The Hungerwashing of Industrial Farming

It's unfortunate how many politicians and industry figures are willing to hide behind hungry people in order to pursue goals with questionable ethics. Take this recent oped by former Sen. George McGovern and former Senate general counsel, Marshall Matz, Agriculture's next big challenge, for an example:

... First, we must recognize that organic, sustainable and commercial agriculture play a part in feeding the world. There is an important role for organic agriculture and, indeed, some consumers are willing to pay a premium for foods that are certified as organic. Sustainable agriculture, defined generally as farming that adheres to practices more sensitive to the environment, is also of great importance. Commercial agriculture is still the backbone of the economy in most rural counties across the nation. ...

... We do not yet see the yields with organic agriculture that would feed a hungry planet of almost 7 billion people. ...

... The primary goal of agriculture is to feed ourselves and those around the globe who lack America's productive resources. ...

... Agriculture is key in our becoming less dependent on foreign oil by converting crops into biofuels and renewal energy. ...

The rest of the article is mainly filled out with commendable concern for the hungry, which lends a shiny patina of 'awwww' to the Trojan horsecrap embedded within it. Sigh.

The Types of Farming

First, there's the matter of organic agriculture. A 2007 study out of the University of Michigan indicates that in developed nations, organic and conventional yields could achieve parity, while organic yields could be triple conventional yields in developing nations. The researchers also determined that green manures, growing nitrogen-fixing cover crops in the off season, fertilized soil quite well without the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. As US farmers draw down our trust fund account of fossil water and fossil fuel derivatives, such techniques will become more obviously beneficial.

It's interesting that they then separate out sustainable agriculture, because that's a hard distinction to get many to make, and then miss its point. The term sustainable does not imply a primarily aim to be good to the environment, though that's an important component. No, the main point of doing something sustainably is to be able to continue doing it indefinitely.

Going back to our trust fund metaphor, if you have a trust account that you're taking money out of, but that no money is being added to, it will run out. When it runs out depends on the amount of the balance and the rate of withdrawal, but the outcome is certain.

If we continue withdrawing soil fertility without replenishing it, farming in a way that requires draining fossil water above replacement rates, and keeping the system going with fossil fuels that are finite and in competition with other uses, we're going to come to the end of our ability to farm that way. Maybe not soon, but that isn't the point. Can you think of a date when you'd find it acceptable for humanity to stop being able to feed itself? Me neither.

And though commercial agriculture is the backbone of the economy now, why is that? As a corn farmer recently lamented, there isn't anything else he can sell in his local area. All the storage and purchasing infrastructure is geared towards corn, even if he wanted to grow other crops. Recognizing that this is so only means that it would be foolish to try and change the food system overnight, it doesn't mean that it has to be accepted as the final word.

Big Daddy

Then, there's the paternalism dodge. We here in America need to be generous and share our productivity with the world or everyone will starve. Those poor brown people could never feed themselves without us. What a goddam bunch of self-serving, arrogant tripe.

Tell that to the farmers in Central America who are pushed into marginal slash and burn agriculture to feed their families because the Chiquita plantations serving the export market were ceded nearly the whole of their countries' arable land. Tell it to the female farmers in Africa, who've never been redressed for the colonial era dispossession of land that had been handed down from mother to daughter, and are still getting kicked off their subsistence plots whenever the men who hold the title decide to participate in the latest export scheme. Tell it to the farmers in India who are committing suicide because Western bottling plants, like ones that are owned by Coca-Cola, move in to their areas and suck up so much of the ground water that they're ruined when their wells dry up.

Just, seriously, sod off with this White Man's Burden bunkum. The whole world is just sick to the teeth of it.

At Last, Biofuels

If there's any future in biofuels that isn't a "crime against humanity", that future does not lie with burning food in our gas tanks. Chances are, the best bet with biofuels will be algal biodiesel, which can be grown in tanks on already industrialized land, and is likely to have very little to do with farming. Consider the EU's path on this, with policy experts there listening to scientists who determined that ...

... the relative environmental benefits of growing crops on arable land to produce biofuels, or replanting the same land with trees, and found that the quantity of CO2 absorbed by forests over 30 years would be "considerably greater" than the emissions avoided by using biofuels. ...

In fact, one of the worst aspects of the EU biofuels targets, started with verve and vigor in advance of efforts here in the US was that they ended up subsidizing the destruction of tropical forests for the planting of oil palm. Production of palm oil has become more profitable and increased dramatically in the biofuels boom, even as many developing nations suffer shortages and price increases for edible oils, which cuts an important source of calories in many developing populations' diets.

And why, you might ask, if the EU was so interested in biofuels, didn't they grow it themselves? Oh, maybe because they still wanted to grow food, emphasis mine:

... Indeed, a 2006 report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation had already suggested that for the EU to meet its 10% target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70% of arable land to be taken out of food production, necessitating a huge increase in EU food imports.

Even worse, by the end of 2006, the commission was aware that the world was about to face a food shortage. Yet, in attempting to show that enough acreage would be available to meet the new biofuels target, the officials indulged in "Enron accounting", using the same areas of land three times. "Set-aside" land allocated for other industrial crops was re-allocated for emergency food production in the light of the "global food crisis", then, within a matter of weeks, redesignated for biofuel production. ...

There are conflicting estimates of how much land it would take to grow that much biofuel, but the EU did drop their targets. Which lower targets they still haven't met, and world food markets already can't handle the strain of the combined EU-US demand for food to drive on.

Look at the numbers: A 2006 memorandum to the House of Lords pegs the total arable land in the EU at 82 million hectares. As of 2002, US land devoted to crops totaled 442 million acres, or about 179 million hectares. A Congressional Research Service report on biofuel policy and agriculture (pdf) listed the EU's 2004 road transportation fuel use at 89 billion gallons per year, and the US' at 177.6 billion gallons per year. We have about twice as much crop land as the EU, but also use about twice as much fuel. A cursory look at these proportions suggest that we'll run into exactly the same problems they've run into. There's no way we can meet our fuel needs domestically through biofuels without either farming more land, massively displacing food crops, or importing biofuels from countries whose local food production and natural resources have been degraded or replaced by export-oriented agriculture.

Ideology and Outcome

To sum up, this is not advice aimed at reducing world hunger.

The authors close with a plea to look at the science, not ideology. Yet science only tells us what's happening and what's likely to happen as near as they can figure. Within the scientific establishment itself, significant resources are devoted to ethics reviews of experiments and research likely to have an impact on humans, because scientists recognize that there needs to be an evaluative framework for their actions - you can't have any such framework without an ideology.

Even Matz' and McGovern's apparent premise that hunger is bad and that food should be cheap and widely available, is ideological. It might be uncontroversial, but it's ideological, it defines some outcomes as desireable and others as undesireable. However, they seem not to realize that.

Perhaps it's just that absence of self-awareness that leads them to advocate against their own stated goals. Though I only speculate. I'm not a mind reader.