Agriculture at the Crossroads

^{A massive ethanol plant in West Burlington, Iowa, turns corn into agrofuel. photo: Steven Vaughn}

The United States has spent decades building a chemical-intensive food infrastructure geared toward industrial production on a corporate model. That infrastructure, and the agrochemical industry it feeds, could be reshaped in fundamental ways if the food movement continues to broaden its base while maintaining an explicitly political edge and focus.

The organic and local food movement is often closely identified with coastal “foodies” in the mold of Alice Waters and the international Slow Food movement with earlier roots in Italy and a commitment to gustatorial pleasure. But in order to keep its edge in addition to its ethos, the food movement must also include anti-hunger, sustainable agriculture, fair trade, labor, environmental justice activists and organizations, family farmers, public health advocates, scientists and parents. If the food movement is able to accommodate and invigorate this extraordinary coalition while keeping a sharp political focus, unprecedented transformation may be possible. With agriculture at a historic crossroads, we have an opportunity to build a new highway to sustainability.

Early signals from the incoming administration indicate that the core issue on which food and agriculture activists must focus these next few years is corporate control of the food system. Whatever his other merits (and there are some), Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack’s nomination to Secretary of Agriculture sent ripples through the food movement around two points that have enormous consequences for the future of who owns agriculture— Vilsack’s ties to agricultural biotechnology and his support for agrofuels.

Agrofuels and modern agricultural biotech (including genetic engineering, synthetic biology and nanotechnologies) are emergent technologies whose developmental and regulatory pathways will be set in the next five years. Currently, both industries are heavily subsidized, nearly unregulated, and present either potential or already-proven risks of “unintended consequences” that could prove catastrophic.

Who owns nature?

Agricultural biotech and agrofuels are also two arenas in which the corporate control of our global food system by agrochemical giants like Monsanto is gathering speed. According to the ETC Group’s report “Who Owns Nature?”, as of 2008, the top 10 agribusinesses controlled 66% of the modern biotech market, 67% of the all seed sales and 89% of the agrochemical market. The top six pesticide companies—Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont—also dominated the seed sector.

U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies and government procurement contracts are the largest market levers currently incentivizing these agribusiness industry sectors. Policies and programs in the USDA could, if wisely revised and redirected, restructure our food system into one that supports green jobs, replenishes the environment, slows climate change and sustains rural livelihoods the world over. So it is for good reason that the Ag Secretary appointment received so much media attention in January. If the food movement keeps at it, this traditionally low-profile office should come under increasingly critical public scrutiny.

Vilsack faced two immediate tasks upon taking office—working with Congress to renew USDA’s $15 billion child nutrition program and deciding whether to tighten USDA’s eligibility rules for farm subsidies. PAN will engage Vilsack and Congress this spring around the sustainable agriculture elements of the Child Nutrition Act. We believe there are opportunities for real progress in that arena.

But Vilsack’s early tasks only begin to touch on the larger, more difficult set of choices facing a nation that is deep in multiple, interlocking crises. The accompanying task of the food movement must be to persist in articulating and agitating around the global implications of these choices as clearly and energetically as possible in the coming years.

Agroecology: Solving the “four-fold crisis”

Agroecological farming (see box at left) offers a singularly robust set of solutions to these crises that debunks the linked notions that organics are merely a lifestyle fad and that corporate labs—rather than farmers tending their land—are best-equipped to feed the world’s growing population.

A nationwide shift to agroecology will not be easy. It will require training hundreds of thousands of new farmers just as the last full generation of American farmers is set to retire. This, in turn, will require renewed national investment in agricultural science and extension programs as people relearn how to do the work performed so crudely by chemical agents these last 60 years. In short, the restorative practices of sustainable agriculture demand the kind of hope and hard work required for any genuine transformation. As Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann points out on page 14, the work of changing our food politics is as much an act of collective courage as it is a matter of international policy: “We must overcome the moral mediocrity that keeps us from making the great sacrifices that the magnitude of the problem requires. We must show our readiness to address the underlying patterns of consumption that are clearly unsustainable.”

In the same vein, Mark Winne argues on page 16 that the central question of food and agriculture politics boils down to how we address poverty. “Unless every segment of society rejects the notion that there is one food system for the poor and one for everyone else,” he writes, the impact of government and nonprofit programs “will remain marginal.” The hungry are the poor, and any shift in course for the food system will therefore require a re-writing of America’s social contract that must be more visionary and global in scope than either FDR’s New Deal, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

An historic moment for change

Change on the scale before us moves simultaneously though social movements, policy frameworks, farming practices, paradigms of science, and broad shifts in individual habits of consumption. An international coalition as broadly based as the food movement must remain active on many levels and in many different venues—from school cafeterias, city councils, boardrooms and family farms to the UN, USDA and Congress. Our voices arise from diverse life experiences and touch on an array of issues but they are united by the fundamental question: “Who will produce our food, how, and for whose benefit?”

A “Lunchbox Brigade” lobby day in Washington, D.C., is planned to support passage of the Child Nutrition Act. Activities will include a screening of Food, Inc. This new documentary from the producers of An Inconvenient Truth is scheduled for theatrical release in June. PAN members will have opportunities to be involved. For updates, see www.panna.org/foodinc

The fact that the food movement has managed to persist and grow despite the entrenched resistance of powerful industry Goliaths is extraordinary. Extraordinary in a different way is the fact that the shift in public consciousness bred by this movement coincides with the kind of political moment of choice witnessed no more than once in a generation as systemic climate, food, energy and economic crises have brought to resolution the need for “change we can believe in.” This coincidence of history renders all the more urgent the hope that the food movement might give rise to a sustainable society in which human lives (and thriving ecosystems) are worth more than profits and patents.

on the web

• “Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life.” www.etcgroup.org