WEDNESDAY, JAN 25, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Module 3-6
The industrialization of agriculture
The production of food by human societies has gone through many changes over the centuries, from hunting and gathering through locally based systems of agriculture and finally to industrial agriculture. All these stages can still be seen on Earth today but as a generalisation it can be said that the countries that industrialised in the nineteenth century now have a predominantly industrial style of agriculture, whereas the so called “two-thirds world” typically has areas of industrial agriculture, often foreign owned, in a matrix of locally based human scale agriculture. We can characterise the differences between these systems by looking at the various elements involved in the process of food production: land, energy, inputs, people, trade and food itself.
Industrial agriculture delivers larger yields in terms of crops and animal products than under any previous farming system. However, this is coming at a heavy price. Chemical fertilisers are reducing the fertility of the soil and polluting rivers, lakes and the ocean through run-off. There are significant levels of chemical poisoning among farm workers, especially in parts of the world where there are insufficient standards and safeguards. Industrial agriculture uses far more water than traditional farming methods. This both depletes ground water and aquifer reserves and deprives small-scale farmers, local people and other species access to water.
Industrial agriculture also poses a serious threat to biodiversity. This is both because the supermarkets that now deliver food to most people in the industrialised countries of the North have an interest in selling a relatively small range of cultivars of each foodstuff (cereals, beans, vegetables, etc.) in large quantities and because monoculture plantations are poor habitats for the endemic plant and animal life that thrives in small-scale, diverse farms. Genetically modified (GM) varieties of crops now present in many countries also bring with it significant dangers to genetic stock of traditional varieties as well as currently largely unquantified dangers to human health. You can find more information about this issue on the Institute for Science in Society website.
In addition, industrial agriculture replaces people with machines, requiring less people on the land, which in turn effects rural communities. Government subsidies are available for farmers in the USA and the European Union, enabling their farmers to out-compete farmers in poorer countries (we will return to this in the Economic Dimension). This has serious consequences for the rural economies and societies in the two-thirds world. Large corporations control the distribution of seeds and other inputs as well as the growing of many crops. One significant consequence of this is that where previously people had an intimate and meaningful connection with the food they ate, today for many it has become a commodity like any other.
Read more here: https://www.eitfood.eu/blog/post/can-regenerative-agriculture-replace-conventional-farming
Finally, and perhaps of most urgent concern, industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on easy access to cheap fossil fuels, which is unsustainable. The high level of efficiency claimed for industrial agriculture does not take into account whole systems costs. More energy is required to produce food by industrial compared with organic methods. In Britain, organic agriculture has about 50% of the carbon footprint of its conventional equivalent.
Meanwhile, in contrast to industrial agriculture, there are many movements which have stood against this system and attempted to justify the environmental and socio-economic benefits of sustainable systems of agriculture. For example, GRAIN is an international non-governmental organisation which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge (see Table 2.5). Another example is, La via Campensina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers.
[The victors write history. For an alternative view of reality: "'Potatoes Made of Oil': Eugene and Howard Odum and the Origins and Limits of American Agroecology." I asked systems ecologist Charles A.S. Hall to verify the historian's history, and he had no quibbles worth mentioning.]
Module 3, lesson 7
