy. There is contradictory information and all of it cannot be right. At the end of the day it boils down to epistemology and axiomatic truths, and a choice needs to be made as to what we are willing to accept as legitimate data.
In trying to discern patterns in the mass of data it seemed to me that there are two broad schools of dueling, wheeling thought, with a host of lesser and emerging schools emanating from them. The first is the modern Green Revolution. The second, simultaneously representing an older form of agrarian logic and a response to the Green Revolution, can be dubbed (perhaps unfairly) the Fatal Harvest School.
The Green Revolution took hold and changed the face of agriculture through the 1960s and 1970s, although its origins lie in the early twentieth century. Until the 19th century food production grew by expanding cultivated land area. If you wanted to grow more food then you had no choice but to put more land under cultivation. A key technological advance -- synthetic ammonia -- changed this age-old truism.
The modern fertilizer industry came into being in 1909, with the synthesis of ammonia by Fritz Haber. This discovery had little agricultural impact at first; during the two world wars production of ammonia was diverted to munitions instead of farming. Following the end of the Second World War, however, the ammonia industry turned to producing ammonia for the rapidly growing fertilizer industry, contributing to dramatically increasing crop yields. Norman Borlaug, known as the father of Green Revolution, in his survey, The Green Revolution: Its Origins and Contributions to World Agriculture (B. 2003) explains that change in hard, cold numbers,
US maize cultivation led the modernization process. In 1940, US farmers produced 56 million tons of maize on roughly 31 million hectares, with an average yield of 1.8 t/ha. In 2000 US farmers produced 252 million tons of maize on roughly 29 million hectares, with an average yield of 8.6 t/ha.
The Green Revolution coupled developments in fertilizer synthesis with the breeding of more robust and fast growing seed varieties. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work in the development of rust-resistant (disease resistant), semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties with radically improved yields.
The new short wheat varieties, which drew on the Japanese Norin wheat germplasm, were much more efficient than their tall predecessor varieties in converting sunlight and nutrients into grain production. Furthermore their superior plant architecture provided resistance against lodging (falling over) in heavy winds and under improved conditions of soil fertility and moisture. (B. 2003).
Throughout the 60s and 70s these varieties of wheat (known as Mexican dwarf wheat) and rice, spread far and wide, particularly in countries suffering from acute food shortages such as India and Pakistan, and later China. Radical (and controversial) changes were made in national agriculture policy in these countries in order to adapt to the regime specified by the scientists that had developed these new wheat varieties. Within 10 years, wheat and rice production had increased by 50 percent. (B. 2003)
To very crudely summarize, the Green Revolution was, and is, a revolution in generating more yield from the same patch of land using hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. Its a Revolution because it has changed the face of agriculture and is squarely responsible for the current, dominant, food production regime. Its a movement that yokes itself strongly to science and technology and claims that there is no way of feeding the growing world population other than through the further deployment of a science-based agriculture. The shift to GMOs can be seen as a new chapter in the story of the Green Revolution, an attempt to further increase yields.
Those who subscribe to the Fatal Harvest School cannot be neatly packaged. It consists of a rag-tag bunch of farmers and activists who claim to represent an older, more gentle and contextually sensitive agrarian logic. They believe that industrial agriculture (as the prime product of the Green Revolution) is inherently destructive: its farming practices, such as the use of fertilizers, pesticides and GMOs, are a serious threat to the environment and to people's health; its practices of monoculture, single crop farming and single minded focus on yield-based agriculture is a threat to biodiversity and pays little attention to local context; the business practices of industrial agriculture are monopolistic and a threat to all subsistence, small and medium size farmers. In short, the Fatal Harvest school lays the blame for each and every problem in the global food system squarely at the feet of industrial agriculture. To summarise the criticisms of the Fatal Harvest School, familiar to many of us, are as follows:
1. Health: The food industry is killing us. In the West there are diseases of over-nutrition, ranging from coronary heart disease through to diabetes. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta cites food related illnesses as the second largest cause of death in the USA. Food corporations are bracing themselves for obesity suits much in the same way that tobacco companies were targeted. In the developing world there are the diseases of malnutrition, such as Vitamin A and iodine deficiencies, as well as the stark fact that 40 million people die of hunger a year.
2. Environmental: Industrialised agriculture is the key cause of environmental degradation today. Mono-cropping is leading to a massive loss of biodiversity (See George Monibots excellent article Fallen Fruit for one case), its putting massive amounts of pesticides and herbicides into the air and into water, its causing a food bubble through rapidly depleting non-renewable water aquifers which once they run dry will cause a collapse in key grain commodities, its pushing fish stocks to extinction (in Canada & Europe).
3. Cultural: Modern agriculture is destroying rural and indigenous farming cultures. Were heading towards a "walmartisation" of food, where the death of small & medium farmers, rural culture and indigenous farming practices means that millions of peasants are left vulnerable to displacement, loss of livelihoods and famine; a monoculture of food and the loss of valuable agricultural practices.
4. Economic: Agribusiness is forming a oligopoly out to control the entire food chain. The food business through rapid consolidation is leading us towards a food monopoly where a handful of Western corporations will control every aspect of food.
From what I can tell, the Fatal Harvest School is winning the public battle for hearts and minds. In the UK it was largely responsible for shaping public attitudes to GMOs which were clearly rejected by the public at large. Its responsible for the mass mobilization of farmers from the South, through the anti-globalisation movement and organizations such as Via Campesina.
In turn, the Green Revolutionaries -- that is, the scientists, agronomists and multinationals who are the target of so much ire -- throw up their hands in exasperation at the irrationality of the Fatal Harvest School. Their rebuttal can be boiled down to a few key points. The first is that given population growth figures we cannot afford, at social, financial and environmental levels, to turn over enough land to feed everyone through less intensive forms of organic farming. Jason Clay, in his excellent and monumental work World Agriculture and the Environment puts it bluntly,
...the Earth is currently home to over 6 billion people. Supporting them all by low-intensity cropping depending solely on recycling organic matter and using crop rotation with legumes would require doubling or tripling the area currently cultivated. This land would have to come from somewhere and would most likely mean the elimination of most if not all tropical rainforests and the conversation of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands too.
His rather dead-pan conclusion is that these are hardly acceptable alternatives. Non-organic methods of farming, in other words, provide more bang for buck. Furthermore because industrial agriculture uses comparatively less land this means that less of the environment is disturbed and cleared away to meet farming needs. This argument hinges on the claim that industrial agriculture yields more per acre than organic agriculture, that we have no choice but to feed the growing population and that the masses want a standard of living equal to those in the West. The Green Revolutionaries think of themselves as the pragmatists in this particular game, they are responding to undeniable trends. The trouble with this, of course, is that they have designed an agricultural logic that profits from destructive and undeniable trends. They leave themselves open to broadsides of criticism in that its no longer possible to discern if they are simply responding to destructive trends or actively a cause of these trends.
The Fatal Harvest School, on the other hand, is arguing that some sort of fundamental change in human behaviour needs to be made. Ideally, population growth figures need to be controlled otherwise industrial agriculture will chew up the planet. Behaviour change, however, can take place in two places, the West and the developing world. In the West this behaviour change looks like a change in consumption patterns thus reducing stress on the environment. In the developing world this change looks like, at best, a change in reproductive patterns (if not more). I find it disturbing that so few people have any faith that behaviour change can take place in the West. At the moment the burden is therefore placed squarely on the developing world. What's more the way Green Revolutionary logic is playing out against Fatal Harvest logic currently means that the world will see an increasingly stratified global food regime, with the rich being able to afford organic food and the poor having to rely on GMOs.
Having said that there are precidents for behaviour change in both the West and the developing world.
Smoking is currently declining in the West, largely due to years of campaigning and health education. Given the liklihood of obesity taking the place of smoking as the number one killer it's also possible that the issue of over-eating be addressed in the same way, through massive public health campaigns. (Of course tobacco companies responded to the decline of business in the West by focussing efforts in the developing world.)
As we've reported before, it looks like global population figures will level off at around the 9 billion mark, which is far from the dire predictions of 20 billion or so that were being made in the 70s. Planning around such levelling off should, at least in theory, mean that it's much easier to make a case for a particular, more environmentally friendly, food logic other than one designed for runaway population growth.
The conundrum posed by these dueling logics boils down to a single, highly complex question, the answer to which is far from clear. Given the vast surplus of food, at least in the West, does the world really need more food?
Next Week: Postcard #3 Southern Views of Northern Logic
