Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Big Ag Won't Feed the World — By Tom Philpott
Wed Jun. 15, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
USDA secretary Tom Vilsack speaks—too often, on behalf of Big Ag interests. 
The Denver Post/Zuma
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/06/vilsack-usda-big-ag

Back in March, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack spoke at an event called the 
Commodity Classic in Tampa, Fl. Sponsored by agribusiness giants Monsanto, 
BASF, Syngenta, John Deere, Dow AgroSciences, Dupont, Syngenta, and Archer 
Daniels Midland, among others, the event hails itself as the "premier 
national trade show and convention for corn, soy, wheat and sorghum farmers."

According to an account in the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Vilsack spoke "with 
sometimes evangelistic fervor." He thundered against critics of corn-based 
ethanol, reiterated the Obama administration's goal of doubling US farm 
exports by 2014 by ramming open foreign markets, and praised the assembled 
farmers and agribusiness flacks for their record of "ensuring affordable food 
for US families," Agri-Pulse reported. The former governor of Iowa ended his 
speech on an evem more flattering note: "The farmers in this room have 
provided the prescription that this nation must follow to get itself back 
totally on its feet ... You should never ever bet against the American farmer 
because if you do, it's a losing bet." The audience roared its approval.

The ag secretary was essentially promoting an agribusiness-as-usual vision of 
farm policy: maximum production of a few commodity crops, mainly to be used 
to fatten confined animals, create cheap sweeteners and fats, and fill gas 
tanks. He did so amid much rhetoric about "jobs," the Agri-Pulse account 
shows. But that's ludicrous. The modern food system lionized by Vilsack has 
been a massive net destroyer of jobs. And the fixation on doubling US ag 
exports can't be good news for farmers in the global south, who struggle to 
compete with their highly capitalized US peers.

Meanwhile, US ag policy as expressed by Vilsack is putting us increasingly at 
odds with an emerging global consenus on how to structure food production in 
an era of climate change, resource scarcity, and population growth. As I 
wrote last week, for years now, development specialists and ag scientists 
associated with the UN and even the World Bank have been questioning the 
assumption that only chemical-intensive consumption of a few commodities can 
"feed the world" going forward. The latest data point: the UN's Food and 
Agriculture Organization has come out with a policy blueprint called "Save 
and grow: A policymaker’s guide to the sustainable intensification of 
smallholder crop production." Its central premise reads like a direct rebuke 
to Vilsack: "The present paradigm of intensive crop production cannot meet 
the challenges of the new millennium."

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The report acknowledges that the advent of pesticides, mined and synthetic 
fertilizers, and monocrops represented a "paradigm shift in traditional 
agriculture" that led to higher crop yields in the short term. But then it 
pushes for "another paradigm shift," to what it calls "sustainable crop 
production intensification, which seeks to increase food production without 
eroding the long-term productivity of farms and their surrrounding 
ecosystems. It promotes farming practices that won't be popular with the 
agribusiness giants that funded the Commodity Classic: things like minimizing 
fertillzer use and increasing soil organic matter by planting nitrogen-fixing 
cover crops; and using a broad variety of plants and animals in conjunction, 
rather than each farm specializing in massive quantities of one or two crops.

According to the report, such approaches have been proven to work:

    A review of agricultural development projects in 57 low-income countries 
found that more efficient use of water, reduced use of pesticides and 
improvements in soil health had led to average crop yield increases of 79 
percent. Another study concluded that agricultural systems that conserve 
ecosystem services by using practices such as conservation tillage, crop 
diversification, legume intensification and biological pest control, perform 
as well as intensive, high-input systems.

But such systems don't appear by magic, the FAO stresses. Intensifying 
agriculture sustainably will require policy reform at the global and national 
levels.

Meanwhile, an agribusiness-funded backlash against FAO's policy agenda has 
been launched, Tom Laskawy reports in Grist. A project called Global Harvest 
Initiative (GHI)—backed by DuPont, John Deere, Archer Daniels Midland, and 
Monsanto, in conjunction with Big Green groups the Nature Conservancy, the 
World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International—has released its own 
policy brief, subtly titled "Embracing Science-Based Solutions." The main 
problem facing global food production, the report suggests, is "resistance to 
adopting new technologies" in the global south. The solution is simple: the 
creation of "rule-based and predictable regulatory systems" that can "bring 
technology forward and foster innovation." In other words, resistance to the 
industry's products must be brought to heel.

In Vilsack's Commodity Classic speech, he hewed close to the industry party 
line, defying the emerging consensus exemplified by the latest FAO report. 
Taken as a whole, the Obama administration's ag policy has from the start 
been wildly inconsistant, sometimes veering in the direction of progressive 
change, other times lurching back toward the agrichemical status quo. 
Meanwhile, the US style of input-intensive commodity agriculture has 
succeeded in creating mountains of cheap food, but has has given rise to a 
massive crisis in diet-related disease, contributes mightily to climate 
change, and routinely trashes the ecosytems it touches. In short, it's a 
system badly in need of reform, not one that needs be exported to other 
nations.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his 
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