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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Big Ag Won't Feed the World — By Tom Philpott
  • Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:22:06 -0600


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
stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott's
RSS feed.




  • [Livingontheland] Big Ag Won't Feed the World — By Tom Philpott, Tradingpost, 06/25/2011

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