Colin Tudge is often in the vicinity of agricultural wisdom but always succeeds in escaping contact. This article is a classic example.

...we have a mantra embraced by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, and the US and British governments: "Agriculture is a business like any other." This dogma is leading the world in totally the wrong directions - and within it, GM crops have become key players...

For agriculture qua business must seek to maximise profit. So it must maximise turnover and output. Scientists and politicians claim this must be good - for there still are famines, and the world population is set to increase by 50% to around 9 billion by 2050.

But the recent famines have rarely resulted from inability to produce food. Almost always you find civil war in the background, corruption, or - as in the Ireland of the 1840s or recently in Argentina - starvation in the midst of plenteous crops that are earmarked for export. In the short term, more production leads to glut - and so world prices for coffee have dropped by nearly 70% in the past five years. The world population is indeed rising but (says the UN) it will stabilise by 2050 and no frenetic increase in food is required. Besides, by then the world's livestock will be consuming enough grain to feed 4 billion people. If we ate less meat we could feed ourselves easily. All that's needed is traditional cuisines, which use meat sparingly. But the business dogma requires ever more livestock because that is where the profit lies.

He starts well by citing the central problem of modern agribusiness - the mistaken view embraced by governments, banks, corporations and international bodies that production of food and fiber is just another business, another sort of widget manufacturing. It is a business, but isn't like others. But then Tudge gets lost. The reason recent famines have rarely resulted from inability to produce food is that the green revolution happened. Wars and politics cause famines too, but without the technological advances of the past few decades famine would have been widespread.

While it is true that excess production lowers prices, and coffee is a good example, that doesn't mean that production increase is not needed. Food production must double by 2050 to feed those extra 3 billion expected humans and the 1 billion food insecure humans we already have.

It isn't only more food that is needed, it is better food. Some of the poor aren't actually starving, they have adequate calories to keep them alive, but they don't have adequate nutrition for organ development. Their brains and eyes are notable victims of their mostly grain diets. There are no animals that can live long, healthy lives on a grain diet. It even harms livestock but they live short lives and are slaughtered before the cumulative insults of a grain diet become an economic problem. Birds and hogs are less than 1 year old at slaughter - cattle less than 2 years - and don't need to see well or have good bones and brains, and the havoc in their blood chemistry and immune systems can be medicated for their brief lives while still turning a profit.

It may be that the rich would do well to eat less, but the poor need to eat more - especially meat and dairy. The first thing a poor person buys when they get a little money is fat and the second thing they buy is meat. Their diets are deficient in both fats and protein - as well as the vitamins available in them - which screws up the metabolism of oil soluble vitamins. The health and well being of the environment, livestock, and people would improve if pastured meat and dairy products were added to the diets of the poor as well as the rich.

The world as a whole needs to remain primarily agrarian - but if agriculture is just a business, then the fewer on the land, the better.

Primarily agrarian? What an insane objective. Why would we want 3 billion people producing food and fiber for 6 billion? Don't we need doctors, teachers and comedians? Should the poor be kept too poor for such extravagance?

So what is the actual role of GM crops as things are? They can increase yield. They can help to reduce labour even more. Pest-resistant GM crops make mass uniform production possible. This may improve on the now "conventional" dousing in industrial chemicals, but is nothing like as good in principle as traditional husbandry, in which pests are contained by mixed cropping and rotation. So high-tech is not used to abet good husbandry but to make bad practice possible. That is more profitable.

The mythical "good husbandry" of traditional agriculture has destroyed environments and the civilizations that depend on them for eons. As Wes Jackson tells it:

The Greek landscape has been subject to episodes of deforestation and soil erosion for 8000 years. History tells us that the ancient Greeks considered themselves careful stewards of the land, people who felt guided by their gods and goddesses in this endeavor. Even so, those early Greeks and their gods, like essentially all agricultural civilizations, failed to hold the top soil (Runnels, 1995). The recent archaeological evidence of soil erosion in ancient Greece due to agriculture is now well documented. The story begins with the farmers who first settled Greece when the landscape was pristine. But archaeological investigations of ancient ecosystems using soils and fossil pollen along with human relics and artifacts reveal that: when hill slopes lose their soil, people move; when usable soils reform thousands of years later, people return to farm (Runnels, 1997, emphasis added). This is no surprise for here is where both Plato and Aristotle witnessed first hand land degradation and its consequences. Plato, in one of his dialogues, has Critias proclaim: "what now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man, with all the fat and soft earth having wasted away and only the bare framework remaining. Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in the loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true."

Not all erosion is human made of course. There was erosion during the last ice age due to climate changes. The past 5,000 years, however, is another story. Four episodes of erosion — at about 2500 BC, 350-50 BC, 950-1450 AD and in recent times — according to Professor Curtis N. Runnels "was followed by a period of stability when substantial soil profiles formed" (1995). The researchers "place the chief blame on the activities of the local inhabitants" citing "the correlation between the periods of erosion and the periods of intense human settlement, and the formation of soil during the periods when the human impact was minimal. ... Soil erosion on a similar scale has been reported from other parts of Greece — the northern provinces of Macedonia and Thessaly and the islands of Euboea in the center of the country and of Crete in the south. The episodes date from as early as the sixth millennium BC and continue through virtually every historical era to the present day."

The chief benefit of current GM crops is that they reduce tillage. Seed can be drilled right through the stubble of last year's crop with no plowing because they are tolerant of the herbicides that are used to kill weeds. No cultivation after planting is needed either. The soil is undisturbed so it doesn't erode and can provide habitat for a diverse community of soil dwelling creatures - everything from fungi to beetles - a more nearly balanced and complete ecosystem than is otherwise possible. CO2 and methane that are otherwise emitted by the ton by plowing remains sequestered in the soil where it increases fertility and tilth rather than atmospheric degradation.

If the world as a whole embraces GM crops, then all agriculture will be controlled by a few high-tech companies and the governments to which they are loosely answerable. All hope of autonomy is wiped out at a stroke. This is already happening.

A radical rethink is needed in all agriculture: social, economic, political, scientific, technical. When the thinking has been done, the world may find roles for GM crops. Until then, they must be resisted.

Rubbish. Small farmers will be the chief beneficiaries of GM crops. The value of their labor is increased since the extra yields have more value than the cost of inputs. Where developing world farmers have been given a chance to grow them - over the objections of ignorant, superstitious obstructionists - they have prospered and been able to hold on to family farms that might otherwise have been abandoned and consolidated into larger businesses.

See this old post for more on all these subjects - grain, livestock and GMOs.

» Idiot Wind from Crumb Trail
In the mood for an ag rant? See Tudge Mudge at M&M. Colin Tudge is often in the vicinity of agricultural wisdom but always succeeds in escaping contact...He starts well by citing the central problem of modern agribusiness - the mistaken view embraced ......[read more]
Tracked: May 13, 2004 01:24 AM