The
propaganda coming over the past 30 years from Corporate America
and similar groups in the �developed� world has been constant and
consistent: We can�t feed the world with low-tech agricultural methods.
What is not said is that the
high-tech agricultural methods are controlled largely by a handful
of transnational corporations, based in the developed countries.
And what is not put out there for the consumption of the people
is that the profits to be made by the transnationals are limitless,
if they can capture the bulk of food production as their own.
Using the power of the purse,
corporations have convinced members of Congress and government officials
- many of them appointed by the same members of Congress and the
executive branch - that, if farmers don�t use the high-tech of machinery,
chemicals, and bio-engineered seed stocks, the world will starve
to death.
Ignoring the cost of producing
agricultural chemicals - fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and
fungicides - all of which are petroleum based, they conveniently
leave out the cost of transporting food around the world and across
nations as vast as the U.S.
A recently-released report on
the globalization of the food supply by Canadian-based ETC Group
shows that 70 percent of the world�s food comes from what has been
called the �peasant food web,� rather than the industrial food chain
that is touted by Corporate America, the giant agribusinesses of
other nations, and the politicians and government officials of most
developed nations.
That
must have come as a surprise to many Americans (the few who might
have heard of the study), but it should not have come as a surprise
to the food chain giants of this country and the world. They know
the world food market and they have a good idea who grows the food.
If they didn�t, how would they know how to deal with that market
and how would they plan to displace and, eventually, replace the
peasant food web?
The ETC Group report, as noted
in the Spring, 2010, edition of the newsletter of Seed Savers Exchange
of Decorah, Iowa, pointed out that 50 percent of the world�s cultivated
food is produced by peasants, 12.5 percent of the world�s food is
from hunting and gathering, and 7.5 percent is urban food produced
by city-dwelling peasants.
This is information that chemical
and agribusinesses like Monsanto really don�t want the general public
to know. Unfortunately, the broadcast outlets are too busy with
celebrity �reporting� and newspapers have been so diminished in
size that they don�t have room for reporting on the important issue
of our daily bread.
Debate on organic (or, �sustainable�
agriculture) versus chemical or conventional agriculture has been
going on for nearly a half-century, or at about the time when J.I.
Rodale popularized the kind of chemical-free farming and gardening
that had been studied by others before him, in the U.S. and abroad.
One thing has been constant:
the powers-that-be have said that the people of the world cannot
be fed by using organic methods. The
other constant is: they were wrong.
The ETC Group report goes a
long way toward proving what organic farmers and their supporters
have been saying for decades. The world can be fed - and fed better
- by organic farming using sustainable methods than the conventional
agriculture that depends every day on petroleum and its products.
Small farm agriculture has been
feeding people in scores of countries around the world and they
continue to do it, even in the face of the assault of transnational
corporations that want farmers to give up their traditional crops
and seeds and buy their genetically-manipulated seeds, along with
the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that those crops require.
The concern of corporate agribusiness
in America over the growing popularity of organic
farming was expressed by no less than a secretary of agriculture
nearly 40 years ago. Earl Butz said: �Before we go back to organic
agriculture, somebody is going to have to decide what 50 million
people we are going to let starve.�
Since Butz grew up on a farm
that used horse power, just after the turn of the last century,
people thought he knew what he was talking about. They couldn�t
have been more wrong. His close ties to industrial agriculture were
apparent to members of the Senate, when Richard Nixon nominated
him in 1971. He was confirmed by a vote of 51-44, a slim margin
for a post as seemingly innocuous (to most Americans) as agriculture.
In recent years, however, members
of Congress seem to have lost the ability to see those close connections,
perhaps because their own connection to agribusiness is as close
as was that of Earl Butz. The revolving door between government
and industry is one that is closely guarded, including that between
the chemical and seed giants and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Individuals go through that door with increasing ease.
One of the reasons for the near
panic by world governments over the amount of food produced, the
agricultural methods of its production, and the widespread hunger
that is increasing, even in the U.S., is that they are looking at the industrial
food chain, not at the locally-grown-and-consumed food system described
in the ETC Group report.
As the world runs low on the
easily obtainable oil, the food system that transnational seed and
chemical corporations are trying to force on developing countries
around the world is one that will only make the problem worse.
Setting aside the issue of producing
fossil fuels and the pollution created through their use, if the
goals of Monsanto and other corporations are met, the industrial
model of agriculture will spread and the likelihood that the sustainable
farming systems of peasants and indigenous peoples will survive
becomes more remote.
The ETC Group report noted that
the industrial model of agriculture takes four units of energy to
produce one unit of food, while the peasant food web used one unit
of energy to produce one unit of food. Some analyses in the past
have claimed more significant savings in energy for peasant agriculture.
A primary concern for many farmers
and others is the loss of diversity in species, plant and animal,
and that loss of farm diversity could parallel today�s loss of species
in nature. Our time is said to possibly be the time of the greatest
rate of extinction since the age of the dinosaurs.
Industrial agriculture has reduced
the varieties of food plants to a small number and has reduced livestock
breeds to an even smaller number in the countries where animals
are raised - if we can call it that - in a system that is modeled
after the way Henry Ford made cars.
But animals are not cars and
factories are not farms. Animals need farms and so do farmers, and
those farmers need to live in communities where their vital work
is not only recognized, but also supported by everyone in the community.
National governments and state or provincial governments must begin
to analyze how they feed their people and move toward a sustainable
future.
That�s what �food sovereignty�
is about: Peoples deciding for themselves what they will eat, how
they will raise and market their food, and having the right to save
their own seeds without interference from foreign entities who dictate
what they can do, on the basis of trade agreements, which are negotiated
by the most powerful countries, acting in behalf of their corporations,
which stand to make untold profits from control of the industrial
food systems they put in place in developing countries.
Hundreds
of millions of small farmers, peasant and other farmers, around
the world are growing food in a traditional way and they never should
be forced from their land. They may not know the word �organic�
or �sustainable,� but they are producing food in that manner and
they feed most of the world. They need to be protected from the
corporations and governments that would take from them the right
to farm with fewer or no chemicals and to save their seeds from
one season to the next. They will continue to grow food that has
fewer chemical residues, which especially have a negative affect
on children who are not yet fully developed physically.
Clearly, the deep concern about
feeding the hungry is why countries like Saudi
Arabia and China
are buying up or leasing large tracts of good farmland in countries
like Ethiopia, other African countries, and nations
in Latin America. In the process, they are
taking land from local farmers and traditional cultures and keeping
them from feeding their own people.
On
the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, we can do no less than
educating ourselves and others about the real problems of hunger
and the devastating effects of industrial agriculture on indigenous
and peasant societies and the earth itself, then work to change
the way we grow our food - across the world - to one that not only
protects and provides for human beings, but saves the planet, as
well.
BlackCommentator.com
Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union
organizer. His union work started when he became a local president
of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for
14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is
organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under
enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers.
Click here
to contact Mr. Funiciello.
|