Farming and Feeding the World
I saw my friend Danielle Nierenberg only a couple of times in the past year during her brief visits to the U.S. from Africa, where she has been traveling to document innovations that “Nourish the Planet” for the 2011 edition of State of the World. A colleague at my former organization, the Worldwatch Institute, Danielle has always inspired me with her commitment to sustainability and, in her words, “food systems that help people”. As global food prices continue to rise thanks volatile commodity markets, and, as Tom Philpott at Grist notes, “For the second time in three years, the globe is lurching toward a full-on, proper food crisis,” food systems that help people are more important than ever.
The recently released State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet (N.B.: our own Brother Dave Andrews served as an adviser for the project) takes a critical view of industrial technologies—despite funding from the pro-technology Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Agriculture has come to a crossroads,” writes Danielle and project co-director Brian Halweil. “Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution, a major share of the human family is still chronically hungry.” Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, puts it more bluntly in the foreword: “We live in a world in which we produce more food than ever before and in which the hungry have never been so many.”
Nearly a billion people suffer from malnutrition globally. Ironically, many of them are farmers. Boosting rural economies and massively scaling up some of the small-scale innovations Danielle documents — such as rainwater harvesting, improved food storage techniques, and farming in ways that enhance, not deplete the soil — could “change the entire global food system,” according to the book.
Nearly a billion people suffer from malnutrition globally. Ironically, many of them are farmers.
• In order to feed future generations, farming must reinforce conservation goals by adding diversity to the food chain and healing ecosystems.
• American “foodies”—those “who are flocking to farmers’ markets and pushing agribusiness away from feedlots”—may emerge as new lobbying allies in matters of international hunger policy.
• Policymakers must think beyond seeds. The historical focus on seeds is no surprise, since they are “elegant vessels for delivering new technology to a farm,” and companies have found ways to profit from them. (Think genetically engineered seeds.) But few companies have found profit in rebuilding ecosystems.
• The new reality of agricultural investment? In 1986, 54 percent of the $3.3 billion the U.S. invested in agriculture came from the public sector compared to 46 percent from the private sector. Today, in contrast, agribusiness firms, primarily seed and agrochemical companies, are responsible for 72 percent of agricultural investments.
In the early 80s, when I was in elementary school watching footage of the Ethiopian famine in school and contemplating with horror what it would be like to go hungry, agriculture’s share of global development aid was 16 percent.
Today, it is a meager 4 percent.
Not only is agricultural aid diminishing, it’s skewed towards industrial technologies like “improved” seeds and fossil-fuel intensive fertilizers that hold the promise of profit — not necessarily a demonstrated track record of diminishing the share of those that go hungry, which continues to rise, or protecting essential resources like water or ecosystems.
As Samuel Fromartz, a contributor to State of the World, wrote on a recent blog for The Atlantic, “It was clear from even my short stay in Zambia that a lack of agro-technology was not the most pressing issue faced by the nation’s farmers.”
We need to invest in agriculture, but more specifically, we need to invest in rural communities and farmers themselves — whether in Dubuque or Dakar. And more than “shopping our way out of it,” we need to mobilize politically to lobby policymakers to shape a food system that does this. Check our evolving U.S. farm bill campaign as one way to get started.
For our research on commodity markets and the global food crisis, check out Casino of Hunger and What’s Behind the Food Crisis.
-Darcey Rakestraw
As a nation we have many issues that face us as citizens. One of them that is sistainable farming. In my belief, we need to stop companies like Monsato that think that Genetically Egineered food is nessisary. They are wrong, and too powerful. And above all they choose greed over the wellfare of our planet and the people in it. We need to stop the use of pestisides, and make oragnic and local foods more acceible to everyone.
The production of wheat and alfalfa in this country mainly goes toward slaughter houses and animal farms. These farms are not only unhealthy to the animals. Inturn it makes them unhealthy to the people that eat the animals. People need to be educated and know where there meat comes from and how it is raised and treated (antibiotically). We see the effects of this in the sick and dieing in this nation. And in birth defects and disabilities around the globe. We need to start educating people and press the fact that this is so important to each and every one of us. We need to take responsibility for our health and the health of our planet.
The cruelty that goes on in slaughter houses is an issue all of it’s own. It’s heartbreaking to me that people can treat animals with such disrespect and still gorge on the meat that they give there life for to feed us. Not to mention it’s a myth that the body exstract more protein from meat than from things like kale. Which is live and 49% protein, that our body has a much easier time exstracting. Not to mention the dead energy that people are consuming. Call me crazy but it does have a negative effect on the body, it’s called Colon Cancer.
We as a whole nation need to face the facts and take responsibility for the outsome of our world. But there is a positive in all of this, it’s called CHANGE. That we as a nation united can harness and put into effect. Stop allowing companies to patent nature. Our laws need to updated and made to stop the coruption, and greed in this country. Educate people of sustainable energies (hemp) and farming, includeing the production of meat. It’s might be more time consuming and more money. But if this can become the way of life people will always adapt to that way of life. It’s not just healthy and good for the planet. It is nessisary for the future generations to live. People need to stop living in such fear, because the people that are teaching you to fear seem like there on your side. But it’s these companies that you should be scared of. They preach lies and prey on the weak minded for controll.
It’s time to wake up America and take the power back. Break free of the chains of fear. And join in the world and poeple that live their outside of limitations. We The Poeple, CAN make this nation and the world great. It’s time to take action!
Very well said.
I’m petrified going grocery shopping, always doubting what the labels say. And here I am a mother of two little girls trying to feed them right. Can’t bare the thought that cancer may claim one of our lives, thanks to all of the different NEW ways of producing food.
I garden and recycle and will do all it takes for my girls to know and choose better. Scary world we live in.