"How can we squeeze more food from a raindrop?"

by Natasha Chart

Published April 15, 2009 @ 11:37AM PT

This excellent question is the headline caption of a Monsanto ad that's been staring up at me from the back cover of Scientific American's latest Earth 3.0 issue, which will be on display until June 16, 2009.

In the ad copy, the company presents the apparent aims of their existence, emphasis mine:

... Our goal is to develop seeds that significantly increase crop yields and can help farmers use 1/3 less water per unit produced.

Producing more. Conserving more. Improving farmers' lives. That's sustainable agriculture. And that's what Monsanto seeds are all about.

Ahem. That's their goal, you see. That's what they're all about.

It's enough to make a person forget that they're nowhere close to achieving it and haven't proved that they can. Like 'clean coal', high-yielding, drought resistant GM crops don't exist. And the drought tolerant crops they are promoting right now don't produce well in optimal conditions, so if you plant expecting the worst and the weather is good, you will still take a production hit.

In fact, based on a review of public data by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they haven't even figured out how to increase yields much with an abundance of irrigation and fertilizer. As scientist turned activist Vandana Shiva points out, their Bt cotton seeds deployed in India have led to farmer indebtedness and suicides because of their unreliable yields. And how are American farmers, using GM crops and the most celebrated methods of industrial farming, doing in the recession? Not so hot:

... Like livestock farmers across the country, [Christopher] Hatch is coping with higher feed, fuel and fertilizer costs, at the same time that the demand for beef products is down.

... With the USDA forecasting a 20 percent decline in farm income this year, more farmers are taking on second jobs. ...

While the article quotes a livestock grower, the increase in input costs affects all farms, because they can't pass along higher operating costs to the marketplace. They're "price takers" both in purchasing inputs and being forced to accept whatever market price for their goods has been set by the monopolistic processing industry, while their heavy debt burden accumulated under capital-intensive farming leaves them unable to survive the inevitable downturns that all businesses, and sometimes countries, fall prey to.

Farm capital used to be held in the reproductive capacity of stock and seed. When it requires financial capital, because the stock and seed must be purchased anew every year, or because water and fertilizer far in excess of renewable local capacity is demanded, a vicious, unsustainable cycle of borrowing is started and it becomes very hard to get out.

How can we squeeze more food from a raindrop?

Monsanto doesn't know. They've only figured out how to make boatloads of money off of claiming that they want to find out, and it's hard to find the charity required to think that they're disappointed with the results.

Meanwhile, their monocrop model of industrial farming is driving many agricultural breeds to extinction, just as their genomic potential in combination with global knowledge bases and seed varieties is starting to show its full potential. Consider Nerica (an abbreviation of "new rice for Africa"), produced by an initiative which combined responsible biotechnology, traditional plant breeding know-how, and combining high-yielding Asian rice with a low-yielding native African variety of rice that was nonetheless superbly adapted to local weather and pest conditions.

Factory farming, promoted by companies like Monsanto, is torching the equivalent of a genetic Library of Alexandria every year, while offering to replace it with a train station newsstand.

That's not sustainability. It's stupidity. And it's all kinds of wrong.

(Photo credit: Larsz on Flickr.)