Have you got a solution to world hunger? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean I remain neutral or am not interested in the subject.
(smile)
Sometimes I feel a bit like a contestant at a beauty pageant when these kinds of topics come up
Hello Everyone!! I just want to say what a thrill it is to be here, and I want to let you know that I believe passionately, WITH ALL MY BEING, that we should find a way to feed the world!!!!
Key: “We are the World” music, and, please, turn up the volume so that we don’t have to listen to the rest of her speech!
Yes, I am off on another political rant. I clicked over to the Tierney Lab, and at the risk of sanctimonious beauty queen platitudes, here I am posting another open letter to another New York Times columnist.
Key: Big sparkly toothed smile and demure batting of eyelashes…
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Open Letter to John Tierney
I like John Tierney’s labs. He is an interesting cat. His reports on science are often designed to provoke, but they are also, inevitably, intriguing.
The following letter is my response to a post yesterday called “Greens and Hunger”.
The gist of Tierney’s argument seems to be that environmentalists would rather let all the hungry people in developing countries starve, than give an inch on agricultural solutions like modified high-yield grains. He quotes extensively from one of the older darlings of GM agri-business, who tells us that the Greens have been campaigning against his research into specialty grains and crop solutions, and are undermining his lobby-power with large NGO aid organizations, and the World Bank.
Tierney concludes the post by suggesting that the Greens seem to be more concerned about global warming than mass starvation and human suffering.
May 20, 2008
John,
I enjoy following your Tierney Lab entries, and the way you test the ideas in science with your blog/column, but I have long felt that whenever you are asked to weigh in on environmental issues, you slip into logical fallacies and rhetorical flourishes that confound both the science and the “test”.
This entry is one of the most egregious examples.
The environmental concerns about the lobbying and the influence of people like Borlaug do not fall into the category of “status quo” advocacy, and certainly cannot be accurately described as a decision to ignore the hungry in Africa, in favour of funding global warming solutions.
You, and many of the anti-environmentalists in your blog’s comment section, completely ignore how capital-intensive, industrial farming—and the consequent global market-trade in food—pose a significant threat to both the world’s hungry and the global climate.
As usual, conservative thinkers want to see the market as a transparent, non-ideological tool.
In contrast, the left-leaning environmentalist asks that you look at how the long-standing, complicated relationship between free-market capitalism and farming has contributed to problems in the past, and how the global trade in food production has resulted in serious down-side repercussions that continue to affect us today.
Yes, market-driven agricultural innovations have led to many good things, and certainly they have helped us produce more food, more efficiently than pre-industrial methods.
But the costs are adding up, too, and proper scientific analysis does not simply ignore nor demean empirically measurable by-products and side-effects, as if they didn’t exist.
History teaches us that the kind of intensive, monoculture/pesticide and herbicide dependant farming that Borlaug and his colleagues promote may threaten long-term sustainable farming methods, for instance; and are at least as likely to squeeze out the majority of small farmers, as they are to save them and their families from hunger during times of drought or unstable conditions.
The majority of the world’s hungry are rural, and they come from communities generally made up of small near-subsistence farmers, who currently eke out a modest living or try to keep their families fed on small plots of land.
The “high yield” cash-crops that Borlaug and others propose (particularly those peddaling GM grain-types whose patents mean that the small farmer is not allowed to re-seed from their own supplies) do not help any of the farmers who are at or barely above subsistence production.
These solutions only make sense in a capital market: A farmer must grow enough of a surplus to make the profit that will allow him/her to ship the grain to international distribution ports, and to purchase the fertilizers, the pesticides and the next year’s seeds. With this increased emphasis on a market-return, comes an increase in intensive, one-crop farming, and with intensive farming comes the need to make or borrow enough money to purchase, make repairs to, or up grade sophisticated mechanical equipment.
Remember: most of these people Borlaug is supposed to be saving from hunger have no access to credit, and probably have been using an ox to pull a rudimentary plough. When they could afford the ox, that is.
The problems with your sure-fire market solution don’t stop there. Depending on how much land he/she owns or rents, the small farmer may no longer be able to set aside space for the family’s other food crops, or for grazing the family’s animals. So they are often forced to purchase basic foodstuffs that they used to grow themselves.
…and we haven’t even got into the problem of shipping their product through an unstable region, often without paved roads, in order to have it arrive at a large market, where they can cash in.
That is where ideology clouds in.
Where do all of the production, distribution, and market factors come into the elusive equation: “more grain = fewer people hungry”?
The market is not liberating the food. It is monetizing it. The new “solution” that Borlaug and his ilk propose, and that the left-leaning environmentalist rejects, simply shifts the dynamic of dependency. It doesn’t necessarily offer a way to feed the hungry; nor does it offer the ordinary farmer sudden, hard-earned self-sufficiency.
In the new paradigm, growing food for profit and trade has now replaced growing food to feed one’s family. Each farming family—even assuming that the majority can afford to set up the new kinds of farms necessary to implement the capital intensive, GM patented solution—is now dependant on the demands of the market, rather than the land.
And, make no mistake, the market places its own sets of demands and comes equipped with an ideological agenda.
Rising and falling grain prices, market speculation, escalating transportation costs, regional transportation infrastructure and stability, trade subsidies and dumping, hoarding, storage problems, processing, and surplus monopolies… such concerns leave the new high-yield croppers as open to marketplace caprice as they were to the havoc wreaked by locusts and grasshoppers, fungus, tribal conflict, or too little rain.
Just ask my uncle…and he had the money and the know how to invest in and develop a large-scale factory-style farm!
Sure, the agricultural “economy” that Borlaug and his proponents adhere to looks great on paper. Ideally, it should lead to more food to feed more peoples. We should be able to get more product from less land.
But we should know better than to think that high-yield, surplus-geared market solutions provide a panacea for food production.
Look at what factory farming and monoculture has done to farming here in North America: both at the human level and at the environmental level.
We all know about the costs. The demands of/on large-scale industrial farms lead to soil leaching, pollution, and region-wide socio-economic disruptions that, inevitably, result in massive rural depopulation, and a wave of migration to urban centres…
Not to mention the inevitable oligopolies and monopolies that rise to control food supplies.
The global free-market trade in food, as it now plays out, provides absurd “efficiencies” that see a salmon caught in Siberia make its way down to a Chinese port to be “processed,” after which it is shipped across two oceans to a packaging plant in Newfoundland so that it can be reprocessed, branded, and re-packaged before being trucked half way across the continent, to be dumped into an industrial-zone wearhouse on the out-skirts of Montreal. Then it is tracked, coded and distributed in more trucks, making their slow way through city traffic, until this Siberian fish can be shelved in bright chilled displays at my local supermarket…. Where, finally, it slips into my cart and eventually onto my dinner plate.
Just think of the carbon “foot-print” that one poor fish left in its wake. No one can tell me that is the most efficient way for me to have supper!
… even if it is, for some inexplicable reason, apparently the cheapest way… well, according to the current calculations of the Market, anyways.
This is the Market we are supposed to trust as the solution to the famines facing Africa and Asia?
This is the Market that is supposed to reward those small rural farmers with huge profits. Bringing them into the global marketplace, and offering them everything they need to feed their families, so they no longer have to bother with growing it?
“No more famine,” they are promised. If only they trust global trade and give the farm over to this new product.
“Plant this one high-yield grain and leave all the other foodstuffs for other people to worry about.”
“Don’t worry, you can buy whatever else you will need, at our store.”
How many developing countries currently feed the Western appetite, acting as a net exporter of foodstuffs, while their own people go hungry?
And, if that is not enough, the factory farming monopolies and this market-generated “cheapness” with regard to the global food supply leaves all of us—the poor rural folk in Africa, and the upper-middle class North American yuppie alike—heavily dependant on others for the majority of our food.
This global trade, consolodated as it is in the hands of a few large companies, leaves everyone vulnerable to food supply contamination, artificial shortages, and price manipulation.
Any solution that requires intensive monoculture farming, then, comes with a number of significant risks, including the fact that intensive industrial farming makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be independent and self-sufficient when it comes to the most basic of necessities: gathering food.
Yes, we need to help rural, poor constituencies like the African farmers, so that they can cope with their farming problems, and find better, sustainable solutions for blight, locusts, and drought.
Drought hearty grains are part of the solution. But not when they come with a GM patented dependency leash, or come attached to monoculture and industrial farming practices.
What Africa’s hungry do NOT need, is to be forced off small, diversified family farms because large-scale industrial agribusiness has driven down the price for any modest surplus they used sell at local markets.
As a libertarian, I would have expected you to recognize the danger of the solution these scientists offer when it comes to the very concept of self-sufficiency.
If there are 100 million poor farming families in the developing world, only a small portion of them will be able to remain on the new large-scale, capital intensive, heavily mechanized farms that arise from Borlaug’s solution.
Far more often, farmers will be (and already have been) forced into the shantytowns around cities.
In search of money to buy food.
Abandoning ways to produce food.
Profit-driven, non-subsistence land-use has already worked to force rural families off the land. Farms or hunting lands are arbitrarily confiscated, or lost to war. Perfectly good agricultural land is overrun by people hoping to cash in on higher land values, capital resource exploitation, and other alternative land uses. Sometimes the farms are gobbled up when they can’t compete with large-scale agribusiness, sometimes they are lost to drought, sometimes to civil war and coercion, and sometimes they are destroyed for tourist resorts and expensive vacation homes.
The poorest countries in Africa and South East Asia are a wash in hunger zones and refugee camps, where people are starving for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the earth’s ability to sustain them (witness the shift in land use from rice growing to tourism, the drowning of vast sections of the Yangzee valley for electricity, and the squeeze of small fishermen from commercial fisheries and aquaculture businesses throughout South and East Asia; or Brazil’s cattle ranch clearing in the Amazon basin; or the conflict in Darfur, which many say arose at least partially over access to prime grazing land and water).
To the environmentalist, then, the tragedy of hunger is two fold. On the one hand, there are all the pitfalls I have described above. On the other, there is the history of environmental devastation left in the wake of proposed solutions like those of the GM crop innovators. Because, as the profit margins for each large-scale farming operation decline (the inevitable result of over-harvesting or over irrigating, salt leaching from excessive fertilizers, pesticide and herbicide water contamination, or over grazing), profit-seeking businesses leave a barren wasteland in their wake, and they move on to the next field, or they clear the next section of forest.
In each case, the poor people we are trying to help…that subsistence usually agrarian family who is so often hungry… are still hungry, but now they and their families cannot eke out a even a subsistence living, even in the good years.
Forced off their land, they become completely dependant on food aid. At the mercy of the monopolies and the market.
…..
Okay. I will admit, the environmentalist/liberal argument presented here, as a counterpoint, may not be any more objective than your analysis.
But, perhaps you will agree: A proper scientific hypothesis arises from thinking about many possible outcomes (good and bad), and all science labs need a cogent thoughtful hypothesis, before they set out to conduct their experiments.
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Some Resources for More Information on Subsistence Farming
and Possible Solutions to Hunger
At present almost 80% of Africa’s population is engaged in farming - mostly subsistence. But despite this huge presence on the land, food security continues to remain elusive due to worn out soils and tiny plot sizes.
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http://www.just1world.org/food-and-hunger.htm Just1World looks at how local infrastructure, good governance, functioning civil institutions (like communications, banking, and policing), land ownership, and local agricultural research and education are fundamental to improving agriculture in Africa.
The [farmer's] journey of 900k (560 miles) meant 17 days on the road to reach his destination. In that time he was stopped 10 times by local officials whom he had to bribe in order to be allowed to move on. And at the end of his ordeal he found that the roads had been so rough that many of his grain sacks had burst open. However, his problems didn’t end there. Selling in Ethiopia is also made hazardous by the fact that there is no legal system to enforce contracts and very few traders have bank accounts.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/2008/mar/20/livelihoods.katinepartners The Guardian (UK) has an informative article on a specific Katine project in Uganda. Again, small scale local solutions are presented after studying how best to serve the farmers in question. When high-yield crop specialization is encouraged, it is to the benefit of the subsistence farmer’s family. They will be able to feed themselves with the cassava and groundnuts, and can easily sell excess on the local market… an absolute necessity, when transportation infrastructure puts the “international” market in grains out of reach.
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http://www.actionaid.org.uk/1715/ethiopia.html Actionaid also works with local farmers, who can indeed benefit from Western research into crops and agricultural techniques, but who need local solutions (including simple micro-credit loans and a way to purchase basic seeds, or help building a mill, so that separating the seed from the husk and grinding seeds will not be so time consuming). They do not need agribusiness propaganda and patented GM high-yield enticements that chain them to a product.
Planting legumes such as ground nuts, beans, and pigeon peas were fixing nitrogen into the soil of some of the fields that I visited, which would be rotated out with a maize crop the next year. In amongst the maize were pumpkin plants and other vegetables. Small trees in the fields helped to prevent soil erosion, and provided fuel for cooking and wood for posts and tools. A long row of tall grass at the edge of the family plot, helped to ensure that the newly enriched soil did not wash away in the heavy rains.
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http://www.untotheleast.com/blog/2006_01_29_archive.html This lovely blog follows the author’s time in Africa from 2006-2007, and covers many of the inter-related problems the farming people of various countries face. In one entry on subsistence farming, the author talks about the risks that face the young, who want to leave the poverty and the hunger on subsistence farms, but who find their only options are abject poverty in the city’s slums, or ”subsistence employment” (making less than 80 cents a day picking tea leaves for a plantation, for instance). In contrast, the author describes a rural community that benefited from an ADRA Canada aid program designed to help farmers find simple and affordable steps to improve soil quality.
