Organic agriculture is not just for yuppies.
I recently finished reading the book Earth Democracy by Indian physicist/activist Vandana Shiva. This book is fascinating for a number of reasons, but today I want to talk about agriculture. I learned that organic agriculture is not just for yuppies and in addition to reducing our intake of pesticides, it has some pretty significant impacts on society as a whole.
Today’s industrial farming focuses on monocultures, or the planting of a single, homogenous crop in large areas. But polycultures, meaning many different crops in the same area, actually has a much higher level of productivity than monocultures, and is especially water-efficient. The author cites a study which shows that polyculture agriculture can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of input, but industrial farming requires 300 units of input for the same 100 units of food. This means that even though we are being told that industrial monoculture farming is the only way we can possible feed the 7+ billion people on this planet, it’s actually a lot less efficient. The author notes that industrial monoculture farming “is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them.” (93)
Organic and polyculture agriculture is also better for farmers. Shiva notes that “small biodiverse farms in West Bengal growing 55 different crops gave incomes of 227,312 rupees per acre; a farm with 14 crops gave 94,596 rupees while a monoculture farm brought in only 32,098 rupees per acre.” (94) We’ve also been told that massive farms are the best way to grow food, and that economies of scale will solve our food problems. Yet Shiva notes that in Brazil small farms (10 hectares or less) were more productive in terms of revenue to the farmer per unit of land ($85 per hectare) than large farms (500 hectares and larger farms see returns of only $2 per hectare).
Globalization is not what I once thought it was. For a while, I bought into the idea that free trade is good for everyone; it’s been the de facto American way for quite a while now. In fact, I still have a mild negative reaction towards tariffs and other “free trade barriers.” But I’ve come to learn that it’s simply not the case that free trade benefits poorer countries and people. It’s just the latest mechanism for capitalism to extract more and more wealth from poor people, transferring it to the already-rich. One way this plays out in the agricultural trade.
The World Trade Organization’s neoliberal policies have “allowed wealthy countries to increase agribusiness subsidies while preventing other countries from protecting their farmers from artificially cheap imported produce.” (108) At the time of this book’s writing, “The US government pays $193 per ton to US soy farmers, which artificially lowers the price of soy on the world market. In India, due to the removal of quotas and the lowering of tariffs, cheap soy has destroyed the livelihoods of not only soy growers but also other farmers who grow oil-producing crops…” (109) And this is not the only way that farmers in poor nations are being driven deeper and deeper into poverty.
Seed patents by multinational corporations also help trap farmers in a sometimes never-ending cycle of debt. Farmers used to be able to save their own seeds to plant the next harvest, but through the extreme manipulation of intellectual property rights (corporations like Monsanto claim ownership of the genetic profile of crops that have developed over centuries by farmers and then make small changes to secure a patent) the “farm-saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved.” And now, farmers are forced to “buy new seeds for every planting season and what was a traditionally free resource, available by putting aside a small portion of the crop, becomes a commodity. This new expense increases poverty and leads to indebtedness.” (108)
The monocultures being propagated by these seed patentholders also lead to an increase in crop failures at the same time they are telling farmers the seeds are “resistant” to pests and disease. Shiva notes the failures of several Monsanto-owned varieties in India, likely due to a lack of testing. This led to farmers losing significant amounts of money AND producing far too little food. (108)
This debt trap has led many farmers in India to commit suicide. According to Business Insider “India has some of the highest farmer suicide rates in the world, with more than 10,000 deaths each year, and numbers expected to have reached a record high in 2020.” Right now, Indian farmers are protesting new farming laws that will likely have devastating impacts on their livelihoods.
All together, this leads me to the conclusion that if we want to feed our planet and keep farmers farming, we need to make significant changes in the way we eat, and the way we approach farm subsidies and seed patents.