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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food and agriculture in a steady state economy
  • Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:57:35 -0600


Food and agriculture in a steady state economy
Oct 4 2010 by The Daly News, Archived Oct 4 2010
http://steadystate.org/food-and-agriculture-in-a-steady-state-economy/

The annual book festival of the Library of Congress just featured Jonathan
Safran Foer who spoke about his book Eating Animals. He writes about his
grandmother who survived World War II on the run from the Germans, scavenging
from garbage cans and always on the verge of starvation. However, she refused
to eat a piece of pork given her by a kindly farmer because “if nothing
matters, nothing is worth saving.”

This fall (what better time than harvest season?), I will focus my Daly News
essays on the ethics and policies that would characterize food production in
a steady state economy. These essays will offer answers to questions such as:
What would people eat and how would it be grown? Would almost everyone be a
vegetarian or vegan? Would genetically engineered food play a big role? What
about farm subsidies and the role of biofuels? How many of the current
agricultural practices in the United States would even continue as part of a
steady state economy?

Since sustainable scale is the most important feature of a steady state
economy (i.e., the economy must fit within the capacity of the ecosystems
that contain it), the first issue to investigate is how environmental systems
are responding to agricultural practices – in particular, the effects of
agricultural practices on climate. There is growing evidence that animal
agriculture is the number one cause of global climate destabilization,
contributing more than all global transport put together. Former World Bank
ecologist Robert Goodland has produced an analysis showing that at least half
of the human-caused greenhouse gases come from the production of domesticated
animals. Livestock and their byproducts account for over 32.5 billion tons of
carbon dioxide a year, or roughly 51% of annual worldwide greenhouse gases
(see Worldwatch Nov./Dec. 2009).

Here is the unsettling irony: factory-farm dominated agriculture, as a major
climate destabilizer, is creating long-term weather changes that compromise
the ability of the earth to produce food.

Plant ecologists estimate that for every 1 degree Celsius temperature
increase, grain yields drop 10%. Climate disruption has led to serious
melting of snowpacks and glaciers in most places. In the Western U.S. where
snowpacks store about 75% of the water supply, the Natural Resources Defense
Council reports that climate change could reduce this to 40% by 2060. Similar
concerns exist for the great Asian rivers like the Ganges and the Mekong that
originate in the Tibetan plateau.

These impacts are not being imposed on a planet whose soils and grasslands
are in wonderful condition and whose groundwater has been safeguarded and not
pumped beyond recharge. These impacts are not being imposed on a planet whose
human population has stabilized but rather is likely to reach 9-11 billion by
2050.

In contrast to this grim picture of the agricultural capacity of the planet,
many encouraging trends in food production are emerging. Examples include
growth of organic food consumption, expansion of farmers markets, the local
food movement, the slow food movement, the food-miles movement, and
initiatives to get healthy food into schools – all of which are heading in
promising directions.

A steady state economy would bolster these trends. It would move away from
control of food by transnational corporations and toward an increased number
and diversity of small and medium-sized farms, and healthy rural communities.
Revamped agricultural systems would provide many varieties of food in ways
that conserve soil and water and maintain long-term fertility of the land.

These promising developments are taking place not because of, but in spite
of, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has for the most part been a
giant promoter of animal slum operations and presider over the demise of the
family farm.

Over 10 million animals are slaughtered for food each year in the U.S. in
factory slum operations that produce over 95% of the nation’s meat. It is
abundantly clear that meat-dominated megafarm agriculture is not sustainable
(even from the climate/energy standpoint alone), and it could not be part of
the food system in a steady state economy.

A steady state economy would not feature perverse subsidies as a cornerstone
of the economy. Yet in the U.S. a curious mathematical formula governs the
dispensing of subsidies: the more environmentally damaging and harmful to
public health the practice or project, the larger the state and federal
handouts.

Thus, industrial agriculture enjoys all sorts of subsidies from the Farm
Bill. Its extensive use of energy-intensive pesticides and fertilizers is
supported by the numerous subsidies the fossil fuel industry receives.
Gigantic animal factory slums not only get subsidized, but they externalize
their environmental and health costs onto their neighbors and the public.
Time magazine documented the competition among states to see who could dole
out the most tax money to lure one of these animal slum operations into their
state. In contrast, the encouraging trends in agriculture that I cited
receive very little governmental support.

Note: CASSE also has a briefing paper on the topic of agriculture in a steady
state economy.






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