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.