Farm Economics
Less Means More For Europe's Low-Input Farmers
Published April 28, 2009 @ 10:58AM PT
This article is reposted with permission from the author, Wayne Roberts, manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council. It's adapted from a print only story that appeared in NOW Magazine, April 2, 2009, and as published to the COMFOOD listserv. Wayne Roberts is also the author of "The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food."
The great divide between food and farming is about to become a blur as a result of pioneering scientific research in Europe that's pushing the boundaries of health and agricultural policy.
Though no poem insists that "food is food and agriculture is agriculture, and never the twain shall meet," that may as well be the watchword in both fields.
The chasm between the two is rarely bridged at any level of public discussion or decision-making. Food writers rarely report on farms, and vice versa. Nutritionists rarely discuss anything that happens to food before it's harvested, and vice versa for agronomists; even the champions of organic farming rarely make nutritional claims. Doctors barely know about nutrition and hospitals serve what is called hospital food, just as farmers and processors don't fret about what happens to diabetes rates when all their corn is turned into cheap pop and junkfood filler. Government ministries and departments of food and agriculture rarely meet, let alone worry about harmonizing their policies.
I've long believed that the vice versas of the Two Solitudes of food and farm are responsible for most of the ills in both worlds, and so was all ears when Carlo Leifert came to speak to the annual Canadian Organic Growers (COG) conference in Toronto during February.
Leifert, a professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University in England, manages 31 institutes in a collaborative research project that's revolutionizing our understanding of how humble farming methods - not just high-tech food storage, packaging and cooking methods - can boost health outcomes of food. Leifert's team is tasked to help farmers do more with less by using low-cost methods to grow high-value food - thus the name of his project, the Quality Low Input Food Project.
Climate Change Hurting Poor Farmers Most
Published April 27, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
Phillipine farmers already feeling the pain:
... “Climate change affects the hydrology of an area. Weather patterns have changed. Now, farmers can no longer rely on suggested planting calendars,” said [University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) statistics professor Dr. Felino] Lansigan in a phone interview with the BusinessMirror. He also noted “significant” yield losses due to increasing temperatures and “extreme” climate variability from the effects of heightened El Niño and La Niña occurrences.
... Citing 2004 statistics from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), Lansigan said average annual temperatures have increased by 0.14 degrees Celsius from 1971 to 2000. Meanwhile, average annual rainfall has increased since the 1980s alongside a noted rise in the occurrence of landslides and floods. ...
Sadly, they're going to try genetically modified rice strains that are supposedly flood-resistant in order to combat their problems. Maybe that will work better than other GM crop applications, which have mostly been successful in growing pesticide sales.
A Sustainable Food Supply, Pt 2
Published April 22, 2009 @ 01:49PM PT
When the G8 agriculture ministers are complaining about protectionism, the irony just floors me. Could there be less reliable critics?
Though while they may be enormous hypocrites, they aren't stupid. No one really wants their local farming to completely go away. As Italy's agriculture minister noted at the recent G8 summit, countries should be self-sufficient in food, and every country with the power to do so tries to ensure that they grow enough to feed themselves.
What if there's a war? What if there's a falling out with a trading partner? What if your nation is landlocked and your supply routes are unstable? What if fuel prices go up and long distance transportation becomes prohibitive?
No matter how unlikely, it would be stupid not to think of these things when you have a whole nation to worry about.
And wealthy nations do worry about these things. It's obvious from their actions, even as they encourage poorer countries to focus solely on exports destined for wealthy consumer markets. Indeed, those who can afford it are buying up farmland in poorer countries as a hedge against future food shortages:
... Food supply scare after last year's food riots has pushed several countries, such as China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, to buy or lease farmland overseas to feed their own people.
Quickly nicknamed "land-grabbing," this phenomenon has drawn sharp criticism for ignoring interests of local population. A leader of major international farmer group, IFAP, has said there was a risk of "second-generation colonialism" in such deals. ...
Though what else is encouraging one country to get on the treadmill of export-dependent agriculture besides to secure food for another consuming country? While export agriculture isn't inherently bad, as it's been practiced, it's often been highly exploitive.
So when Emily Gertz points out that eating local isn't necessarily the most direct way to cut your carbon footprint, she's right. Though as she also touches on, it keeps local farms in business, where their sustainability practices can be influenced more easily by those immediately affected and seasonality can return to our dietary expectations.
And while that might seem like a luxury in some US communities (seems, that is, because buying local food is a great way to boost local economies in the US [pdf],) supporting the development of local food security is vital to poorer nations who are more vulnerable to global supply chain and price disruptions. Instead of growing biotech foods for export, they need to be supported through appropriate research and locality specific soil management advice:
A Sustainable Food Supply, Pt 1
Published April 22, 2009 @ 09:37AM PT
What does that mean, to have a sustainable food supply? It simply means that our production of food today should feed people today, but not restrict the production of food by future generations. And expert after expert insists that this is the way policymakers should prepare to do it, whether alone or with other prescriptions of varying merit:
... taking full advantage of the opportunities for sustainable agriculture created by biotechnology ...
They might make wild claims like these:
... A generation ago, the Green Revolution delivered a jolt to farm productivity through the improved use of irrigation, fertilizer, and crop breeding. Today, we must rely on biotechnology to deliver many of the same benefits in what might usefully be called the Gene Revolution. The genetic enhancement of crops already has brought us large increases in yield. More is on the way, especially if we allow biotechnology to take advantage of all it can offer, from drought tolerance in wheat and maize to biofortification in rice. ...
Yeah, and what'd we get from that Green Revolution just a few decades later? Dying waterways and depleting aquifers. It has trapped farmers in debt, water shortage, and cycles of ever increasing pesticide and fertilizer use as the pests develop resistance and the soil becomes depleted.
Then about those biotech benefits, they have yet to materialize. They don't increase yield. The products' spread can't be controlled, making ever more of the plant genome the private property of companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. Major nutrition gains and drought tolerance would be nice but aren't in evidence.
Meanwhile, high yields, higher nutrition and greater drought tolerance can be realized right now through organic agriculture. Though someone like Joel Salatin isn't going to grow a filthy rich multinational from it, so it has few big league promoters.
As Vandana Shiva explains so well, the real point of genetically modified seed is to make a profit and monopolize food sources, not to make farming sustainable.
(Photo credit: twoblueday on Flickr.)
Chicken Goo
Published April 18, 2009 @ 12:57PM PT
I wrote a little the other day about the food industry-sponsored lies that small-scale, local agriculture was 'ruining' food and was just plain dangerous. A ridiculous hypothesis.
Though it isn't enough just to scoff, I'm sure. Which is why I'd like to share with you this story of Foster Farms' chicken goo being dumped into the Columbia River in Oregon, courtesy of Bryan Denson at The Oregonian:
The case stunk from the very beginning. A pair of law students had stood watch at the Foster Farms plant in Kelso, Wash., then followed a truckload of chicken carcasses to a fish processing plant near the mouth of the Columbia River.
There they observed the phantom pipeline, which spewed chicken parts into the air and belched chemically rendered goo into the water.
That would be highly illegal. That was almost five years ago.
This week, the students' gumshoe work helped lead to the criminal sentencing of California Shellfish Co., which was ordered to pay a $75,000 fine for a felony violation of the Clean Water Act. ...
Would this story be any better if they'd had a permit to discharge the chicken goo into the river? Because that's what the case hung on - a company that had a permit to discharge fish goo didn't get a permit to also discharge chicken goo. Charming.
From a soil perspective, animal remains are nutritious food for below-ground microfauna, and it would seem far more sensible to turn the leftover remains into biochar, seeing as there's no other use for them.
Though one of the big problems with industrial agriculture is that often the volume of waste produced by a high concentration of animals is simply too large to economically recycle as soil amendments, even if a business were so inclined. This is often the case with manure, which is an exceptionally good soil additive in reasonable quantities.
We pay as a society to dispose of waste, usually in ways that render the disposal areas less fit, or downright unfit, to support life. It seems far more sensible to pay instead to have it be cycled back into the environment in a productive way where appropriate, even if that cost has to be more broadly shared.
We're just wasting good food for the soil, which is to say that we're wasting good food for ourselves and our livestock. That just seems ridiculous.
Supporting, Undermining Global Food Security
Published April 16, 2009 @ 09:16AM PT
It's the case in the world of federal legislation that many people have their hands in any given legislative pie. A large bill has numerous parents, and the process is difficult and time-consuming enough that in general, if you get a thing or two that you want in the final product, you take your win and go home.
I get that. It's the way business is done.
Indeed, when you can get a strong Senate coalition to approve a measure that will ease global hunger, an aim that's strongly supported by the president, hey, celebrate.
Though somebody, somewhere, needs to keep an eye on the bigger picture.
The Global Food Security Act of 2009, S. 384, will mandate the acceptance of genetically modified crops as part of US foreign assistance. Which unfortunately means that what it gives to Africa and S. Asia with one hand, it likely takes away with the other.
That part of the bill needs to come out.
Now it must be admitted that traditional farming, while it's had notable achievements and fed all the people we descended from for many generations, had the occasional total collapse. Old school crossbreeding gave us many wonderful foods, but mobility and information sharing weren't what they are now and they were far more at the mercy of the weather.
Though the Green Revolution, where high-yield hybrids were added to new well-drilling, irrigation and synthetic fertilizer technology has in many cases tossed the baby out with the bath water.
Consider that India's current elections in Punjab, where the Green Revolution was embraced wholeheartedly, have as a major campaign issue the ongoing farmer suicides in the region. It's being reported that 4 kill themselves every day, with the toll having reached 1,600 in 2007.
They can't get proper loans for capital intensive farming, for the new seeds, new chemicals, and new wells that need to be dug as the water table drops ever lower, so they have to go to loan sharks. Green Revolution crops are good producers, though only if they're pampered. Then if anything goes wrong, like the rains aren't great or prices collapse, they end up deep in debt with no way out.
Farmers who don't commit suicide may lose their land to developers or government fiat. They move to some slum in a city where there's little hope of work for them and have to buy what they might once have grown. One way or another, small farmers stop farming and their expertise is lost along with any unique crop breeds they once cared for.
Every indication is that genetically modified seeds are an advantage over Green Revolution hybrids only in that they make a lot more money for their producers.
Now countries that have tried to keep genetically modified organisms out of their borders may be blackmailed into giving up. Even if you approve of genetically engineered crops, is it really the US' business to make that decision for other countries? I don't think so.
Which is why I'd appreciate it if you'd read up on this bill and contact your representatives to ask them to remove the biotechnology section from S. 384, even if you've already written them in support of it. There's no good argument for forcing this on the unwilling.
(Photo credit: visualpanic on Flickr.)
