[permaculture] It's Not Rocket Science: Land Productivity, Food Rights
Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
lakinroe at silcom.com
Thu Mar 19 10:39:37 EDT 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/its-not-rocket-science-la_b_176754.html
Stan Goff
It's Not Rocket Science: Land Productivity, Food Rights
Originally posted at Feral Scholar
I am offering this piece by my dear collaborator,
De, as an essential bit of counter-propaganda
against Big Ag -- one of the key players in the
oligarchy that holds sway over the Obama
administration every bit as much as they have
Bush II, Clinton, Bush I... etc. etc., just go
back and check.
The nascent food underground in this country is a
mass movement in embryo form that offers us "food
praxis" as a point of departure in redesigning
our built environment for a post-imperial, and --
yes -- post-capitalist age.
SG
* * * * *
Not Rocket Science: Land Productivity, Food Rights
By DeAnander
We're all familiar with the myth: we learned it
in school. It goes something like this:
Once Upon a Time, in the 1960's, a crew of
brilliant whitefellas in lab coats Saved the
World by revolutionising farming and eliminating
world hunger. Their new, advanced
mechanical/chemical farming methods -- vast areas
of monocrop, heavy tractors, giant combines,
tonnes of artificial pesticides and fertilisers
-- and their new, improved, superior hybridised
crops increased yields tenfold and more. Without
industrial farming, billions would starve, even
though other billions would be re-sentenced to
the short lives of brutal, backbreaking toil from
which they were rescued by industrial/mechanised
farming. Therefore, anyone who advocates organic
or "sustainable" farming practise is some kind of
heartless elitist who wants billions to starve
and the rest to live as dawn-to-dusk field slaves
-- for this is what will happen if we do not
continue and expand the highly successful [and
highly profitable, for everyone except farmers
and eaters] model of industrial/corporate
farming. There is no other way to feed ourselves.
If there are "external costs" of the industrial
farming system, we will just have to accept them.
That's what I was taught in school -- and
probably you were too, if the subject of
agriculture was even mentioned during your school
years.
The real story -- slowly emerging now into public
discourse, in bits and pieces, in a mosaic of
books, documentary films, research, nationalist
and peasant movements, grassroots efforts -- is a
lot more ambiguous and complicated. Did
agricultural productivity really rise as a result
of industrial farming methods? Well, yes and no;
it depends how you measure productivity. Was
hunger really eliminated by the so-called Green
Revolution of the 1960's? Obviously not, since
billions are going hungry worldwide today. How
effective were the new artificial pesticides and
fertilisers really? And what are the long-term
consequences of their use? On what theories was
this shift in agriculture based, and who
benefited most, and what other agendas were on
the table (or under it) at the time? And most
urgently perhaps -- as we measure the annual loss
of topsoil, the reduced nutritional value of
industrially-farmed food, and the many risks to
food security posed by massively centralised and
fossil-fuel-dependent food production -- is there
any other way to feed ourselves? If the answer is
Yes, and any other approach to farming and food
is capable of feeding us, then these two (or
more) competing models of farming which should be
examined and evaluated. But if the answer is No,
then we are indeed the captives of an irrevocable
choice made sometime in the 1930's and 1940's,
with no way out.
So let us talk first of all about productivity:
the productivity of land, that is, land producing
food that we can eat.
First of all, when we consider climax ecosystems
(maximally productive ecosystems, those which
sustain the highest levels and diversity of life
per hectare/acre), we find that they are never
monocrops. There is no such thing as a monocrop
in nature: all ecosystems are symbiotic,
requiring the interactions of tens to tens of
thousands of species to achieve maximum densities
of life and nutritional exchange. A hectare of
rigidly-enforced monocrop is "efficient" only in
the sense that it can be harvested by machines
(and the "efficiency" of machine harvesting is
entirely dependent on the relative cost of
machinery and fossil fuel); in terms of biomass
produced, it is bound to be less productive than
a climax ecosystem or a food plantation modelled
on a climax ecosystem (the practise known as
"permaculture") employing a wide variety of
species in symbiotic, complementary
relationships. What's the difference in
productivity?
Forest gardens are inspired by nature. The reason
natural woodland is so productive is because it
grows on many layers, rather like having half a
dozen fields stacked on top of each other.
A forest garden imitates each woodland layer, but
uses more edible species. The garden floor is
covered with fruit and vegetables, and above
them, the shrub layer is equally abundant.
A bit higher up are the fruit trees, such as
apples, pears, medlars (a fruit rather like the
crab apple) and quinces.
And then there is the canopy where those trees
that aren't producing food are serving other
essential functions such as recycling nutrients
through their root system and leaf litter.
Some plants are selected primarily because they
attract beneficial insects - hover flies, for
example, which eat aphids - so no pesticides are
needed.
Surely this requires endless attention and work?
'Over a whole year, an average of one day a
week,' said Martin. 'A lot of that is harvesting.
In terms of maintenance, it's about ten days a
year.' Compared to running a conventional farm,
that is virtually nothing.
But how much food does it produce? 'One designed
for maximum yield could probably feed about ten
people an acre,' said Martin. That's roughly
double the number we can currently feed from an
average acre of conventional arable farmland.
footnote
So we have a first approximation: diverse
polyculture mimicking a climax ecosystem may be
two times as productive as monocrop.
In Pasadena, California, the Dervaes family has
been working towards food self-sufficiency on
their standard (American suburban) 1/5 acre lot.
Their food garden occupies 1/10th of an acre or
about half the lot. On that .1 acre, they are
cultivating over 350 species of plant, and their
annual food yields are worth noting: (2008) 4,300
pounds of vegetable food, 900 chicken and 1000
duck eggs, 25 lbs of honey. Four people manage to
get over 90 percent of their daily food from this
1/10th of one acre. That would suggest that over
30 people -- if not actually 40 -- might be able
to eat from the productivity of one whole acre;
far more optimistic than our British estimate.
But of course that's in mild southern California,
with its year-round growing season. Surely in
more northerly climes -- without Great Britain's
good fortune in being situated near a warm ocean
current -- manual garden-tending could not
possibly out-produce fossil-assisted, mechanised
farming? Dr Leonid Sharashkin examined closely
the contribution of Russian smallholders and
gardeners to the nation's food supply.
In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all
households in the country) owned gardening plots
(subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha)
and were involved in growing crops for
subsistence (Rosstat 2005b). By 2005, 53% (by
value) of the country's total agricultural output
was coming from household plots (which in 2006
occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land), while
the remaining 47% (by value -- Rosstat 2006) came
from the agricultural enterprises (often the
former kolkhozes and sovkhozes) and individual
farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands
(Rosstat 2007b).
(recent research by Sharashkin, as reported by Dmitry Orlov)
Let us review those statistics for just a moment.
In post-Soviet Russia (with a growing season of
about 110 days in the area studied) smallholders
-- ordinary gardeners and market-gardeners --
control only 3 percent of the agricultural land,
yet they are producing over half the country's
total agricultural output (by value). Orlov
highlights Dr Sharashkin's results: smallholders
are growing 90% of all the potatoes in Russia,
80% of all the vegetables, 50% of the meat and
milk etc. In other words, very high proportions
of certain products, including at least one
calorie staple (potato). And they were doing so
on about 3 percent of the available land. What
does this say about the "efficiency" of the large
industrial farms occupying the other 97 percent?
Or about the potential of small-scale polyculture
to feed large numbers of people?
And how can this be? How is it that these
real-world results can co-exist with the repeated
claims by monocrop/industrial farm experts that
their methods are far more productive than "mere
peasant farming"?
Vandana Shiva explains it carefully and clearly
in her landmark paper "The War Against Farmers
and the Land" [published in the
highly-recommended anthology The Essential
Agrarian Reader (ed. Norman Wirzba)]:
The polycultures of traditional agricultural
systems have evolved because more yield can be
harvested from a given area planted with diverse
crops than from an equivalent area consisting of
separate patches of monocultures. For example, in
planting sorghum and pigeon pea mixtures, one
hectare will produce the same yield as .94
hectares of sorghum monocultures and .68 hectares
of pigeon pea monoculture combined. Thus one
hectare of polyculture produces what 1.62
hectares of monoculture can produce. This is
called the land equivalent ratio (LER).
Increased land-use efficiency and higher LER's
have been reported for polycultures of
millet/groundnut (1.26); maize/bean (1.38);
millet/sorghum (1.53); maize/pigeon pea (1.85);
maize/cocoyan/sweet potato (2.08);
cassava/maize/groundnut (2.51). The monocultures
of the Green Revolution thus actually reduced
food yields per acre when compared with mixtures
of diverse crops. This falsifies the argument
often made that chemically intensive agriculture
and genetic engineering will save biodiversity by
releasing land from food production. In fact,
since monocultures require more land,
biodiversity is destroyed twice over -- once on
the farm, and then on the additional acreage
needed to produce the outputs a monoculture has
displaced. Not only is the productivity measure
distorted by ignoring resource inputs (focussing
only on labour), it is also distorted by looking
at a single and partial output rather than the
total food output.
A myth promoted by the one-dimensional
monoculture paradigm is that biodiversity reduces
yields and productivity while monoculture
increase yields and productivity. [...] Planting
only one crop on an entire field as a monoculture
will of course increase its yield. Planting
multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields
of individual crops, but will have high total
output of food.
The Mayan peasants in the Mexican state of
Chiapas are characterised as unproductive because
they produce only two tonnes of corn per acre.
However, the overall food output is twenty tonnes
per acre. In the terraced fields of the high
Himalayas, women peasants grow Jhangora (barnyard
millet), marsha (amaranth), tur (pigeon pea),
urad (black gram), gahat (horse gram), soybean
(glysine max), bhat (glysine soya), rayans (rice
bean), swanta (cow pea), and kodo (finger millet)
in mixtures and rotations. The total output, even
in bad years, is six times more than
industrially-farmed rice monocultures.
Shiva emphasises that the diversity of crops in
traditional peasant food gardening is essential
to their high productivity: as many as twenty
different sweet potato varieties (out of over
5000 grown nationally) may be found in any garden
in Papua New Guinea; in Java, the typical small
farmer cultivates over 600 species in the home
garden; in sub-Saharan Africa, women
traditionally cultivate over 100 species in
leftover spaces alongside cash crops; a single
home garden in Thailand typically has over 230
species. In eastern Nigeria results similar to
those from Russia are reported: home gardens
occuping only 2 percent of a family's land
account for half of the total output of the farm.
Again and again, in widely varying climates, we
see living proof that large-scale monoculture is
hopelessly inefficient at producing food. It is
efficient only at producing uniform commodities
for export and/or industrial processing -- as
with the nearly-inedible varieties of corn now
dominating much of North America's farmland,
which must be heavily processed before becoming
at all palatable. (cf Michael Pollan's excellent
book The Omnivore's Dilemma and the independent
documentary film King Corn, inspired by Pollan's
work).
Not only does industrial monoculture produce less
food per hectare, it produces its inefficient
results at very high (and unaccounted-for)
"external" costs. North American industrial
farming has been estimated to consume 10 calories
of fossil fuel for each calorie of food produced;
estimates of topsoil loss vary from 2 to 6
bushels for every bushel of industrial corn
harvested. Water usage for industrial farming is
similarly alarming: in North America, the ancient
Oglalla Aquifer is being drained dry by the
enormous water demands of huge acreages of
unnatural monoculture. Meanwhile, runoff from
artificially-fertilised fields is creating large
"dead zones" in coastal waters, destroying
fisheries; and pesticides are implicated not only
in human health risks, but in the destruction of
beneficial insect populations including essential
pollinators. Clearly, the inefficiencies of
industrial agriculture go far beyond how many
bushels of corn or soy can be extracted from each
hectare of land in each season; if non-renewable
resources are being consumed, or other sources of
food (such as oceans and rivers) are being
damaged, then our food-producing capacities are
being impaired by the way in which we are
producing food -- in which case we are on a
downward escalator of diminishing returns and
negative feedback, and there is no future in the
present paradigm.
Returning to our original article from the UK:
Could permaculture feed Britain?
I asked Patrick Whitefield, Britain's leading expert in permaculture.
'Good question,' he said. 'A better question
would be, "Can present methods go on feeding
Britain?" In the long term, it is certain that
present methods can't because they are so
entirely dependent on fossil-fuel energy. So we
haven't got any choice other than to find
something different.'
The petrochemical industry, the owners of
massively consolidated factory farm operations,
the farm equipment sector, and the purveyors of
patented hybrid and GMO seed, meanwhile, are
telling us that we have no choice: we must go on
playing by their rules. But the numbers from
actual research in the field (literally) suggest
that their absolute certainty is ill-founded as
well as self-serving. Smallholder polyculture not
only can feed the world -- it may be the only
farming method that will.
In seeking local food security, then, we may be
quite confident that the encouragement of diverse
smallholdings -- backyard gardens, SPIN farms,
family farms -- practising polyculture rather
than monoculture, is a sound, practical, and
realistic strategy. It is not sentimental
dreaming, nor the charming but useless hobby of a
handful of food snobs; the myths we were taught
in school are just that -- myths. It is
industrial monoculture that is unsound,
impractical, inefficient, and unrealistic. We can
-- and sooner than we think, perhaps, we must be
prepared to -- feed the world with
small-to-medium-scale organic/sustainable farming.
It is not the productivity of land that prevents
us from eliminating hunger. It is not the lack of
new, improved, ever more phantasmagorical
high-tech toys and techniques. What prevents us
from eliminating hunger is our failure to return
to, and adhere to, a moral code that recognises
healthy food as a human right. As F M Lappé notes
in a recent article, such a moral code is nearly
universal among the people we call "primitive";
early humans, in striking contrast to many other
animals, seem to have an innate tendency to share
food -- even with others not directly related to
themselves. Allowing people in our tribe,
village, or city to starve is a violation of our
primeval human nature. When we muster the
political will to continue our ancient
food-sharing behaviour in modern dress, the
results are astonishing: astonishingly simple,
astonishingly easy, astonishingly efficient.
In the early 90's, Brazil's fourth largest city
made a serious commitment to the elimination of
hunger among its citizens. As Lappé tells the
story:
Belo [Horizonte], a city of 2.5 million people,
once had 11 percent of its population living in
absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its
children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly
elected administration declared food a right of
citizenship. [...]
The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the
federal anti-hunger effort-began by creating a
city agency, which included assembling a
20-member council of citizen, labor, business,
and church representatives to advise in the
design and implementation of a new food system.
[...] During the first six years of Belo's
food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to
the new emphasis on food security, the number of
citizens engaging in the city's participatory
budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.
The city agency developed dozens of innovations
to assure everyone the right to food, especially
by weaving together the interests of farmers and
consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens
of choice spots of public space on which to sell
to urban consumers, essentially redistributing
retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached
100 percent-to consumers and the farmers.
Farmers' profits grew, since there was no
wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got
access to fresh, healthy food.
In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city
makes good food available by offering
entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right
to use well-trafficked plots of city land for
"ABC" markets, from the Portuguese acronym for
"food at low prices." Today there are 34 such
markets where the city determines a set
price-about two-thirds of the market price-of
about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state
farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything
else they can sell at the market price.
"For ABC sellers with the best spots, there's
another obligation attached to being able to use
the city land," a former manager within this city
agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. "Every weekend
they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the
poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so
everyone can get good produce."
Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is
three large, airy "People's Restaurants"
(Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues,
that daily serve 12,000 or more people using
mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of
less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in
one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and
newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers
with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street
clothes, others in uniform, still others in
business suits.
"I've been coming here every day for five years
and have gained six kilos," beamed one elderly,
energetic man in faded khakis.
"It's silly to pay more somewhere else for lower
quality food," an athletic-looking young man in a
military police uniform told us. "I've been
eating here every day for two years. It's a good
way to save money to buy a house so I can get
married," he said with a smile.
No one has to prove they're poor to eat in a
People's Restaurant, although about 85 percent of
the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma
and allows "food with dignity," say those
involved.
Belo's food security initiatives also include
extensive community and school gardens as well as
nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal
government contributes toward school lunches,
once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys
whole food mostly from local growers.
Residents of the Northern Hemisphere, dazed by
decades of neoliberal propaganda about the
inefficiencies of government, the futility of
"welfare," and so on, may understandably be
convinced that this food-rights programme must
have foundered somewhat over the 15 years since
its bold inception; or we may be tempted to
conclude that it must be weighing down the city's
finances unbearably by now.
The result of these and other related innovations?
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant
death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by
more than half, and today these initiatives
benefit almost 40 percent of the city's 2.5
million population. One six-month period in 1999
saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced
by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo
Horizonte was the only locality in which
consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2
percent of the city budget. That's about a penny
a day per Belo resident.
For a penny a day per person -- a whopping $3.65
per year each -- a world-class city took
meaningful, measurably successful steps towards
the redefinition of food as a human right, the
elimination of hunger among its poorest people,
the promotion and availability of fresh and
healthy food for everyone, and the revitalisation
and ongoing support of local, small-scale
agriculture. Rather than escalating the
destructive practises of gargantuan-scale
industrial farming and then distributing its
inferior, malnutritious products as charity or
welfare, Belo Horizonte made a courageous attempt
to create a food economy that would meet the
standards suggested by Carlo Petrini of the Slow
Food Movement: good, clean, and fair. (Here's a
video clip of Petrini explaining his standards
and their implications.) As the Slow Food web
site explains:
Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We
believe that the food we eat should taste good;
that it should be produced in a clean way that
does not harm the environment, animal welfare or
our health; and that food producers should
receive fair compensation for their work.
The city of Belo Horizonte, by boldly addressing
food justice and food rights, has begun the
process of guaranteeing every person acess to
food that is good, clean, and fair. Their success
vividly highlights the many failures --
nutritional, social, agricultural -- of our own
industrial and wholly profit-oriented food
system. It also suggests that our situation is
far from hopeless. If we were to continue with
business-as-usual, the future of food looks
pretty dismal; but the documented productivity
and sustainability of dense polyculture, plus the
documented success of the food-as-a-civic-right
policy implemented by Belo Horizonte, seem like
very well-lit signage beckoning us to a safe exit
from the ratcheting finger-trap of industrial
agriculture.
Hunger is not inevitable. Factory farming is not
inevitable. Low-quality, tasteless, contaminated
food is not inevitable. Repeated "food scares"
are not inevitable. Soaring public health costs
are not inevitable. Another and better food
system is eminently possible -- now, not ten
years from now or after some promised, imaginary
"scientific breakthrough". It is possible right
now, today -- in our own backyard(s).
What are we waiting for?
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