The so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter half of the 20th century, in which yield-per-acre in industrial agriculture increased by orders of magnitude due to the use of improved technology and intensive fertilization, coupled with the use of herbicides to reduce weed competition and pesticides (including genetic modifications in crops to allow them to produce their own pesticides) to reduce insect depredation, all in the name of improving crop yields in order to “feed a starving world”… it’s all based on a lie.
There is a fundamental problem with the idea that we can increase food production to match population growth,
and it is an obvious problem, one which a simple look at two graphs can tell you is at the core of a whole host of global ills – first, a chart of who experiences the most food stress, and next a chart of who imports the most food.
Yes, the amount of food being produced is now greater than it ever has been before, that much is true. But even before you begin to calculate the nearly incalculable damage that these methods have done (and are continuing to do) to our environment, we really ought to face the fundamental fact that all that extra food is going directly to wealthy people and making them fat. Virtually none of that extra production is feeding the people who are actually dealing with food security issues.
Between 1961 and 1999, food exports globally increased by over 400%; much of that increase has come in the form of diets becoming westernized in most of Asia – the fastest growing businesses in the Pacific Rim are franchised fast food restaurants like Domino’s and McDonald’s, which to their credit do a fairly good job of localizing their menus in their new locations, but… an island nation like Indonesia is not exactly a great place to grow wheat. As a consequence, all that flour for all those hamburger buns and pizza crusts comes from somewhere else.
The same dynamic is playing out in pretty much every country on earth where trends toward modernization and urbanization are drawing people out of the countryside and into cities that are increasingly homogenous in form and function.
There is a temptation to say, well, it’s working in Asia, and if you look at the map of underfed persons, Africa seems to be the only real problem child, so let’s just export Big Macs to Ethiopia and presto! Problem solved!
Apart from the fact that Ethiopian Big Macs would need to be halāl (Arabic “حلال “ or English “permissible”), and producing that much halāl meat is not really possible using modern factory-farming methods (animal cruelty is harām – “forbidden” – in Islam, so if the cow came from a slaughterhouse, a Muslim cannot eat it), there is also the very real problem that cattle production on the kind of scale necessary to let everyone in the world eat beef with the same wanton, hedonistic abandon as Americans do would require the use of more freshwater than the world has available. Raising more cattle in Ethiopia than is done at present would leave no fresh water for other purposes. It simply isn’t an option.
Even as an export… the only places in the world with sufficient freshwater for an increase in cattle production are not amenable to the industry – Lake Baikal in Siberia has 20% of the world’s freshwater. It is also so remote and cold that unless you are either Siberian or Mongolian (or a geography geek), you’ve undoubtedly never heard of it.
The current model of feeding the world, in short, is haphazard and doesn’t work. Numerous organizations recognize this problem and are leading efforts to reconceptualize how we approach issues of food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has over the years evolved a framework for discussing food security, and their work has been adapted by many other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous others.
In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that the “four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability.” Which brings us back to our initial premise – the “Green Revolution” methodology of throwing technology at the problem of food security is actually counterproductive, and tends over time to limit the availability, access, utilization and stability of food, particularly in the most food-stressed parts of the world. To take each pillar in turn:
Availability – Numerous complications make food unavailable under the current paradigm, most notably that technological advances tend not to make production cheaper, but rather only to make production more profitable. That is, advances in production techniques (better tractors, more powerful fertilizers, etc.) do, in fact, lead to higher yields, but they also require greater capital outlays, and (more to the point) incentivize producing food crops which will lead to a greater return on investment (ROI), not necessarily the same thing as producing crops which will be available for low cost to those who do not have enough to eat. Poor farmers can’t produce without technology, and rich farmers don’t produce for poor consumers.
Access – Much as with availability, the economics of increasing production also limit access. A prime example of this problem relates to rice production – the Asian economy has exploded over the past fifty years, with most of the world’s fastest growing local economies over that time period being in the region. And rice is still, today, the most important foodstuff in every Asian city. But because the economy has boomed for most, the price of rice has gone up for all. And so, this simple food most Americans take for granted – and think of as cheap – has become increasingly difficult for poor families to put on their tables at dinnertime. They have been priced out of the market – even when rice production is good (and that is not always a given thanks to pollution and global warming, both of which have wreaked havoc on rice crops in recent years), increasingly large percentages of the population simply have no access to this food staple.
Utilization –.Farmers down through history have almost never been concerned with whether or not the food they are producing is actually good for a human being to eat, and as a consequence, the marketplace is flooded with alleged food, things no one ought to ever put in their mouths, and including these poisonous calories right alongside nutritious items, and we pretend that this calculus is somehow healthy.
Increasingly all that improved agricultural production and all those food exports come in the form of high fructose corn syrup – that ridiculously sweet bottle of Coca-Cola started its life as somebody’s corn field. Maize may have been one of the “three sisters” that allowed the aboriginal Amerindians to thrive, but it has turned into an addictive toxin. It requires massive chemical intervention (in the form of fertilizer and pesticide) to grow, which poisons our waterways to the point of choking all the oxygen out of large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and does nothing to feed malnourished children in the Sudan. It sure has made a lot of folk exceptionally fat everywhere from Miami Beach to Seattle, Washington, though.
So, what’s the answer? Advocates of the Green Revolution (notably Texas A&M’s own Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug) tend to discount advocates of organic farming:
What is needed is a shift not just in production methods, but in production philosophy.
Which brings us to the fourth pillar…
Stability – Change is the only constant. One of the strengths of a global economy, of course, is the idea that when there is a shortage in one region, it may be supplemented by imports from another region. In practice, however, this kind of balancing of temporary shortages is not what the global food economy tends to implement. Instead, food exports are planned in advance and tend to take advantage of the most profitable redistributions of agricultural goods, not the most needed redistributions. That is, wheat or corn farmers will export their grain to the country that pays the most, not the one that is the hungriest. As such, the increasing weather variability brought on by anthropogenic climate change will hit the poorest people in the world harder than it will hit anyone else – slight changes to crop conditions will lead to increasing starvation wherever people are depending on vulnerable supply chains.
The answer, then, is to decrease the vulnerability of supply chains. And there are two ways to strengthen a chain: 1) increase the strength of the material being used to make the links – this is the “Green Revolution” approach, increasing yield-per-acre on the lands being used for agriculture; or 2) shorten the chain – this is the approach we recommend.
“Not everyone can grow their own food,” goes the argument from the Green Revolutionists. Poppycock, we say. It is true that not everyone can put together a backyard microfarm, owing in great measure to the fact that not everyone has a backyard. However, we have written before about the apartment porch hanging-potato-sack gardens of Nairobi, and spoken at great length about the guerilla gardeners throughout the world who will grow a stand of amaranth or a row of squash in any vacant lot, alleyway, or unused public right-of-way.
The shortest farm-to-table food supply chain is the one that requires nothing more than opening your back door and picking your salad.
Rather than trying to expand industrial farming techniques to all corners of the Earth in an attempt to turn every developing country into Kansas (which, by the way, is going to increasingly be unfarmable in coming decades, thanks to the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, so Kansas will itself be “food poor” under the current model before too terribly long), we ought to be figuring out the best possible way to turn every porch, kitchen window, alleyway, rooftop and vacant lot in the world into a community garden.
As for the argument that we ought to focus on crop yields… well, fine. It is easier, though, to fertilize a container garden than it is to fertilize a 100 acre farm. And there’s no runoff to worry about.
Ultimately, food security is only one small part of an overall feeling of security which impoverished persons will never find satisfactorily addressed by anything other than economic self-sufficiency. Relying on an international economy which not only does not put their faces or names to the issues at hand, but does not care one way or the other, is not an approach we ought to ask the people of Botswana, or Turkmenistan, or East Saint Louis, to just trust us on.
There is a strong impulse to call access to food, shelter, clothing, employment and health care and the like a “right” – we don’t quite go that far, but neither do we dismiss such arguments out of hand. Regardless of how such fundamental human needs are categorized, the simple truth is that no one can be considered “free” who is, through no fault of their own, unable to meet those needs. And the fastest route, the surest means, of personal security is having the means of meeting those needs for oneself and one’s family in one’s own control.
Subsistence agriculture has, for as long as the field of economics has existed, been an epithet, the marker of uncivilized humans. It is time for that to change. Not only should we be teaching people suffering from extreme food security crises how to be the best subsistence farmers they can be… we in the developed world ought to be doing the same thing. The less we rely on that incredibly long (and incredibly vulnerable) international food chain, the more truly free we shall become.
Something to think about? We hope so.
Happy farming!
There is a fundamental problem with the idea that we can increase food production to match population growth,
 |
| Most of the world's extreme food security issues are in Africa.... |
Yes, the amount of food being produced is now greater than it ever has been before, that much is true. But even before you begin to calculate the nearly incalculable damage that these methods have done (and are continuing to do) to our environment, we really ought to face the fundamental fact that all that extra food is going directly to wealthy people and making them fat. Virtually none of that extra production is feeding the people who are actually dealing with food security issues.
 |
| Virtually none of the world's chief food importers overlap with food security issues |
Between 1961 and 1999, food exports globally increased by over 400%; much of that increase has come in the form of diets becoming westernized in most of Asia – the fastest growing businesses in the Pacific Rim are franchised fast food restaurants like Domino’s and McDonald’s, which to their credit do a fairly good job of localizing their menus in their new locations, but… an island nation like Indonesia is not exactly a great place to grow wheat. As a consequence, all that flour for all those hamburger buns and pizza crusts comes from somewhere else.
The same dynamic is playing out in pretty much every country on earth where trends toward modernization and urbanization are drawing people out of the countryside and into cities that are increasingly homogenous in form and function.
There is a temptation to say, well, it’s working in Asia, and if you look at the map of underfed persons, Africa seems to be the only real problem child, so let’s just export Big Macs to Ethiopia and presto! Problem solved!
Apart from the fact that Ethiopian Big Macs would need to be halāl (Arabic “حلال “ or English “permissible”), and producing that much halāl meat is not really possible using modern factory-farming methods (animal cruelty is harām – “forbidden” – in Islam, so if the cow came from a slaughterhouse, a Muslim cannot eat it), there is also the very real problem that cattle production on the kind of scale necessary to let everyone in the world eat beef with the same wanton, hedonistic abandon as Americans do would require the use of more freshwater than the world has available. Raising more cattle in Ethiopia than is done at present would leave no fresh water for other purposes. It simply isn’t an option.
Even as an export… the only places in the world with sufficient freshwater for an increase in cattle production are not amenable to the industry – Lake Baikal in Siberia has 20% of the world’s freshwater. It is also so remote and cold that unless you are either Siberian or Mongolian (or a geography geek), you’ve undoubtedly never heard of it.
The current model of feeding the world, in short, is haphazard and doesn’t work. Numerous organizations recognize this problem and are leading efforts to reconceptualize how we approach issues of food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has over the years evolved a framework for discussing food security, and their work has been adapted by many other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous others.
In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that the “four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability.” Which brings us back to our initial premise – the “Green Revolution” methodology of throwing technology at the problem of food security is actually counterproductive, and tends over time to limit the availability, access, utilization and stability of food, particularly in the most food-stressed parts of the world. To take each pillar in turn:
Availability – Numerous complications make food unavailable under the current paradigm, most notably that technological advances tend not to make production cheaper, but rather only to make production more profitable. That is, advances in production techniques (better tractors, more powerful fertilizers, etc.) do, in fact, lead to higher yields, but they also require greater capital outlays, and (more to the point) incentivize producing food crops which will lead to a greater return on investment (ROI), not necessarily the same thing as producing crops which will be available for low cost to those who do not have enough to eat. Poor farmers can’t produce without technology, and rich farmers don’t produce for poor consumers.
Access – Much as with availability, the economics of increasing production also limit access. A prime example of this problem relates to rice production – the Asian economy has exploded over the past fifty years, with most of the world’s fastest growing local economies over that time period being in the region. And rice is still, today, the most important foodstuff in every Asian city. But because the economy has boomed for most, the price of rice has gone up for all. And so, this simple food most Americans take for granted – and think of as cheap – has become increasingly difficult for poor families to put on their tables at dinnertime. They have been priced out of the market – even when rice production is good (and that is not always a given thanks to pollution and global warming, both of which have wreaked havoc on rice crops in recent years), increasingly large percentages of the population simply have no access to this food staple.
Utilization –.Farmers down through history have almost never been concerned with whether or not the food they are producing is actually good for a human being to eat, and as a consequence, the marketplace is flooded with alleged food, things no one ought to ever put in their mouths, and including these poisonous calories right alongside nutritious items, and we pretend that this calculus is somehow healthy.
 |
| Any urban space can replace a farm... if enough of them are used |
Increasingly all that improved agricultural production and all those food exports come in the form of high fructose corn syrup – that ridiculously sweet bottle of Coca-Cola started its life as somebody’s corn field. Maize may have been one of the “three sisters” that allowed the aboriginal Amerindians to thrive, but it has turned into an addictive toxin. It requires massive chemical intervention (in the form of fertilizer and pesticide) to grow, which poisons our waterways to the point of choking all the oxygen out of large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and does nothing to feed malnourished children in the Sudan. It sure has made a lot of folk exceptionally fat everywhere from Miami Beach to Seattle, Washington, though.
So, what’s the answer? Advocates of the Green Revolution (notably Texas A&M’s own Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug) tend to discount advocates of organic farming:
"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"The problem is, in advocating intensive monoculture factory farming, Borlaug and others threw the baby out with the bathwater. Sustainable agriculture on the scale previously practiced could not, it is true, keep pace with population growth and urbanization. But, long term, neither can a chemically oriented system of factory farming dependent upon ever increasing yields. Eventually, soil which requires continual fertilizing, and tilling, and irrigation becomes played out. Depending on increasing yields will eventually cause the whole system to break down catastrophically.
What is needed is a shift not just in production methods, but in production philosophy.
Which brings us to the fourth pillar…
Stability – Change is the only constant. One of the strengths of a global economy, of course, is the idea that when there is a shortage in one region, it may be supplemented by imports from another region. In practice, however, this kind of balancing of temporary shortages is not what the global food economy tends to implement. Instead, food exports are planned in advance and tend to take advantage of the most profitable redistributions of agricultural goods, not the most needed redistributions. That is, wheat or corn farmers will export their grain to the country that pays the most, not the one that is the hungriest. As such, the increasing weather variability brought on by anthropogenic climate change will hit the poorest people in the world harder than it will hit anyone else – slight changes to crop conditions will lead to increasing starvation wherever people are depending on vulnerable supply chains.
The answer, then, is to decrease the vulnerability of supply chains. And there are two ways to strengthen a chain: 1) increase the strength of the material being used to make the links – this is the “Green Revolution” approach, increasing yield-per-acre on the lands being used for agriculture; or 2) shorten the chain – this is the approach we recommend.
 |
| Potato sacks on an apartment balcony |
“Not everyone can grow their own food,” goes the argument from the Green Revolutionists. Poppycock, we say. It is true that not everyone can put together a backyard microfarm, owing in great measure to the fact that not everyone has a backyard. However, we have written before about the apartment porch hanging-potato-sack gardens of Nairobi, and spoken at great length about the guerilla gardeners throughout the world who will grow a stand of amaranth or a row of squash in any vacant lot, alleyway, or unused public right-of-way.
The shortest farm-to-table food supply chain is the one that requires nothing more than opening your back door and picking your salad.
Rather than trying to expand industrial farming techniques to all corners of the Earth in an attempt to turn every developing country into Kansas (which, by the way, is going to increasingly be unfarmable in coming decades, thanks to the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, so Kansas will itself be “food poor” under the current model before too terribly long), we ought to be figuring out the best possible way to turn every porch, kitchen window, alleyway, rooftop and vacant lot in the world into a community garden.
As for the argument that we ought to focus on crop yields… well, fine. It is easier, though, to fertilize a container garden than it is to fertilize a 100 acre farm. And there’s no runoff to worry about.
 |
| Potato sacks on a patio wall |
Ultimately, food security is only one small part of an overall feeling of security which impoverished persons will never find satisfactorily addressed by anything other than economic self-sufficiency. Relying on an international economy which not only does not put their faces or names to the issues at hand, but does not care one way or the other, is not an approach we ought to ask the people of Botswana, or Turkmenistan, or East Saint Louis, to just trust us on.
There is a strong impulse to call access to food, shelter, clothing, employment and health care and the like a “right” – we don’t quite go that far, but neither do we dismiss such arguments out of hand. Regardless of how such fundamental human needs are categorized, the simple truth is that no one can be considered “free” who is, through no fault of their own, unable to meet those needs. And the fastest route, the surest means, of personal security is having the means of meeting those needs for oneself and one’s family in one’s own control.
Subsistence agriculture has, for as long as the field of economics has existed, been an epithet, the marker of uncivilized humans. It is time for that to change. Not only should we be teaching people suffering from extreme food security crises how to be the best subsistence farmers they can be… we in the developed world ought to be doing the same thing. The less we rely on that incredibly long (and incredibly vulnerable) international food chain, the more truly free we shall become.
Something to think about? We hope so.
Happy farming!
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