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  • From: <pbunch@cox.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Food and agriculture in a steady state economy
  • Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 8:13:48 -0700

Good find, I had not seen this article. It describes one of the reasons why I
think that development of the steady state economy is perhaps the only way we
are going to make it as a species.


---- Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:
>
> 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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