Helping Farmers

And I only mean the title somewhat ironically.

First, there's good news about Pigford Remedy Claims Act, which the Obama administration will finally put some budgetary muscle behind.

The Pigford Act is based on a class action case that successfully proved in court that the federal government farm programs had been systematically discriminating against Black farmers. As Eddie Gehman Kohan writes at Civil Eats, this is a two-fer: doing the right thing and helping a group of farmers who usually have smaller farms.

But then with the other hand, the Obama administration is going to be actively promoting biotech. As Tom Laskawy writes, not only is biotech part and parcel of encouraging the use of toxic pesticides, it costs more while delivering very little:

... But while I’m not willing to overlook Vilsack’s presentation of the false choice of GM seeds as key to food security, I would hope that he’s serious about bringing what he referred to as “agricultural science” front and center. Because if he does, he’ll see that perhaps, at last, the research tide has turned against GM seeds. Most notably the Union of Concerned Scientists just released an analysis of 20 years’ worth of scientific research designed to determine the extent to which GM seeds have improved overall crop yields. The answer? Only one GM crop—Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn—has shown ANY yield increase. And it has managed a mere 3-4% total increase over 13 years. That’s it, folks. No huge jumps in productivity. No magic seeds.

... Unlike the US, the UN understands all this, which is why they released a report declaring that organic techniques are ideal for answering the developing world’s agricultural needs. In fact, adopting the basic organic techniques of composting, mulching, and crop rotation could double or even quadruple current yields in Africa. Take that, Monsanto!

Of course, organic practices aren’t patented. There are no license fees or expensive supplies. No flying in compost from Iowa or manure from North Carolina. Just education and investment in “human capital.” ...

And consider the toll of pesticide-based agriculture:

... research by one of the most respected medical institutes in India recently found that farming villages using large amounts of pesticides have significantly higher rates of cancer than villages that use less of the chemicals.

... Singh says he noticed one of the first troubling clues in the late 1980s and early '90s: Peacocks — India's national bird — disappeared from the fields. Over the years, seven people in his family got cancer — and three of them died. People in Jajjal and surrounding villages got cancer, too.

Singh says he saw that many fellow farmers were overusing pesticides and not handling the toxic chemicals safely. ...

Someone promoting pesticide use might zero in on the fact that the farmers were handling these chemicals improperly. They might point out that taking illiterate subsistence farmers out of the equation and modernizing farming, industrializing it, would solve that.

But look, these increases in cancer and other diseases are seen in farm country in the US, where the literacy rate is somewhere around 99 percent and farming is a highly capitalized industry.

It's a question of how fast farmers are being exposed to carcinogens and neurotoxins that by and large don't degrade and are being sprayed on food that the farmers and everyone else eats. This stuff doesn't break down into plain water, it often accumulates in the bodies of the people and animals who eat it.

If high doses of pesticide are bad for you, well, wait a while and you'll get one. Just keep eating. Wait a few generations until all the living things on the planet are saturated in them, and we'll all be getting the exposure rates of these villages in rural India. I hate to think how toxic the fish population will be, and fully expect that my grandkids will end up being raised to think of all fish as poisonous if we keep doing what we're doing.

While it is possible for people to decrease the activity of unhealthful genes through lifestyle changes, even cancer-promoting genes, when you can end up with teenagers and 20-somethings with deadly cancers that weren't seen in their families 100 years ago, there's a problem that goes beyond lifestyle. There's a problem that goes beyond diet.

If we want to really help farmers, lets stop encouraging them to use expensive, unnecessary technology that can give their families cancer. Let's build up their knowledge repertoire and the range of crops they can earn a living by selling. Let's stop paying lip service to the vital work they do and actually incentivize them to have a safe workplace.