Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

[I'm sure there are some disputes with this one]

Local organic food: An answer or a sure path to disaster?
Behind the collapse of past civilizations was the collapse of a food industry 
-- each and every time
By Randy Shore, Vancouver Sun July 3, 2010
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Local+organic+food+answer+sure+path+disaster/3230713/story.html#ixzz0skFYo0pm

Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly
By James E. McWilliams
Little, Brown and Company, 272 pages ($28.99)

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
By Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas
Random House Books, 320 pages ($35.95)
---

I there is a hotter topic in the publishing industry than local organic food, 
I don't know what it is. Two books that recently crossed my desk take 
decidedly divergent approaches to the problem of commercial agriculture, 
though both authors agree that commercial agriculture is a problem.

There the similarity ends.

James E. McWilliams argues in Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How 
We Can Eat Responsibly that the locavores have it all wrong and that organic 
farming is not only NOT the answer, but a path to certain disaster.

He quite rightly points out that the local foodism promoted by Alice Waters 
is elitist in the extreme and that organic farming as it is practised today 
provides high-end groceries for the relatively rich.

He is dismissive of the concept of food miles, arguing that transport is only 
a tiny fraction of the energy inputs that go into food production as though 
that was the only problem with the globalization of food systems.

The premise of his book is that we have to do something drastic to ensure 
that we are able to feed a rapidly growing global population, but the author 
doesn't properly consider that rapidly expanding food production is exactly 
the reason that we have so many mouths to feed in the first place. Countless 
times in human history, advances in agriculture led to population booms. The 
collapse of those food systems, usually due to soil depletion or climate 
change, led to the collapse of the population. Each and every time.

If we, as a race, are committed to uncontrolled population growth, then yes, 
Williams is right to say that genetically engineered crops are the only way 
to support the nine billion people we will have to feed in a couple of 
decades. But the bubble will burst, because commercial agriculture devastates 
the soil's natural capital, and famine will result, as it has throughout 
human history. Each and every time.

We can only hope that biotechnology leads to a solution to soil depletion.

Just as informative and less annoyingly pedantic is Empires of Food: Feast 
Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Evan Fraser and Andrew 
Rimas. The professor and his reporter pal take us on a ride through time, 
noting those moments that changed history. Civilizations arise when the 
people growing food produce more than they can eat, giving rise to trade and 
urbanization. All civilizations are built on a foundation of food. Without 
productive agricultural systems, cities collapse into ruin and, more often 
than not, revolution results.

We got a tiny taste of the fragility of our own civilization just a few years 
ago when a single crop of rice faltered and six countries closed their 
borders to rice exports. When prices spiked, there were riots in many Asian 
cities and a run on all available supply here in Vancouver.

McWilliams calls locavores "cynically populist, isolationist, and 
protectionist." I say if we can produce enough food to feed ourselves -- and 
British Columbia produces only 42 per cent of the food we consume -- the 
world's problems need not be ours. At least not right away. When push comes 
to shove, most nations will take care of their own and you can kiss your 
Chilean grapes and New Zealand apples goodbye. Maybe cynically populist, 
isolationist and protectionist isn't such a bad thing.

The food empire that feeds the globe is built on a rapidly decaying 
foundation. Agribusiness runs on nitrogen and chemical fertilizer, which 
comes from the petroleum industry. We can all see the demise of the petroleum 
industry on the horizon, and we are planning for alternative forms of energy 
to run our factories, but where will the chemical energy that fuels 
agriculture come from?

Even slightly more expensive oil is going to have dramatic impacts of the 
amount of food we are able to produce, and given the condition of the world's 
soils. We cannot dream of doing without it.

Chillingly, Fraser and Rimas describe how the scenario of collapse has played 
our through history, from Roman times forward, and how food was the pillar 
that gave way. Each and every time.