Thursday, January 24, 2013

AGRICULTURE......the correct way #1


FROM THE BOOK "MORE GOOD NEWS" by David Suuzuki and Holly Dressel

These countries—Canada, the U.S., and Australia—have become known as the hated spoilers, not just of climate change agreements but of every United Nations attempt to protect biodiversity or to deflect agriculture from its current suicidal path. Unlike the other 107 countries involved, they refused to approve the 1 aastd report.
That's because multifunctionality, by definition, would discourage vertical integration and would favor the small farmer, local slaughterhouses and storage facilities, diversity of production, and natural biodiversity. Large corporations, with the collusion of our governments, have worked hard for the past sixty years to eliminate people from the country landscape and replace them with machines and monoculture management. But this report by four hundred international experts recognizes that only farmers running small or medium-sized operations can provide the personal attention that a multifaceted and multiproductive approach to agriculture demands so that the land base remains both economically and environmentally sustainable over the long term. The industrialization policies of the old Green Revolution were consciously intended to get cheaper food out of the countryside and use the displaced farmers to provide new industries with a bigger labor force. But today these policies are working to the tragic disadvantage of the citizens whose countries are still applying them. Most Third World cities are swelling so fast with refugees from the seizure of the countryside by big operations that they are topping 12 and 15 million people, a population density widely recognized to be both unmanageable and unsustainable. And good jobs are not available to the huge majority of these refugees.

By contrast, the multifunctional approach is based on scientific studies and hard policies that were adopted by consensus in the EU over a decade ago. Multifunctionality has made European farmers the most financially secure in the world, their landscapes among the most beautiful and desirable, their countrysides the most livable, and their food of the highest quality. Critics of multifunctionality claim that the concept is protectionism in disguise. They have turned to trade regimes like NAFTA and the WTO to prevent its spread, although even the WTO has rarely found such practitioners in noncompliance.
A major argument waiting in the wings throughout this discussion is encapsulated in a post to an NGO website: "Isn't it a bit dubious to hear wealthy people living in monocultural landscapes, the destruction of which made them wealthy, dictate to the world's poor on how to value ecosystem services, landscapes, and cultures— things for which there is no market?"23 It might be possible to argue in favor of the spread of monocultures if all the world's poor people really could become rich (or even fed) by thus despoiling their home landscapes. But there are a variety of reasons why they can't, all related to the crises in usable soil and water, the unavoidable future escalation in the cost of fossil fuel supplies, and the simple fact that large monocultures favor large landowners. Even if industrial agriculture miraculously survives the steady increase in the supply of fuel and chemical inputs, policies favoring it are far more likely to push poor people off their ancestral lands and into urban slums than to make them rich. Thanks to unionization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America, urban employment did generate wealth for a generation or two. However, moving from the land to the city to get a good hourly wage in a factory (or call center) would be seen as poor career planning for most refugees from rural areas. There aren't enough jobs to go around, and since the downturn, many such refugees, in China, for example, have turned around and headed for home.

Leaving aside the heated discussions about rich versus poor and city versus country, the problem of how to provide everyone on the planet with a Western standard of living is one that is amenable to mathematics. Given what each First World citizen consumes, the number of people who are now alive, and how many natural resources remain for us all to divvy up, it would take (according to variations in calculations) between at least four and as many as eight more planets fully as rich in natural resources as this one. Right this minute, even with many countries not suffering from a food deficit, we would need the current planet's total production plus a third more to elevate everyone to Western economic status.24
Since no one has any extra planets handy, we all have to embrace a different paradigm pretty quickly—and that's what institutions like Slow Food, EU agricultural policies, and the IAASTD are trying to do. Those yield-per-acre zombie arguments are still used to "prove" the efficacy of Green Revolution or industrialized agriculture. But knowing what we do today about the effects of industrial agriculture on soils, water, ocean dead zones, biodiversity, and climate change, it's more realistic to argue along with Bob Watson, the director of IAASTD, that in terms of agriculture, "business as usual... will leave us facing a world nobody would want to inhabit."25

CUBA   

Two vastly different political states have already been forced by circumstances to grow and distribute food and to share resources in exactly this way. In the first edition of this book, we talked about how Cuba was driven by the U.S. oil blockade to become the modern world's first country fed totally on organic food. Because of the blockade, Cuba lost access to modern fertilizers, pesticides, and parts to repair their agricultural machinery; as well, 74 percent of the population migrated into the cities, leaving the countryside short of farmers. In only seven years, however, between 1990 and 1997, Cuba learned how to feed itself by paying higher prices to farmers, using modern organic technologies, establishing smaller production units, and encouraging urban agriculture.
The latter was largely a bottom-up achievement. With a little government encouragement, tiny plots of vegetables, spices, and medicinals sprang up inside every city, on lawns, in vacant lots, and in parks. Farmers' markets were deregulated so that the growers could sell directly to consumers, something that has become increasingly difficult to do in Canada and the U.S. The Cuban government also provided free assistance and advice, as well as biological control agents and access to low-cost manure and compost.
Today Cuba consumes less than a tenth of the chemicals it was buying in 1989, and the country's forced experiment has proven, beyond any doubt, that organic food production can match or surpass that of industrial production when combined with market and tenure reforms. It wasn't easy, and to this day no one is exactly getting fat. But the country's health indicators, such as mortality rates, both infant and adult, compare favorably to indicators in the U.S. and to the rest of the industrialized world; they are far better than those common in other tropical countries with similar resource bases. Organic agriculture works for Cubans because it delivers ..........

Nobody is suggesting that such an achievement makes living in a dictatorship with a serious lack of human rights acceptable, but that's another subject altogether. What we're talking about is a critical food-producing experiment carried out on an overpopulated, under resourced tropical island, a place that has had a hard time feeding itself under any type of government. Without modern technology and fossil fuels, between 1994 and 1998, production of tubers  and plantains tripled, vegetable yields doubled and then doubled again. Today most urban areas are able to provide the huge majority of their populations' food needs within the city limits, with the slack taken up by countryside crops. There are almost no imports.28

INDIA

 Southern India is another part of the world where the population is poor and marginalized, has a big lesson to teach as well. Kerala is in the unenviable position of being India's poorest and also most populous state. However, for many years, the three major parties of this democratic state's government have all supported a very effective health program for women and children under five, the key correlate to lowered population rates. They have also ensured that women have access to education.
The state provides health care, including vaccination and free treatment of scourges like leprosy and aids, as well as basic staple foods like rice, along with cooking and lamp oils. Women still aren't fully employed in Kerala, but their status is better than anywhere else in India. The general literacy rate, 91 percent, is one of the highest in the world, and women are free to teach or to become doctors or politicians. Keralans can look forward to a life span less than a Canadian's but comparable to the U.S. average, and significantly, like women in the First World, Keralan women outnumber men and also live longer; a very unusual circumstance in India and in poor countries in general. The number of children each woman in this state produces—1.73—is considerably below the U.S. average pf 2.1 and comparable to Canada's low 1.66 rate. Which means that even managing to institute part of heep's four rules helps people control their numbers, so they're better able to share what they have with each other.29

What has happened in Kerala demonstrates that when women and children especially are given some security and health and educational support, swelling populations go down. And what has happened in Cuba is a real-time experiment proving that chemical-dependent monocultures and genetically engineered seeds are not the answer to hunger. That argument was skewed from the beginning, since statistics for Green Revolution practices' impressive yields per acre never take into account the losses to soil, water, and wildlife biodiversity that these processes cost a region. They don't even subtract the dollar costs of the chemical inputs! In any event, studies running five instead of one or two seasons have revealed that industrial yields are generally high for only the first year; after that they drop below those of traditional, organic crops, because the soils are so rapidly exhausted by the chemical inputs.

  Nearly all of the positive Green Revolution studies, even those coming out of universities, were paid for by chemical companies and other Green Revolution proponents, making their results highly suspect. Today, as the IAASTD report points out, even if these practices actually delivered what they claim, we'd still have to abandon them. Industrial agriculture technologies all require heavy use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels cannot be the basis for future food because they destroy the atmosphere, destabilize climate, poison soils, deplete water, and contaminate the oceans. Even if we wanted to ignore that, we're almost out of cheap supplies of oil. It simply isn't in the cards that such a system, in any of its guises, and that includes biotech, can feed the poor.
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To be continued

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