by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 2, 2018 | Listening to the Land
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
I’ve been very interested in wild foods for many years, and over the last 8 or 10 have made a more concerted effort to make them a part of my diet—with more success over the last 3 or 4 years.
A few years ago an indigenous woman told me a story of a coal power plant near her community that polluted the river with mercury, and people were advised against eating the fish from this river. One man in the community continued to fish and eat the fish. When people told him to stop, saying “you will get sick,” his response was that “I am not separate from the river. If the river is sick, I am sick.”
People will fight to defend the system that provides them with life. Grocery stores provide life, but it’s a toxic mimic of food—deprived of nutrition and shipped from far away. Even local, organic food is a pale imitation of wild foods in terms of nutrient content. Humans need nutrient-dense foods, not tasteless cardboard imitations. We need food diversity—hundreds of species. We need the movement and physical stimulation that wild food helps us to do—walking, climbing, crouching, picking, wandering, tasting, smelling, sneaking, crawling, running, carrying. Wild foods heal and nourish us in countless ways.
Most importantly, wild foods nourish the soul. There is a big difference between walking down the aisles of a grocery store and casting a fly into a small mountain creek, filling a basket with wild greens from a meadow, gathering acorns from underneath oak trees and processing them in the evening with friends, stalking elk across forested ridges.
There is a big difference between getting your food from a “farm”—even a local one that you have visited—and knowing that this land, right here, right in front of your eyes, under your feet, is where your food will come from. “Farms” are places where the wild is domesticated, subjugated, plowed, destroyed, eliminated.
Can you identify wild edible and medicinal plants? Do you know where they like to live, and why? Do you know the feeding habits of trout, or the season and the weather patterns that will produce a good crop of a certain nut or plant? Do you know where to find good water on your landbase? Do you know how much to harvest of a given species or community, and have you observed that population over years, decades, or even generations to ascertain what is a sustainable harvest?
Wild food leads to connection. Connection leads to love. Love leads to responsibility. Responsibility leads to protectiveness. And we need more of that in the world today.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 28, 2018 | Agriculture
by Richard Young – SFT Policy Director / Sustainable Food Trust
Media attention has again highlighted the carbon footprint of eating meat, especially beef, with some journalists concluding that extensive grass-based beef has the highest carbon footprint of all. SFT policy director, Richard Young has been investigating and finds that while the carbon footprint of a year’s consumption of beef and lamb in the UK is high, it is nevertheless responsible for less emissions than SFT chief executive Patrick Holden’s economy class flight to the EAT forum in Stockholm this week.
A recent, very comprehensive, research paper by Poore and Nemecek from Oxford University and Agroscope, a large research company in Switzerland, has again drawn attention to the rising demand for meat, resulting from population growth and increasing affluence in some developing countries. Looked at from a global perspective the figures appear stark. The study claims that livestock production accounts for 83% of global farmland and produces 56-58% of the greenhouse gas emissions from food, but only contributes 37% of our protein intake and 18% of calories. As such, it’s perhaps not so surprising that concerned journalists come up with coverage like the Guardian’s, Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth. This is part of a series of articles, some of which have been balanced, but most of which have largely promoted vegan and vegetarian agendas with little broader consideration of the issues.
The question of what we should eat to reduce our devastating impact on the environment, while also reducing the incidence of the diet-related diseases which threaten to overwhelm the NHS and other healthcare systems, is one of the most important we face. Yet, the debate so far has been extremely limited and largely dominated by those with little if any practical experience of food production or what actually constitutes food system sustainability.
I’ve lost count of the number of food campaigners who’ve told me that all we need to do to make food production sustainable is to stop eating meat. Really? What about the environmental impact of palm oil, soya bean oil, rape oil and even sunflower oil production; the over-enrichment of the environment from nitrogen fertiliser; the decline in pollinating insects; the use of pesticides with known harmful impacts that would have been banned years ago were it not for the fact that intensive crop and vegetable growers can’t produce food without them?
What also about the growing problem of soil degradation, not just in the countries from which we import food, but right here in the UK? Environment Secretary Michael Gove himself has warned that we are 30-40 years away from running out of soil fertility on large parts of our arable land. With only minor exceptions, soil degradation is not a problem on UK grasslands.
Contrary to popular belief, continuous crop production is not sustainable. That’s the mistake made by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, and the Romans in North Africa 2,000 years ago, and in both cases the soils have never recovered. Far from abandoning livestock farming on UK grassland, we actually need to reintroduce grass and grazing animals into arable crop rotations. Despite the drop in demand for red meat in the UK (beef consumption down 4% and lamb consumption down more than 30% since 2000), at least one leading conventional farmer has now publicly recognised the agronomic need for grazed grass breaks. Even before there has been any encouragement in policy, I am aware that some arable farmers are already being forced to re-introduce grass and livestock because they can no longer control arable weeds like blackgrass, sterile brome and couch (twitch), which have become resistant to the in-crop herbicides repeatedly applied to them in all-arable rotations.
Grazing livestock and nature conservation
Seemingly oblivious of these issues, George Monbiot in The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy, on Friday, June 8, also used the research study as evidence to support his claim that if we all gave up meat and dairy we’d be able to re-wild grasslands and live happily by eating more imported soya. Giving up livestock farming would, he believes, allow “many rich ecosystems destroyed by livestock farming to recover, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, protecting watersheds and halting the sixth great extinction in its tracks.”
He quoted a passage from the Poore and Nemecek research paper which states that the environmental impacts of converting grass into human-edible protein are “immense under any production method practiced today”. However, ‘immense’ is a subjective adjective. There are many things we do which have far higher negative impacts, most of which are non-essential and do not bring with them the unique benefits that come from grazing animals. Letters responding to the Guardian’s series of articles drew attention to some of these, including issues previously publicised by the Guardian itself.
What about meat and wildlife?
It’s true, and a very great concern, that human activity is destroying the natural world in a completely unsustainable way. The growing of grain crops specifically for intensive livestock is clearly part of the problem, as is highly intensive grassland farming. However, blaming meat consumption so specifically lets an awful lot of practices off the hook. When one considers the rabbits, hares, deer, moles and wild birds killed each year to protect food crops, and the decline in hedgehog and other small mammal numbers since the 1950s – in part due to the removal of hedgerows to make fields larger for crop production – plant-based diets could even be responsible for the deaths of as many mammals and birds as animals slaughtered from the livestock sector.
Since we were (mistakenly in my view) encouraged to switch from animal to vegetable fats 35 years ago, we’ve also consumed and used ever-greater quantities of palm oil from south-east Asia. Its production has been responsible for the near annihilation of many species, including orangutans, pigmy elephants and Sumatran elephants, rhinos and tigers. With demand still growing, similar pressures are now building in equatorial countries in Africa and South America where palm oil production is also taking off. The scientists behind some of the most recent research on species decline blame “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich”, rather than livestock production specifically.
The importance of livestock grazing for wild plants and animals
We also need to remember that many important plant and wildlife species have evolved in tandem with grazing animals and depend on them for their survival, a point made very strongly by Natural England in their report, The Importance of Livestock Grazing for Wildlife Conservation. This is a key reason why the RSPB uses cattle on its reserves, and states that livestock farming is “essential to preserving wildlife and [the] character of iconic landscapes”. And while overgrazing, encouraged by poorly conceived support schemes, has been a problem in the past, the RSPB is concerned that “undergrazing is now occurring in some areas, with adverse impacts on some species, such as golden plover”, while also “contributing to the spread of ranker grasses, rush, scrub and bracken”. Extensively grazed grasslands also have a wide range of additional benefits. They purify drinking water better than any other land use, and they provide food for pollinating insects at times of year when there is little else available. They also store vast amounts of carbon, which if released through conversion to continuous crop production, would accelerate global warming even faster than it is currently occurring.
Food security
Livestock production may only provide 37% of total protein globally, but it clearly provides significantly more than that in the UK. Two-thirds of UK farmland – if we include common land and rough grazing – is under grass, most of that for important environmental reasons. Only 12% of this (8% of total farmland) is classified as arable, meaning that it may, under current EU rules, be ploughed for cropping. Much of this is on farms which grow grass in rotation with crops to build fertility naturally and control weeds, pests and diseases, so when one field of arable grassland is ploughed up another is generally re-sown with grass. If we were to stop grazing cattle and sheep on this land, we would greatly reduce our food security and make ourselves vulnerable, if, for example, extreme weather due to climate change, or a new crop disease were to reduce global soya yields. We would also need to import a very great deal more food, because as I have previously shown, cattle consume only about 5% of the 3.1 million tonnes of soya oil, beans and meal we import (1.1 million tonnes of the 3.1 million tonnes imported is fed to livestock, of which cattle consume only 15%) and sheep consume very little indeed.
The problem with global averages
So far, I’ve rather ducked the key issue of the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production. Before we can make much progress on this we need first to consider the issue of global average emission figures. Looking at global averages and drawing conclusions from them isn’t actually very helpful. Essentially a small proportion of grazing livestock animals cover a high proportion of the land area and emit a high proportion of the greenhouse gases, while producing only a very small proportion of the meat and milk. The authors of the research paper say, “For many products, impacts are skewed by producers with particularly high impacts…..for beef originating from beef herds, the highest impact 25% of producers represent 65% of the beef herds’ GHG emissions and 61% of land use.”
Simplistically, we might think the obvious answer is to eliminate the 25% of producers who are causing such a large part of the problem. However, this 25% of producers mostly live in dryland regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, areas which often have very poor soils and low rainfall. As such their animals grow very slowly, but it is claimed, still produce a lot of methane, because they have to eat very poor-quality herbage. No doubt, people living in the Global South could reduce their carbon footprint from food significantly if they gave up meat and dairy, but they would also very quickly starve.
Approximately a quarter of the global population live in dryland regions where severe droughts are an ever-present threat. Farming families, depending entirely on crops, would have no food at all when the rains fail. In contrast, animals put on flesh in the better years and provide a substantial buffer against starvation, since they can be slaughtered and eaten one by one over significant periods of time in drought years. It also has to be pointed out that unlike many of us in the Global North, who mostly have cars, central heating and fly abroad, the emissions associated with meat consumption in the drylands in the Global South are more or less the only carbon footprint these people have, and amount to just a small fraction of our own.
This aspect also helps us to see how misleading even the headlines on the percentage of land used for livestock production can be, when the very large areas of land in dryland regions are averaged with the grasslands in more fertile regions.
It is also significant that global averages cited by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Livestock’s Long Shadow in 2006 (and two other reports in 2013) were dramatically increased by the inclusion of the emissions associated with the destruction of rainforest and virgin land for cattle grazing and soya production, most of which took place before 2005. These were tragic events with multiple causes, but ones which have little relevance to grazing livestock production and beef consumption in the UK, where the predominant land use changes occurring at the time were entirely in the opposite direction – the conversion of grassland to crop production and the planting of trees.
Beef and sheep production in Northern Europe, especially the UK and Ireland, is highly productive and this greatly reduces the carbon footprint of beef and lamb in these regions. These countries have climates and soil types ideally suited to growing grass and only marginally suited to crop production. So using global average figures for the UK also tells us nothing of value.
The scientific debate
I have written to a number of scientists about these issues over the last week, including one of the authors of the research paper, Joseph Poore. Both he and I recognise that there are huge differences in the emissions associated with beef produced in different production systems and that an objective should be to improve systems, wherever possible, to reduce their carbon footprint. While the headlines have focused on the worst examples – beef linked to emissions of between 40 and 210 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilo – the research study does actually provide data for the second most productive category of beef production which emit 18.2 kg of CO2 per kilo of beef produced.
For anyone not familiar with how these figures are obtained it may help to know that despite being expressed in terms of the greenhouse gas (GHG) CO2, the emissions from beef mostly relate to methane (CH4) and to a lesser extent nitrous oxide (N2O). In order to compare emissions from different sources, these are expressed in terms of CO2 equivalent, based on the relative global warming impacts of the different GHGs, CH4 and N2O, approximately 30 and 300 times higher, respectively, than CO2.
The figures cited in the research paper are global close-to-best, overall average and close-to-worst, but in correspondence, Poore has helpfully given me further information, which shows that beef from the UK dairy herd is typically responsible for emissions in the range 17-27 kg CO2 per kilo. I’ll express this as an average of 22kg CO2 per kilo of beef to make the calculations later on, less complex. While it is generally assumed that dairy beef has lower emissions than suckler beef, and that could be the case on farms with late maturing cattle, figures for the 100% organic grass-fed beef produced on my own farm suggest that emissions are no higher than 17 kg per kilo of beef, and may even be lower – I can’t do a complete calculation because I don’t have figures for all aspects, for example, the electricity costs at the abattoir where our animals are slaughtered and refrigerated before being brought back to our butchers shop, or the GHG costs of making our hay.
Methane
Despite all this, we cannot pretend that the direct greenhouse gases from grass-fed beef are insignificant. Nevertheless, methane (CH4) breaks down (largely in the atmosphere, and to a lesser extent in soils not receiving ammonium-based nitrogen fertilisers) to CO2 and water after about 10 years. If we contrast grassland with little or no nitrogen fertiliser use with food systems which depend heavily on nitrogen fertiliser, the carbon in the CO2 and the CH4 from grass-fed ruminants is recycled, not fossil, carbon. Ruminants can’t add more to the atmosphere than the plants they eat can photosynthesise from the atmosphere.
The high methane levels in the atmosphere are a very serious problem, but they have become a problem not so much because of cattle and sheep – the numbers of which have increased only modestly over the last 40 years – but because of fossil fuels. Taken together, the fossil fuels, oil, natural gas and coal are not only by far the biggest source of the major GHG CO2, they are also responsible for about a third more methane emissions than ruminants – and all the carbon in that CH4 is, of course, additional carbon that has been stored away deep underground for the last 400 million years. That’s all based on long-established data. But a more recent study analysing the relative amounts of the isotopes carbon12 and carbon14, which vary according to the source of the methane, has found that scientists have previously under-estimated methane emissions from fossil fuels by 20-60% and over-estimated those from microbial sources, such as the rumen bacteria which produce methane, by 25%. That doesn’t affect the figures in Poore and Nemecek’s paper, but it does help us to see more clearly the relative importance of reducing fossil fuel use compared with red meat consumption. In that respect, re-localising food systems, discouraging supermarkets from centralising their distribution networks, consuming the foods most readily produced in the UK and minimising imports would surely be a good start?
Soil carbon sequestration
Unlike some leading campaigners and scientists who call for big reductions in ruminant numbers and largely dismiss the significance of soil carbon sequestration, Poore and Nemecek accept that carbon sequestration under grassland can, under certain circumstances, for a finite period, offset a significant proportion of the emissions from cattle and sheep. According to them the maximum extent of this is a reduction of just over one-fifth (22%) of the emissions. However, since they cite no UK-specific data in their study it is not clear whether this has any relevance to the UK or whether it is simply a global average.
About half of soil organic matter is made up of carbon. The rest is mostly nitrogen and water. Organic matter is critically important to long term soil resilience and water-holding ability. The general assumption amongst scientists is that organic matter levels fall, year on year when grassland is converted to cropland, and eventually stabilise at a new lower level on clay-based soils after a century or more. Peat-based and sandy soils are an exception as. In contrast, the conversion of croplands to grass will rebuild that carbon over broadly the same period. Overstocked land will also lose carbon. Ley/arable rotations will see levels go up and down depending on the phase of the rotation and the proportion of arable to grass crops.
As such, long-established, many well managed soils under permanent grassland in the UK are probably already close to their maximum potential level of carbon. However, virtually all heavily stocked UK grasslands have the potential to sequester more carbon if their management is improved and all croplands could steadily regain carbon if they were converted to grass or to rotations including grass breaks. Since a third of soils globally are significantly degraded and another 20% moderately degraded the global potential for carbon sequestration is considerable.
Confusion has arisen due to the very significant variation between the rates of sequestration found in many studies. However, a review of 42 studies in 2014 found that more than half these differences could be explained by considering whether or not livestock manures were returned to the land. It seems likely, based on other research, that much of the remaining differences will relate to land management, stocking levels and precipitation levels. Deeper rooting grasses, legumes and herbs also have the potential to increase carbon down to much greater depths than the most widely used ryegrasses which are shallow-rooting.
Undertaking a calculation
Can we find a way of relating the emissions associated with beef to other things we do to get some idea of their relative significance? I’ll use the average 22 kg of CO2 for beef from the UK dairy herd (established above) as it’s the only solid figure I have for the UK. In 2015 and 2016, according the AHDB’s UK yearbook – cattle, average beef consumption per person in the UK was 18.2 kg and average consumption of lamb was 4.9 kg. So we can now undertake a calculation to establish the carbon footprint of a typical beef and lamb consumer.
- Beef 18.2 x 22 = 400.4 kg carbon dioxide equivalent
- Lamb 4.9 x 25 = 122 kg carbon dioxide equivalent (based on figures in the study)
On this basis an average British beef and lamb consumer is responsible for the equivalent of 522 kg of CO2, as a result of their red meat consumption. This doesn’t of course include the emissions associated with chicken and pork, but to get some idea of whether giving up red meat is the single most important thing you can do to save the planet, I used an online calculator to work out how much CO2 was emitted as a result of SFT chief executive Patrick Holden’s return flight from Heathrow to Stockholm for the 2018 EAT forum this week. That comes to 466 kg of CO2. Undertaking a similar exercise for the round trip journey by car from his farm in Wales to Heathrow adds another 110 kg, making a total of 576 kg carbon dioxide, for one trip to a nearby country, compared with 522 kg for a whole year’s worth of red meat eating.
One question which therefore arises from this is whether the repeated focus on red meat as a source of global warming is misleading the entire population into assuming that providing they don’t eat red meat they can travel abroad as much as they like with a clear conscience? It’s of note that a roundtrip from Heathrow to San Francisco is equivalent to about 5 year’s-worth of beef and lamb produced in the UK – and quite a few of the vegetarian and vegan campaigners at the EAT forum had come from the US.
Why we need grazing livestock
More than all these issues, however, the SFT defends the role of grazing animals, as we know from years of practical farming experience that systems with cattle or sheep at their core are able to remain highly productive, repair degraded soils and avoid the GHG emissions associated with the manufacture of nitrogen fertiliser, equivalent to about 8 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of nitrogen used. Farmers growing bread-making wheat and oilseed rape in the UK use up to 250 kg of nitrogen per hectare, meaning that each hectare puts GHGs equivalent to 2 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, just in relation to nitrogen. About half of this nitrogen is lost to the environment and has a wide range of negative impacts on soils, water, the air and on our health. This diffuse pollution has major negative costs for society, estimated by scientists to be 2-3 times higher than the commercial benefits farmers get from using nitrogen fertiliser.
In contrast, using forage legumes, like clover, instead, allows nitrogen to be built up in the soil under grazing swards without any GHG emissions. This can then be exploited to grow crops in subsequent years, before going back to grass and clover. Such grassland systems are almost as productive as those using the highest rates of nitrogen fertiliser. Grain yields are lower, but if we move away from grain-fed livestock that won’t matter. Grain legumes like beans and peas do also fix some nitrogen naturally, but it is not enough to make a significant contribution to reducing nitrogen use in subsequent crops. In addition, not all cropland in the UK is suitable for growing peas, and it’s not possible to grow beans more than one year in five, even with repeated applications of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
In conclusion
Clearly there are significant emissions associated with meat production, and it may well be that, in general, grass-fed beef has slightly higher direct emissions than grain-fed beef. I can see big advantages, both environmental and ethical in reducing the production and consumption of grain-fed meat, be it chicken, pork or beef. But there is an overwhelmingly important case why we should continue to produce and eat meat from animals predominantly reared on grass, especially when it is species-rich and not fertilised with nitrogen out of a bag.
Yet, while a few farmers are trying their best to counter the prevailing trends by producing organic or grass-fed meat, far more cattle are now being housed in American-style feedlots, as recently exposed by the Guardian. Ironically this trend is occurring largely due to the failure of scientists, journalists and campaigners to understand the full significance of the differences between farming systems, and therefore the red meat which brings major benefits as well as a few negative impacts, compared with that which only has negative impacts. Due to falling demand for red meat, smaller, more traditional farmers are being forced to choose between giving up – something which has now affected tens of thousands of them – and intensifying, in order to cut costs and stay in business. I very much hope we can find a way to broaden understanding of these issues, because if we can’t, we will see the further spread of most intensive beef systems and we will lose the iconic pastoral character of the British countryside.
Copyright © 2018 with Richard Young, republished with permission. The Sustainable Food Trust is a UK registered charity, charity number 1148645. Company number 7577102.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 19, 2018 | ANALYSIS, Movement Building & Support
Featured image: Ercan Ayboğa
by Sean Keller / Local Futures
The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (MEM) has been at the heart of Rojava’s democratic revolution since its inception. The Movement grew out of single-issue campaigns against dam construction, climate change, and deforestation, and in 2015 went from being a small collection of local ecological groups to a full-fledged network of “ecology councils” that are active in every canton of Rojava, and in neighboring Turkey as well. Its mission, as one of its most prominent founding members, Ercan Ayboğa, says, is to “strengthen the ecological character of the Kurdish freedom movement [and] the Kurdish women’s movement.”
It’s not an easy process. Neoliberal policies, war, and climate change have made for an impressive roster of challenges. Crop diversity has been undermined due to longstanding subsidies for monocultures. Stocks of native seeds are declining. The region has been hit by trade embargoes from Turkey, Iraq, and the central Syrian government, and villages have been subject to forced displacement and depopulation. Groundwater reserves are diminishing, and climate change is reducing rainfall. Many wells and farms were destroyed by the self-described Islamic State (ISIS), and many farmers have been killed by mines. Much of the region is without electricity. And there has been an influx of refugees from the rest of Syria, fleeing civil war.
As MEM sees it, the solutions to these overlapping problems must be holistic and systemic. Ercan gives an impressive rundown of MEM’s priorities: Decreasing Rojava’s dependence on imports, returning to traditional water-conserving cultivation techniques, advocating for ecological policy-making at the municipal level, promoting local crops and livestock and traditional construction methods, organizing educational activities, working against destructive and exploitative “investment” and infrastructure projects such as dams and mines — in short, “the mobilization of an ecological resistance” towards anything guilty of “commercializing the waters, commodifying the land, controlling nature and people, and promoting the consumption of fossil fuels.”
In 2016, MEM published a declaration of its social and ecological aims, and it is a thing of beauty. “We must defend,” it says, “the democratic nation against the nation-state; the communal economy against capitalism, with its quick-profit-seeking logic and monopolism and large industries; organic agriculture, ecological villages and cities, ecological industry, and alternative energy and technology against the agricultural and energy policies imposed by capitalist modernity.”
Getting children involved in all of this is critical. Schools in Rojava teach ecology as a fundamental principle. In 2016, with the support of Slow Food International and the Rojava Ministry of Water and Agriculture, MEM helped build a series of school gardens in villages around the city of Kobane, in order to provide a “laboratory” for children to learn about the region’s biodiversity and how to care for it. These gardens are growing fruit trees, figs, and pomegranates, instead of corn and wheat monocultures. Some have been planted on land that was once virtually destroyed by ISIS. In Rojava, even cultivation comes inherently infused with a spirit of resistance. “We grew up on this land and we haven’t abandoned it,” says Mustafa, a teacher whose school was one of those to receive a new garden in 2016. “As a people of farmers and livestock breeders, we have always tended the crops using our own techniques, which are thousands of years old.” As the MEM declaration says, “Bringing ecological consciousness and sensibility to the organized social sphere and to educational institutions is as vital as organizing our own assemblies.”
The spirit of resistance is as alive in the realm of society and economics as it is on the land. The cooperative economy in Rojava is booming. Michel Knapp, a longtime activist in the Kurdish freedom movement and co-author of the book Revolution in Rojava, observes that most cooperatives in Rojava are “small, with some five to ten members producing textiles, agricultural products and groceries, but there are some bigger cooperatives too, like a cooperative near Amûde that guarantees most of the subsistence for over 2,000 households and is even able to sell on the market.”
The government of Rojava is democratic and decentralized, with residential communes and local councils giving people autonomy and control over decisions that affect their lives. Municipal-level government bodies are systematically integrated into the operations of MEM, in a one-of-a-kind partnership between the public and nonprofit spheres. And the prison system is being radically reformed, with local “peace committees” paying attention to the social and political dimensions of crime in passing judgment. Most cities contain no more than one or two dozen prisoners, according to Ercan.
And to top it all, women have taken a leading role in every facet of the revolution. Women’s cooperatives are a common sight in Rojava, as are women’s councils, women’s committees, and women’s security forces. Women’s ecovillages have been built both in Rojava and across the border in Turkish Kurdistan, aimed at helping victims of domestic violence and trauma. Patriarchy is just one more aspect of the neoliberal program being cast aside in Rojava, on the road towards building what MEM describes as “a radical democratic, communal, ecological, women-liberated society.”
This piece was originally published on Medium as part of Local Futures’ Planet Local webseries.
Read about other holistic ecological initiatives from around the world on our Planet Local: Ecology page.
Dig deeper into Rojava and the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement on the following pages (the source material for much of this piece):
Sean Keller is Local Futures’ Media and Outreach Coordinator, and editor of Planet Local, an online ‘library’ showcasing grassroots localization projects around the world. He studied Anthropology and Russian at Vassar College, and spends his free time reading and writing speculative fiction.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 12, 2018 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives
by Frances Moore Lappé / Local Futures
People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.
Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic agriculture, or more broadly “agroecology”—is actually the only way to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, healthful food. Inefficiency and ecological destruction are built into the industrial model. But, beyond that, our ability to meet the world’s needs is only partially determined by what quantities are produced in fields, pastures, and waterways. Wider societal rules and norms ultimately shape whether any given quantity of food produced is actually used to meet humanity’s needs. In many ways, how we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce. Solving our multiple food crises thus requires a systems approach in which citizens around the world remake our understanding and practice of democracy.
Today, the world produces—mostly from low-input, smallholder farms—more than enough food: 2,900 calories per person per day. Per capita food availability has continued to expand despite ongoing population growth. This ample supply of food, moreover, comprises only what is left over after about half of all grain is either fed to livestock or used for industrial purposes, such as agrofuels.1
Despite this abundance, 800 million people worldwide suffer from long-term caloric deficiencies. One in four children under five is deemed stunted—a condition, often bringing lifelong health challenges, that results from poor nutrition and an inability to absorb nutrients. Two billion people are deficient in at least one nutrient essential for health, with iron deficiency alone implicated in one in five maternal deaths.2
The total supply of food alone actually says little about whether the world’s people are able to meet their nutritional needs. We need to ask why the industrial model leaves so many behind, and then determine what questions we should be asking to lead us toward solutions to the global food crisis.
Vast, Hidden Inefficiencies
The industrial model of agriculture—defined here by its capital intensity and dependence on purchased inputs of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides—creates multiple unappreciated sources of inefficiency. Economic forces are a major contributor here: the industrial model operates within what are commonly called “free market economies,” in which enterprise is driven by one central goal, namely, securing the highest immediate return to existing wealth. This leads inevitably to a greater concentration of wealth and, in turn, to greater concentration of the capacity to control market demand within the food system.
Moreover, economically and geographically concentrated production, requiring lengthy supply chains and involving the corporate culling of cosmetically blemished foods, leads to massive outright waste: more than 40 percent of food grown for human consumption in the United States never makes it into the mouths of its population.3
The underlying reason industrial agriculture cannot meet humanity’s food needs is that its system logic is one of disassociated parts, not interacting elements. It is thus unable to register its own self-destructive impacts on nature’s regenerative processes. Industrial agriculture, therefore, is a dead end.
Consider the current use of water in agriculture. About 40 percent of the world’s food depends on irrigation, which draws largely from stores of underground water, called aquifers, which make up 30 percent of the world’s freshwater. Unfortunately, groundwater is being rapidly depleted worldwide. In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer—one of the world’s largest underground bodies of water—spans eight states in the High Plains and supplies almost one third of the groundwater used for irrigation in the entire country. Scientists warn that within the next thirty years, over one-third of the southern High Plains region will be unable to support irrigation. If today’s trends continue, about 70 percent of the Ogallala groundwater in the state of Kansas could be depleted by the year 2060.4
Industrial agriculture also depends on massive phosphorus fertilizer application—another dead end on the horizon. Almost 75 percent of the world’s reserve of phosphate rock, mined to supply industrial agriculture, is in an area of northern Africa centered in Morocco and Western Sahara. Since the mid-twentieth century, humanity has extracted this “fossil” resource, processed it using climate-harming fossil fuels, spread four times more of it on the soil than occurs naturally, and then failed to recycle the excess. Much of this phosphate escapes from farm fields, ending up in ocean sediment where it remains unavailable to humans. Within this century, the industrial trajectory will lead to “peak phosphorus”—the point at which extraction costs are so high, and prices out of reach for so many farmers, that global phosphorus production begins to decline.5
Beyond depletion of specific nutrients, the loss of soil itself is another looming crisis for agriculture. Worldwide, soil is eroding at a rate ten to forty times faster than it is being formed. To put this in visual terms, each year, enough soil is washed and blown from fields globally to fill roughly four pickup trucks for every human being on earth.6
The industrial model of farming is not a viable path to meeting humanity’s food needs for yet another reason: it contributes nearly 20 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, even more than the transportation sector. The most significant emissions from agriculture are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is released in deforestation and subsequent burning, mostly in order to grow feed, as well as from decaying plants. Methane is released by ruminant livestock, mainly via their flatulence and belching, as well as by manure and in rice paddy cultivation. Nitrous oxide is released largely by manure and manufactured fertilizers. Although carbon dioxide receives most of the attention, methane and nitrous oxide are also serious. Over a hundred-year period, methane is, molecule for molecule, 34 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas, and nitrous oxide about 300 times, than carbon dioxide.7
Our food system also increasingly involves transportation, processing, packaging, refrigeration, storage, wholesale and retail operations, and waste management—all of which emit greenhouses gases. Accounting for these impacts, the total food system’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, from land to landfill, could be as high as 29 percent. Most startlingly, emissions from food and agriculture are growing so fast that, if they continue to increase at the current rate, they alone could use up the safe budget for all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.8
These dire drawbacks are mere symptoms. They flow from the internal logic of the model itself. The reason that industrial agriculture cannot meet the world’s needs is that the structural forces driving it are misaligned with nature, including human nature.
Social history offers clear evidence that concentrated power tends to elicit the worst in human behavior. Whether for bullies in the playground or autocrats in government, concentrated power is associated with callousness and even brutality not in a few of us, but in most of us.9 The system logic of industrial agriculture, which concentrates social power, is thus itself a huge risk for human well-being. At every stage, the big become bigger, and farmers become ever-more dependent on ever-fewer suppliers, losing power and the ability to direct their own lives.
The seed market, for example, has moved from a competitive arena of small, family-owned firms to an oligopoly in which just three companies—Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta—control over half of the global proprietary seed market. Worldwide, from 1996 to 2008, a handful of corporations absorbed more than two hundred smaller independent companies, driving the price of seeds and other inputs higher to the point where their costs for poor farmers in southern India now make up almost half of production costs.10 And the cost in real terms per acre for users of bio-engineered crops dominated by one corporation, Monsanto, tripled between 1996 and 2013.
Not only does the industrial model direct resources into inefficient and destructive uses, but it also feeds the very root of hunger itself: the concentration of social power. This results in the sad irony that small-scale farmers—those with fewer than five acres—control 84 percent of the world’s farms and produce most of the food by value, yet control just 12 percent of the farmland and make up the majority of the world’s hungry.11
The industrial model also fails to address the relationship between food production and human nutrition. Driven to seek the highest possible immediate financial returns, farmers and agricultural companies are increasingly moving toward monocultures of low-nutrition crops such as corn—the dominant US crop—that are often processed into empty-calorie “food products.” As a result, from 1990 to 2010, growth in unhealthy eating patterns outpaced dietary improvements in most parts of the world, including the poorer regions. Most of the key causes of non-communicable diseases are now diet-related, and by 2020, such diseases are predicted to account for nearly 75 percent of all deaths worldwide.12
A Better Alternative
What model of farming can end nutritional deprivation while restoring and conserving food-growing resources for our progeny? The answer lies in the emergent model of agroecology, often called “organic” or ecological agriculture. Hearing these terms, many people imagine simply a set of farming practices that forgo purchased inputs, relying instead on beneficial biological interactions among plants, microbes, and other organisms. However, agroecology is much more than that. The term as it is used here suggests a model of farming based on the assumption that within any dimension of life, the organization of relationships within the whole system determines the outcomes. The model reflects a shift from a disassociated to a relational way of thinking arising across many fields within both the physical and social sciences. This approach to farming is coming to life in the ever-growing numbers of farmers and agricultural scientists worldwide who reject the narrow productivist view embodied in the industrial model.
Recent studies have dispelled the fear that an ecological alternative to the industrial model would fail to produce the volume of food for which the industrial model is prized. In 2006, a seminal study in the Global South compared yields in 198 projects in 55 countries and found that ecologically attuned farming increased crop yields by an average of almost 80 percent. A 2007 University of Michigan global study concluded that organic farming could support the current human population, and expected increases without expanding farmed land. Then, in 2009, came a striking endorsement of ecological farming by fifty-nine governments and agencies, including the World Bank, in a report painstakingly prepared over four years by four hundred scientists urging support for “biological substitutes for industrial chemicals or fossil fuels.”13 Such findings should ease concerns that ecologically aligned farming cannot produce sufficient food, especially given its potential productivity in the Global South, where such farming practices are most common.
Ecological agriculture, unlike the industrial model, does not inherently concentrate power. Instead, as an evolving practice of growing food within communities, it disperses and creates power, and can enhance the dignity, knowledge, and the capacities of all involved. Agroecology can thereby address the powerlessness that lies at the root of hunger.
Applying such a systems approach to farming unites ecological science with time-tested traditional wisdom rooted in farmers’ ongoing experiences. Agroecology also includes a social and politically engaged movement of farmers, growing from and rooted in distinct cultures worldwide. As such, it cannot be reduced to a specific formula, but rather represents a range of integrated practices, adapted and developed in response to each farm’s specific ecological niche. It weaves together traditional knowledge and ongoing scientific breakthroughs based on the integrative science of ecology. By progressively eliminating all or most chemical fertilizers and pesticides, agroecological farmers free themselves—and, therefore, all of us—from reliance on climate-disrupting, finite fossil fuels, as well as from other purchased inputs that pose environmental and health hazards.
In another positive social ripple, agroecology is especially beneficial to women farmers. In many areas, particularly in Africa, nearly half or more of farmers are women, but too often they lack access to credit.14 Agroecology—which eliminates the need for credit to buy synthetic inputs—can make a significant difference for them.
Agroecological practices also enhance local economies, as profits on farmers’ purchases no longer seep away to corporate centers elsewhere. After switching to practices that do not rely on purchased chemical inputs, farmers in the Global South commonly make natural pesticides using local ingredients—mixtures of neem tree extract, chili, and garlic in southern India, for example. Local farmers purchase women’s homemade alternatives and keep the money circulating within their community, benefiting all.15
Besides these quantifiable gains, farmers’ confidence and dignity are also enhanced through agroecology. Its practices rely on farmers’ judgments based on their expanding knowledge of their land and its potential. Success depends on farmers’ solving their own problems, not on following instructions from commercial fertilizer, pesticide, and seed companies. Developing better farming methods via continual learning, farmers also discover the value of collaborative working relationships. Freed from dependency on purchased inputs, they are more apt to turn to neighbors—sharing seed varieties and experiences of what works and what does not for practices like composting or natural pest control. These relationships encourage further experimentation for ongoing improvement. Sometimes, they foster collaboration beyond the fields as well—such as in launching marketing and processing cooperatives that keep more of the financial returns in the hands of farmers.
Going beyond such localized collaboration, agroecological farmers are also building a global movement. La Via Campesina, whose member organizations represent 200 million farmers, fights for “food sovereignty,” which its participants define as the “right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.” This approach puts those who produce, distribute, and consume food—rather than markets and corporations—at the heart of food systems and policies, and defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation.
Once citizens come to appreciate that the industrial agriculture model is a dead end, the challenge becomes strengthening democratic accountability in order to shift public resources away from it. Today, those subsidies are huge: by one estimate, almost half a trillion tax dollars in OECD countries, plus Brazil, China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine.16 Imagine the transformative impact if a significant share of those subsidies began helping farmers’ transition to agroecological farming.
Any accurate appraisal of the viability of a more ecologically attuned agriculture must let go of the idea that the food system is already so globalized and corporate-dominated that it is too late to scale up a relational, power-dispersing model of farming. As noted earlier, more than three-quarters of all food grown does not cross borders. Instead, in the Global South, the number of small farms is growing, and small farmers produce 80 percent of what is consumed in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.17
The Right Path
When we address the question of how to feed the world, we need to think relationally—linking current modes of production with our future capacities to produce, and linking farm output with the ability of all people to meet their need to have nutritious food and to live in dignity. Agroecology, understood as a set of farming practices aligned with nature and embedded in more balanced power relationships, from the village level upward, is thus superior to the industrial model. This emergent relational model offers the promise of an ample supply of nutritious food needed now and in the future, and more equitable access to it.
Reframing concerns about inadequate supply is only the first step toward necessary change. The essential questions about whether humanity can feed itself well are social—or, more precisely, political. Can we remake our understanding and practice of democracy so that citizens realize and assume their capacity for self-governance, beginning with the removal of the influence of concentrated wealth on our political systems?
Democratic governance—accountable to citizens, not to private wealth—makes possible the necessary public debate and rule-making to re-embed market mechanisms within democratic values and sound science. Only with this foundation can societies explore how best to protect food-producing resources—soil, nutrients, water—that the industrial model is now destroying. Only then can societies decide how nutritious food, distributed largely as a market commodity, can also be protected as a basic human right.
This post is adapted from an essay originally written for the Great Transition Initiative.
Featured image: TompkinsConservation.org
Endnotes
1. Food and Agriculture Division of the United Nations, Statistics Division, “2013 Food Balance Sheets for 42 Selected Countries (and Updated Regional Aggregates),” accessed March 1, 2015, http://faostat3.fao.org/download/FB/FBS/E; Paul West et al., “Leverage Points for Improving Global Food Security and the Environment,” Science 345, no. 6194 (July 2014): 326; Food and Agriculture Organization, Food Outlook: Biannual Report on Global Food Markets (Rome: FAO, 2013), http://fao.org/docrep/018/al999e/al999e.pdf.
2. FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015: Meeting the 2015 International Hunger Targets: Taking Stock of Uneven Progress (Rome: FAO, 2015), 8, 44, http://fao.org/3/a-i4646e.pdf; World Health Organization, Childhood Stunting: Context, Causes, Consequences (Geneva: WHO, 2013), http://www.who.int/nutrition/events/2013_ChildhoodStunting_colloquium_14Oct_ConceptualFramework
_colour.pdf?ua=1; FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2013: Food Systems for Better Nutrition (Rome: FAO, 2013), ix, http://fao.org/docrep/018/i3300e/i3300e.pdf.
3. Vaclav Smil, “Nitrogen in Crop Production: An Account of Global Flows,” Global Geochemical Cycles 13, no. 2 (1999): 647; Dana Gunders, Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40% of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill (Washington, DC: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2012), http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf.
4. United Nations Environment Programme, Groundwater and Its Susceptibility to Degradation: A Global Assessment of the Problem and Options for Management (Nairobi: UNEP, 2003), http://www.unep.org/dewa/Portals/67/pdf/Groundwater_Prelims_SCREEN.pdf; Bridget Scanlon et al., “Groundwater Depletion and Sustainability of Irrigation in the US High Plains and Central Valley,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 24 (June 2012): 9320; David Steward et al., “Tapping Unsustainable Groundwater Stores for Agricultural Production in the High Plains Aquifer of Kansas, Projections to 2110,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 37 (September 2013): E3477.
5. Dana Cordell and Stuart White, “Life’s Bottleneck: Sustaining the World’s Phosphorus for a Food Secure Future,” Annual Review Environment and Resources 39 (October 2014): 163, 168, 172.
6. David Pimentel, “Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat,” Journal of the Environment, Development and Sustainability 8 (February 2006): 119. This calculation assumes that a full-bed pickup truck can hold 2.5 cubic yards of soil, that one cubic yard of soil weighs approximately 2,200 pounds, and that world population is 7.2 billion people.
7. FAO, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use,” March 2014, http://fao.org/resources/ infographics/infographics-details/en/c/218650/; Gunnar Myhre et al., “Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013), 714, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf.
8. Sonja Vermeulen, Bruce Campbell, and John Ingram, “Climate Change and Food Systems,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37 (November 2012): 195; Bojana Bajželj et al., “Importance of Food-Demand Management for Climate Mitigation,” Nature Climate Change 4 (August 2014): 924–929.
9. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007).
10. Philip Howard, “Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996–2008,” Sustainability 1, no. 4 (December 2009): 1271; T. Vijay Kumar et al., Ecologically Sound, Economically Viable: Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture in Andhra Pradesh, India (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009), 6-7, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/244362-1278965574032/CMSA-Final.pdf.
11. Estimated from FAO, “Family Farming Knowledge Platform,” accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.fao.org/family-farming/background/en/.
12. Fumiaki Imamura et al., “Dietary Quality among Men and Women in 187 Countries in 1990 and 2010: A Systemic Assessment,” The Lancet 3, no. 3 (March 2015): 132–142, http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/langlo/PIIS2214-109X%2814%2970381-X.pdf.
13. Jules Pretty et al., “Resource-Conserving Agriculture Increases Yields in Developing Countries,” Environmental Science & Technology 40, no. 4 (2006): 1115; Catherine Badgley et al., “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22, no. 2 (June 2007): 86, 88; International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, Agriculture at a Crossroads: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009).
14. Cheryl Doss et al., “The Role of Women in Agriculture,” ESA Working Paper No. 11-02 (working paper, FAO, Rome, 2011), 4, http://fao.org/docrep/013/am307e/am307e00.pdf.
15. Gerry Marten and Donna Glee Williams, “Getting Clean: Recovering from Pesticide Addiction,” The Ecologist (December 2006/January 2007): 50–53,http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/resources/download-pdf/publication-the-ecologist.pdf.
16. Randy Hayes and Dan Imhoff, Biosphere Smart Agriculture in a True Cost Economy: Policy Recommendations to the World Bank (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2015), 9, http://www.fdnearth.org/files/2015/09/FINAL-Biosphere-Smart-Ag-in-True-Cost-Economy-FINAL-1-page-display-1.pdf.
17. Matt Walpole et al., Smallholders, Food Security, and the Environment (Nairobi: UNEP, 2013), 6, 28, http://www.unep.org/pdf/SmallholderReport_WEB.pdf.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 15, 2017 | Agriculture
by Francis Thicke, introduction by Steven Gorelick / Local Futures
The organic food movement suffered a major setback recently, when the US National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted in favor of allowing hydroponically-grown products to receive the “organic” label. This decision should not have come as a surprise to those who have watched the organic movement steadily taken over by big agribusiness – a process that began in 1990 when Congress required the USDA to create a single set of national standards that would define the meaning of “organic”.
Previously, “organic” meant striving for a healthy relationship among farmers, farm animals, consumers, and the natural world – with soil-building seen as central to the long-term health of agriculture. Organic farms were certified by statewide or regional organizations using locally-defined standards, with the understanding that food production was necessarily diverse – reflecting local climates, soils, wildlife, pests, and so on. A one-size-fits-all national standard wasn’t needed to protect consumers who purchased food from local or regional organic farms, but it was required if global trade in organic products was to expand. The all-but-inevitable result has been a takeover of the organic market by corporate agribusinesses, along with a steady watering down of the standards – which have been largely reduced to a list of proscribed chemicals and required practices meant to apply everywhere. (At Local Futures we continue to believe that localizing food production offers the best way for consumers to know how their food was produced.)
After the decision to allow hydroponics under the “organic” label, National Organics Standards Board member Francis Thicke delivered the following farewell message to the Board:
There are two important things that I have learned during my five years on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). First, I learned that the NOSB review process for materials petitioned for inclusion on the National List is quite rigorous, with Technical Reviews of petitioned materials and careful scrutiny by both NOSB subcommittees and the full board.
The second thing I learned, over time, is that industry has an outsized and growing influence on USDA – and on the NOSB (including through NOSB appointments) – compared to the influence of organic farmers, who started this organic farming movement. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the growing value of organic sales. With organic becoming a $50 billion business, industry not only wants a bigger piece of the pie, they seem to want the whole pie.
We now have “organic” chicken CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] with 200,000 birds crammed into a building with no real access to the outdoors, and a chicken industry working behind the scenes to make sure that the animal welfare standards – weak as they are – never see the light of day, just like their chickens. The image consumers have of organic chickens ranging outside has been relegated to pictures on egg cartons.
We have “organic” dairy CAFOs with 15,000 cows in a feedlot in a desert, with compelling evidence by an investigative reporter that the CAFO is not meeting the grazing rule – not by a long shot. But when USDA does its obligatory “investigation,” instead of a surprise visit to the facility, USDA gives them a heads up by making an appointment, so the CAFO can move cows from feedlots to pasture on the day of inspection. This gives a green light to that dairy CAFO owner to move forward with its plans to establish a 30,000-cow facility in the Midwest.
We have large grain shipments coming into the US that are being sold as organic but that lack organic documentation. Some shipments have been proven to be fraudulent. The USDA has been slow to take action to stop this, and organic grain farmers in the US are suffering financially as a result.
We have a rapidly growing percentage of the fruits and vegetables on grocery store shelves being produced hydroponically, without soil, and mostly in huge industrial-scale facilities. And we have a hydroponics industry that has deceptively renamed hydroponic production – even with 100% liquid feeding – as “container” production. With their clever deception they have been able to bamboozle even the majority of NOSB members into complicity with their goal of taking over the organic fruit and vegetable market with their hydroponic products.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that big business is taking over the USDA organic program, because the influence of money is corroding all levels of our government. At this point, I can see only one way to bring the organic label back in line with the original vision of organic farmers and consumers. We need an add-on organic label for organic farmers who are willing to meet the expectations of discerning consumers who are demanding real organic food.
A while back I wouldn’t have supported the idea of an add-on organic label because I, like many others, saw the USDA organic label as the gold standard, and hoped that through our vision of the process of continuous improvement we could really make it into that gold standard. Now I can see that the influence of big business is not going to let that happen. The USDA is increasingly exerting control over the NOSB, and big business is tightening its grip on the USDA and Congress. Recently industry representatives have publicly called on the US Senate to weaken the NOSB and give industry a stronger role in the National Organic Program. And sympathetic Senators have promised to do just that.
I now support the establishment of an add-on organic label that will enable real organic farmers and discerning organic consumers to support one another through a label that represents real organic food. I support the creation of a label, such as the proposed Regenerative Organic Certification, that will ensure organic integrity; for example, that animals have real access to the outdoors to be able to express their natural behaviors, and that food is grown in soil. My hopes are that this add-on certification can be seamlessly integrated with the NOP certification, so that a single farm organic system plan and inspection can serve to verify both NOP and the higher level organic certification, by certifiers that are accredited by both certification systems.
I also am pleased that organic farmers have recently organized themselves into the Organic Farmers Association (OFA), to better represent themselves in the arena of public policy. Too often in the past the interests of big business have overruled the interests of organic farmers – and consumers – when organic policies are being established in Washington. I hope this will allow organic farmers to gain equal footing with industry on issues that affect the organic community.
In summary, organic is at a crossroads. Either we can continue to allow industry interests to bend and dilute the organic rules to their benefit, or organic farmers – working with organic consumers – can step up and take action to ensure organic integrity into the future.
Francis Thicke is a pioneering organic farmer who – with his wife Susan – operates a 730-acre farm in Fairfield, Iowa. He has served as a National Program Leader for soil science for the USDA-Extension Service, as a board member of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, and as a board member of the Cornucopia Institute. His 5-year term with the National Organics Standards Board just ended.
Steven Gorelick is the author of Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of The Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgencemagazines. He frequently teaches and speaks on local economics around the US. He also runs a small-scale organic farm with his wife and two children in Vermont.
Originally published in Local Futures. Republished with permission.
