Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Agribiz: Food or the Environment But Not Both
January 13, 2011
http://beyondgreen.weaversway.coop/2011/01/agribiz-food-or-environment-but-not.html


In a piece on the EPA's attempts to save the Chesapeake Bay as well as USDA's 
new policy of acknowledging risks of genetic contamination or organics by GMO 
crops, Tom Philpott has a key insight about industrial agriculture:

    In both the case of the Chesapeake Bay watershed's vast chicken factories 
and that of GM alfalfa, industrial agriculture is admitting that it needs to 
trash its neighbors and the surrounding landscape to thrive. It wants us to 
believe that there are no alternatives if we want to feed ourselves 
plentifully.

The idea that protecting the environment is a luxury we can't afford is a 
standard defense for corporations in many sectors -- though typically only 
trotted out by the dirtiest industrial polluters (e.g. coal and oil 
companies).

This argument tends to be more effective when the environment that's being 
trashed has already been depopulated by economic forces (as in the sad 
decline of rural America). And as the natural gas drilling industry has 
discovered, it's a lot easier to steamroll the widely disbursed residents of 
West Texas than it is when you're drilling near population centers in New 
York or Pennsylvania. Still, the thing agribusiness has going for it is that, 
by and large, it has moved its biggest operations away from media and public 
attention.

But I do wonder in the two cases Philpott addresses, if agribusiness is using 
this threat as more an act of desperation than clever strategy. In the case 
of the Chesapeake, for which it is the primary cause of pollution at this 
point, industrial agriculture is mostly benefiting now from the unwillingness 
of local governments to take responsibility for the mess created by overuse 
of fertilizer and under-treatment of factory farm waste.

In fact, the "sky is falling" rhetoric is a direct response to the EPA's move 
to penalize state and local governments for polluting the bay. As this WaPo 
article documented, the actual desire is to force farmers to pay, not 
consumers. When faced with the continued death of an eco-system from which 
millions of residents of several states benefit, claims of falling skies may 
not quite be enough.

As for the new USDA policy that supports protecting organic agriculture from 
contamination by genetically modified crops -- on this point, agribusiness is 
all bluster. The USDA is partly doing this out of good intentions, but mostly 
because the science, and far more importantly, the courts, are demanding this 
policy shift. Even the Supreme Court, packed as it is with an 
industry-friendly majority, had to acknowledge the real risks of genetic 
contamination to other, legitimate forms of agriculture. And the series of 
losses in court over GM sugar beets has forced the USDA to bend, if not 
break, the law to maintain any plantings.

This fight is one to be welcomed. It represents the coming of age of organic 
ag. It doesn't mean the reign of agribusiness is anywhere near over -- but it 
does mean that organic agriculture is big enough and financially successful 
enough to represent a sector worthy of legal and policy protections. After 
all, there's now real money at stake!

Look at me getting all sunny. Must be something in the water... Too bad 
agribusiness doesn't want to clean it up.