Dinner With a Side of Controversy

by Natasha Chart

Published December 31, 2008 @ 11:16AM PT

Sometimes, people disagree. In food and agriculture, these are some of the things they disagree about.

1. Genetically Modified Organisms (GM, GMO or GE crops)

Genetically engineered crops are hailed by giant agribusiness corporations as the future of food.

Unfortunately, they haven't been proven safe and they routinely interbreed with nearby crops, as the species favored for modification tend to be wind pollinated. The pollen of grains, like corn, is light enough to travel for miles. This has led to a rush of copyright infringement lawsuits by corporations like Monsanto against farmers whose crops have been contaminated by their neighbors' GMO pollen. Monsanto's position is that farmers should pay for this privilege.

Meanwhile, several domesticated crop species go extinct every hour, and the sort of small farms that harbored their abundant diversity are following them into the abyss. We're being pushed towards a future of nothing but thousand acre-farms growing a few patented commodity grains, with the copyrights owned by multinationals. A future where there's little else to grow because thousands of years worth of human horticultural work and knowledge has been allowed to vanish without a trace.

GM crops are being pushed on farmers for one reason only: they're immensely profitable. If Syngenta and the rest of them could make a lot of money off of heirloom beans and squashes, they'd be singing a different song.

2. Elitism

Some say that because our current food system makes healthy, non-toxic food expensive, that healthy, non-toxic food is itself elitist. Which makes perfect sense. It's entirely reasonable that people should have to pay extra for food with no poison in it. Head, meet desk.

It's also suggested that local food is elitist, because it can be hard for locals to get to farmer's markets. But consider that even the finest French cheese started out one day as farmer Jacques' curdled milk, and the most expensive Italian wines used to be farmer Giuseppe's home brew. What delicious things are you missing out on because your local grocery store will only purchase food that's been shipped in bulk from a warehouse hundreds of miles away?

Then there those who suggest that opposition to technologies like GM, or to massive commodity monocultures, hide a secret belief that poor people in other countries should be left to starve. Right. But it wasn't sustainable agriculture activists and local food enthusiasts who insisted that farmers in Central America should let Chiquita have all the best land to grow bananas for US supermarkets, or that African farmers should be pushed into growing flowers and chocolate for export instead of food for their local communities. It was the interests of large agri-business - not the sustainable food movement -- that drove the price of corn so low that it put loads of Mexican farmers out of business, and that insisted on the ethanol mandates that drove imported corn prices so high that their families couldn't afford tortillas anymore.

Who's elitist now?

3. Subsidies

We'd rather talk about manure. Not kidding. This might be the most contentious issue of all. Over the years, subsidies have been enacted to correct for the fact that sometimes crops fail because of bad weather or natural disasters and, well, farming is not like other industries. Society survived the loss of buggy whip manufacture, but people need to eat and someone needs to grow that food.

Unfortunately, what were subsidies to farmers to help them cope in a competitive market have become a long-running subsidies to food processors who can buy certain protected crops at below the costs of production. Because of inequities in international power, poorer countries have generally been forced to drop agricultural product tariffs and subsidies, leaving their farmers at the mercy of both weather and market.

If US agricultural subsidies end outright, it will almost certainly cause problems and market disruptions. Though if New Zealand's example is anything to go by, the end of subsidies might mean a flourishing of agriculture, just a little bit changed.

There are also payments that go to keep land out of production for conservation purposes. Though the longterm preservation of agriculture and human communities that depend on it requires that there be wetland habitat maintained for birds and other wildlife. It requires that there be regular windbreaks to prevent erosion and plots of unplowed grassland where beneficial species like carabid beetles and earthworms can comfortably establish themselves. It requires that stream banks have enough surrounding vegetation that they don't become silted in from runoff and more prone to flood.

Since the market has failed to incentivize conservation, somebody should.

4. Animal Cruelty

And, there's worse. You may have heard that around seventy percent of antibiotics used in the US are used on livestock. While it's true that antibiotics help improve animal growth rates, what's undeniable is that they're often used as life support.

Antibiotics allow many factory-farmed animals simply to stay alive in conditions so foul, filthy and inhumane that only constant medication prevents them from keeling over dead. Some are fed mixtures of feathers and other animals' droppings. Some are fed diets so enriched with grain, instead of the grass they're supposed to eat, that their stomachs are permanently ulcerated. Some are crowded in so close that they're unable even to turn around, or in cages so cramped that their feet grow into the bars.

When they're slaughtered, in icy, sloppy warehouses staffed by exhausted workers that have to kill hundreds of animals a day, they may not even be dead when the dismembering starts.

Is this how we want to eat?

5. Slavery

While it is true that slavery has been outlawed, and individuals are no longer directly bought and sold, slaves and sharecroppers harvest and process much of our food.

They work for contractors who work for the farm operators who sell to the companies that process and ship our food to the grocery stores. That's a long chain of blame aversion.

So when the contractor brings terrified immigrants to shacks in the middle of nowhere, forcing them to work long hours for wages that haven't gone up in decades, paying them nothing or so little that they can never pay back their transport debts, ripping them off through the company store, threatening them with violence or deportation if they complain, everyone can pretend they don't know. When junkies are lured to live in guarded work camps where their employers sell them more drugs to help them escape their poverty in their imaginations, at the least, it was just a few bad apples.

Farm operators get, on the high end, 20 cents of every dollar we pay for food. No allowances are made for increased labor costs, and virtually all of the profit goes to distributors. So, slavery and sharecropping. Because while you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip, you can squeeze it out of a scared, immigrant picker in Immokalee, Florida, who's lucky to get paid $0.45 for gathering 32 pounds of tomatoes.

Great civilization we're running, here.

(Photo credit: iLoveButter on Flickr.)