=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #434
—March 23, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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THE PESTICIDE OPPORTUNITY
Worldwide, food production has gone through three stages, and
last year it entered a fourth. Since the emergence of our
species, HOMO SAPIENS, roughly 100,000 years ago, [1]humans have
hunted and gathered what nature produced. A handful of human
communities still live this way today. About 10,000 years ago,
people began to plant seeds and cultivate crops on a local scale.
Most of the world is still at this stage. (Throughout the world,
there are 3.1 billion people, out of 5.4 billion, or 57%, still
living in the countryside. [2]) About 150 years ago, in some
parts of the world, farmers began to use large machines (for
example, the McCormick reaper, invented in 1831). During the past
50 years the industrial trend accelerated with the introduction
of chemical technology (fertilizers, pesticides, and growth
regulators).
A key idea underlying all industrial agriculture is the mind-set
that says, “The best measure of success in farming is crop-yield
per agricultural worker.” [3] By this narrow measure, industrial
agriculture has been a success.
During the past 40 years, industrial/chemical agriculture has
become known as the Green Revolution; industrial corporations and
government agencies (e.g., the World Bank) have made major
efforts to promote the Green Revolution world-wide. Despite such
efforts, the Green Revolution has met with only limited success
(discussed below). Nevertheless, chemical corporations are now
trying to move the world into a fourth stage of agriculture,
which maintains the industrial mind-set as it adds yet-another
major technology: genetic engineering.
The introduction of rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) into
the American milk supply last year (see RHWN #381–#384) was the
chemical industry’s opening shot in a campaign to shift the
world’s farmers to genetic engineering. Some major corporations,
such as Monsanto of St. Louis, have committed their entire future
to convincing farmers to adopt genetic engineering. It was
Monsanto who introduced the synthetic hormone rBGH into our milk
last year and who is now promoting genetically-engineered crops
that are resistant to chemical herbicides. The theory is that
these genetically-engineered crops will be able to survive heavy
application of herbicides aimed at killing non-crop species
(weeds). Monsanto hopes to sell to farmers, worldwide, both the
genetically-engineered crop strains AND the herbicides, in hopes
that farmers will grow dependent upon such technologies and upon
the corporations that sell them.
However, even as industrial corporations tinker with the genetic
structure of crops and animals, there are countercurrents
developing. During the past 15 years, people have begun to ask
whether humanity took a wrong turn when we applied the industrial
mind-set to agriculture. For example, Indian physicist Vandana
Shiva says, “For more than 40 centuries Third World peasants,
often predominantly women, have innovated in agriculture. Crops
have crossed continents, crop varieties have been improved,
patterns of rotational and mixed cropping have been evolved to
match the needs of the crop community and the ecosystem. These
decentred [decentralized] innovations have been lasting and
sustainable. They stayed because they struck an ecological
balance. Peasants as experts, as plant breeders, as soil
scientists, as water managers, have kept the world fed all these
centuries.” Dr. Shiva goes on, “The worldwide destruction of the
feminine knowledge of agriculture, evolved over four to five
thousand years, by a handful of white male scientists in less
than two decades has not merely violated women as experts; since
their expertise in agriculture has been related to modelling
agriculture on nature’s methods of renewability, its destruction
has gone hand in hand with the ecological destruction of nature’s
processes and the economic destruction of the poorer people in
rural areas.” [4]
A different, though related, criticism of the Green Revolution
comes from Rutgers University biology professor David Ehrenfeld:
“The chemicals that are an inseparable part of the system are
highly toxic to farmers and their environments. It erodes and
wastes the soil even as it poisons it. It depletes scarce water
resources. It allows, even promotes, the extinction of countless
precious varieties of crops, the irreplaceable genetic heritage
of millennia of farming. And all these consequences, acting
together, have destroyed farm culture and farm communities and
have forced millions of knowledgeable farmers to abandon farming
and leave their land, in the rich and poor nations alike.” [5]
This last idea may be the most fundamental criticism of
industrial agriculture: that it destroys the fabric of both rural
AND urban societies.
In his eye-opening book, THE TRAP (a runaway best-seller in
France and England, but so far largely ignored in the U.S.), Sir
James Goldsmith, a member of the European Parliament, writes,
“When people leave the land, they gravitate to the cities in
search of work. But throughout the world there are not enough
urban jobs and the infrastructure –such as lodgings, schools,
hospitals, etc. –is already insufficient. The result is
increased unemployment, with the attendant costs of welfare, as
well as a need for substantial expenditure on infrastructure.
These are the indirect costs of intensive [industrial]
agriculture and they must be taken into account.
“There is also a deeper price…. loss of rural employment and
migration from the countryside to the cities causes a fundamental
and irreversible shift. It has contributed throughout the world
to the destabilization of rural society and to the growth of vast
urban concentrations. In the urban slums congregate uprooted
individuals whose families have been splintered, whose cultural
traditions have been extinguished and who have been reduced to
dependence on welfare from the state. They form an alienated
underclass. From the first world to the third, these huge
shantytowns have become tragic, moribund intumescences. The cost
of such social breakdown can never be measured. The damage is
too fundamental. Throughout the world social breakdown in the
mega-cities threatens the existence of free societies.” [6]
Think of the U.S., where the House of Representatives recently
voted to weaken Fourth Amendment guarantees against illegal
search-and-seizure; and voted to curb prisoners’ ancient right of
HABEAS CORPUS; and voted to spend another $10.5 billion building
new penitentiaries [7]at a time when the U.S. already has more
than one million of its citizens incarcerated; [8]and voted to
spend yet another $10.5 billion in “block grants” that local
authorities can use as they see fit to “fight crime.” Even as
the Congress is restricting liberty and spending vast sums to
“fight crime” no one believes that even these extreme measures
will do much good: the “crime problem” is expected to worsen
steadily because industrial farming has destroyed communities and
families, the mainstays of civilized life.
But, you ask, didn’t “the market” drive the family farmer out of
business because of “economies of scale” enjoyed by industrial
agriculture? No. As World Bank economist Herman Daly has shown,
“…on closer examination, it turns out that it is government
policy that has given the advantage to the larger farmers. Study
after study has shown that small family operations are in fact
more productive per acre. Though cash income may be small, they
can support a family. It is when they are drawn into increasing
their size or into excessive borrowing for ‘modernization’ that
they are sucked into the downward currents that lead to
bankruptcy.”
Daly continues: “The only measure by which the large farms are
better is that of productivity of labor… if productivity is
measured in other ways, such as production per acre or per unit
of energy or amount of capital input, it is the small farm that
always excels. It is federal policy that has destroyed family
farms in so much of the country, not any inherent weakness in the
family farm system. The cessation of federal interference is the
first requirement for the recovery of healthy rural life.” [9]
In the U.S., the public is not well-informed about government
programs that have destroyed rural communities and farm families.
But there is one aspect of industrial agriculture that the
public “gets.” The public is deeply disturbed about industrial
poisons in the food supply, namely pesticides. According to a
survey conducted by the federal Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) in 1989, fully 97% of the public is genuinely concerned
about pesticides contaminating their food. At the same time, the
public is losing faith in the ability of government to regulate
pesticides safely. Thirty years ago, in 1965, 98% of Americans
expressed confidence that government could regulate pesticides
safely; in 1987, the number expressing such confidence had
dropped to 46%. [10] A majority of Americans no longer believe
that the government can protect our food supply from the whims of
the industrial corporations that now dominate farming. But, in a
sense, this is GOOD news.
A concerned public is an essential part of any reform effort, and
often the hardest part to develop. The pesticide issue ALREADY
HAS THE PUBLIC’S ATTENTION. The scene is set for organized
citizens to develop the case for major reform of federal farm
policies, for curbing the appetites of the agrichemical
corporations, to revitalize rural life and culture, to offer
people a way out of the prison that urban life has become for so
many. Of course, neither the present Republican Congress nor the
Democratic Congresses before it, would consider such
people-oriented, common-sense solutions. As always, our first
step must be to get private money out of our elections, so more
serious, thoughtful people can afford to run for Congress.
Nevertheless, the ground is fertile now, and it is a good time
for us all to be sowing the seeds of change.
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
===============
[1] Human physical and cultural history is described
authoritatively in Bernard G. Campbell, HUMANKIND EMERGING 6th
edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
[6] Sir James Goldsmith, cited above, pgs. 103-104.
[7] FACTS ON FILE Vol. 55, No. 2831 (March 2, 1995), pgs. 148-149.
Descriptor terms: agriculture; farming; food; human history;
industrial agriculture; fertilizer; pesticides; growth
regulators; chemical industry; rbgh; bst; bovine growth hormone;
monsanto; milk; hormones; vandana shiva; david ehrenfeld; rural
life; urbanization; pesticides; farm subsidies; price support
programs; herman daly; sir james goldsmith;