Reprinted with permission from the November, 2009 Ester Republic.

In the powerful book Fatal Harvest, a collection of essays on industrial agriculture edited by Andrew Kimbrell, seven common myths are identified that make up the “big lie” of industrial agriculture. These include such chestnuts as “industrial food is cheaper”, and “industrial agriculture offers more variety.” Each are effectively and systematically disassembled in the book, exposed as entirely ungrounded in reality. But there is a funny thing about myths: you can expose them in a book, or on T.V., but that will not necessarily stop the world from perpetuating them for years and years to come. Windmills have to be visible to everyone before they can be slain for good. So with that in mind, I thought it might be illuminating to take these next seven issues of ER to look at each of these myths in practice.

Inspiration for this came from the back matter of a recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine, which read:

9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. Now What?

The world’s farmers will need to double food production by 2050.

Biotechnology can help.

As you might guess, this is copy from an advertisement for Monsanto, and it just happens to echo the first of the seven myths of industrial agriculture: the need to feed the world. Monsanto claims that “providing abundant and accessible food means putting the latest science-based tools in farmers’ hands.” This statement is not merely inaccurate, its disingenuous. Forget that no comprehensive study has ever proven large-scale industrial agricultural practices as more efficient than small-scale practices, except by the most short-sighted, one-dimensional metrics. The real problem, however, is in this claim that science will somehow make food more “accessible.”

Whether or not one has access to food has about as much to do with how it is grown as nuclear weapons had to do with the Iraq war. If it did, malnutrition and hunger would be non-issues, because more than enough food is already being produced to feed every person on the planet. In fact, thanks in large part to industrialization, food production capacity has grown during the last 35 years, 16 percent faster than the world’s population. We now produce more food on this planet, per capita, than at any other time in the modern age.

World hunger is not created by lack of food, but by poverty and landlessness, both of which deny people access to food, and are caused, in fact, by many of the industrial agricultural practices that purport to solve hunger in the first place! Industrial agriculture increases hunger, by raising the cost of farming, by forcing tens of millions of farmers off their land, and by encouraging the use of arable land for high-profit export crops (e.g., biofuels) and luxury crops. Over the last few decades, the chemical and technological inputs and patented seeds brought to farmers in the third world by agribusiness have done nothing but dramatically increase the costs of peasant farming, and meanwhile, the higher yields and worldwide competition also promoted by agribusiness, serve to lower the prices those farmers can expect to earn. It is an unbearable irony, especially when one thinks of all the corn being used to make disposable silverware, or to feed cattle for meat-hungry Americans, or for that matter just being left to rot in a landfill.

Technological advances like those argued for by Monsanto have therefore put millions of the world’s farmers in a fatal dilemma, resulting in cases of mass malnutrition in rural communities, epidemics of farmer depression and suicide, and the abandonment of so many important rural places across the globe. Currently, more than half a billion rural people in the third world are have neither sufficient land to grow their own food, nor sufficient money to buy it.

Yet for some reason a great many people, from scholars to politicians to food scientists, ignore this and go on blindly beating the food production drum. Increasing production continues to be the de-facto solution; in part, I believe, because of advertisements like this. In my mind this makes Monsanto about as culpable for the global hunger and malnutrition problem as the bureaucrats and despots that choke their citizens’ access to healthful foods and arable lands. I believe the term for it is complicity.

To legitimately address hunger and malnutrition will require a fundamental shift away from asking how “we feed the world,” and toward asking why people cannot feed themselves. This idea, that one group of people should be responsible for feeding everyone else makes no sense; it puts the majority of people in a vulnerable position of receivership, and undermines any conversation we might have about helping communities regaining control over one’s food security. Rather, we need to change the global food cartel by making it irrelevant, first by learning to feed ourselves, and opting out of the system that keeps people hungry. Some have criticized this ‘local food movement’ as a middle-class exercise in vanity, but who else can take the first step, other than those who have the room in their lifestyles to make these changes? Fair trade is working for coffee, why shouldn’t we demand fair food as well?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 11:19 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Feature Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.