The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture

[JohnyCanuck]

The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture
By John Ikerd

On food safety, a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study reviewed dozens of studies linking routine feeding of antibiotics in concentrated livestock operations to people being infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. “Use of antibiotics in food-producing animals allows antibiotic-resistant bacteria to thrive,” they concluded. “Resistant bacteria can be transmitted from food-producing animals to humans through the food supply.” The big agricultural corporations claim that they are committed to the humane treatment of animals—while advocating legislation to criminalize unauthorized photography in concentrated animal feeding operations. Numerous scientific studies over the past 50 years have documented inhumane treatment in these “animal factories.” The mistreatment is not only a result of inevitable overcrowding in confinement operations, but also results from routine management practices, transportation, and even in the genetic selection of animals for maximum productivity.

The Food Dialogues campaign claims to advocate consumer choice by supporting all types of farming. However, its language strongly suggests that industrial agriculture is essential to keeping food affordable. It considers organic agriculture and other sustainable faming alternatives to be no more than “niche markets.” In reality, the only clear “benefit” of industrial agriculture is that it requires fewer farmers. There is no indication that industrial agriculture has produced more food than could have been produced with more sustainable methods, only that it has employed far fewer farmers. Any production-cost advantage has been more than offset by higher margins, including profits, elsewhere within the corporate food supply chain. Over the past 20 years, an era of intensive agricultural industrialization, U.S. retail food prices have risen faster than overall inflation rates.

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In economic terms, industrialization allows capital and technology to be substituted for workers and managers. In other words, it allows raw materials or natural resources to be transformed into more valuable products while employing fewer, lower-skilled workers—in both labor and management positions. In a world with an abundance of natural resources and a scarcity of workers, industrialization seemed a logical strategy for economic development. With increases in populations and depletion of natural resources, the economic benefits of industrialization have declined while the negative consequences for unemployment and envi-ronmental degradation have grown.

For agriculture, the benefits of industrialization have been fewer and the costs have been greater. The reality of agriculture is in conflict with the worldview that supports industrialization. Industrialization is rooted in a mechanistic worldview: the industrial world works like a big, complex machine that can be manipulated by humans to extract natural resources and use them to meet our needs and wants. In reality, the world is an extremely complex living ecosystem, of which we humans are a part. Our well-being ultimately depends on working and living in harmony with nature rather than conquering nature. We are currently seeing the disastrous consequences of treating living ecosystems as if they were inanimate mechanisms.


JOHN IKERD is professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of several books, including The Essentials of Economic Sustainability (Kumarian Press, 2012).

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/0315ikerd.html

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Biodiversity or GMOs: Will The Future of Nutrition Be in Women's Hands or Under Corporate Control?

Biodiversity or GMOs: Will The Future of Nutrition Be in Women's Hands or Under Corporate Control?


Declaration for International Women's Day, 8 March 2015

Diverse Women for Diversity, Mahila Anna Swaraj, Initiative for Health, Equity and Society, Navdanya, Moms Across the World

Dr Vandana Shiva and Dr Mira Shiva

Please circulate widely and repost, but you must give the URL of the original and preserve all the links back to articles on our website.


Women have been the primary growers of food and nutrition throughout history, but today, food is being taken out of our hands and substituted for toxic commodities controlled by global corporations. Monoculture industrial farming has taken the quality, taste and nutrition out of our food. As a result, India is facing a nutritional crisis: every fourth Indian goes hungry, and in 2011 alone, diabetes took the lives of 1 million Indians.

Now, the same companies who created the crisis are promising a miracle solution: GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Genetically engineered Golden Rice and GMO Bananas are being falsely promoted by corporations hiding behind the cloak of academia as a solution to hunger and malnutrition in the Global South. Indigenous biodiverse varieties of food grown by women provide far more nutrition than the commodities produced by industrial agriculture. Golden Rice is 350% less efficient in providing vitamin A than the biodiversity alternatives that women grow. GMO ‘iron-rich’ Bananas have 3 000% less iron than turmeric and 2 000 % less iron than amchur (mango powder). Apart from being nutritionally empty, GMOs are part of an industrial system of agriculture that is destroying the planet, depleting our water sources, increasing greenhouse gases, and driving farmers into debt and suicide through a greater dependence on chemical inputs. Moreover, these corporate-led industrial monocultures are destroying biodiversity, and we are losing access to the food systems that have sustained us for millennia. When we consider the number of patents involved in these initiatives, it becomes all too clear that the only beneficiaries of these supposedly ‘people-led’ ventures are large companies operating for profit, not for people.

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How industrial farming robs food of its nutrition

First, industrial breeding is based on uniformity, long distance transport, and industrial processing. In comparison, food grown by women – who have been the primary seed breeders and producers of food – is based on diversity, taste, nutrition, quality and resilience. Traditional Indian wheats like kathia, bansi, and mishri are full of taste and nutrition. Industrially-bred wheats, on the other hand, are low in nutrients and have contributed to the epidemic of gluten intolerance.

Second, by replacing biodiversity with monocultures, industrial agriculture reduces the amount of nutrition per acre. With diversity we can grow enough iron for 20 Indias, and enough vitamin A for all of India today.

Third, by substituting the sophisticated ecological processes of renewing fertility with chemical inputs of synthetic fertilisers, the health of the soil is destroyed, nutrition in soils is reduced, and plants, which provide our food become nutritionally empty (see Table 1)

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More at:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Biodiversity_or_GMOs.php