Are We Headed for a Subprime Mortgage Crisis of Food?

A recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, called "How Locavores Could Save the World," makes quick work of some of the most tenacious misconceptions about our food system — that monoculture is a good way to produce food, that GMOs are a promising answer to the world's food needs and that we need to produce ever-more food.

The most striking line in the piece is an apt comparison between the disease-resistant GMO crops and the subprime mortgages that have brought our economy low.

GMOs are the food industry's answer to the possibility that a single disease can ravage a monoculture with devastating effects. These GMO crops, author Felix Salmon writes, are "the agricultural equivalent of creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur."

By trying to fix problems of our own making with complex and improbable technologies, are we placing ourselves on course for a massive food disaster?

It seems plausible, especially if you consider how disastrous things already are in terms of contamination, hazardous chemicals, health problems and environmental degradation. But I, for one, would prefer not to wait around and find out. We can start changing things right now. We can reverse all of this trouble: We already know how.

We know that we need to work with nature instead of against it. As Salmon writes, "Nature abhors a monoculture," and make no mistake, nature will get its way in the end.

I can already hear the naysayers. Their flawed arguments for monoculture farming and GMOs insists that we need to continue down the path we're on if we want to feed the bulging population marching toward us over the next decades.

Well, hogwash. Salmon wipes that idea off the map in one fell swoop: "There's already more than enough food being grown to feed every person on the planet.... The hunger that persists is a question of distribution," not of supply.

If we support a localized, polyculture model of farming assertively enough, we can avoid the disaster headed our way.

As Salmon puts it, "the costs of the modern agriculture industry are far greater, and more insidious, than the costs of returning to a more localized model of farming would be.... At the very least, locavores should be an important part of the mix."

Foreign Policy magazine, ladies and gentlemen. Hardly Mother Earth News.

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