The Coming Food Crisis
Found a story on the coming global food crisis the Independent (via Raw Story) that shows some of the problems with agriculture. The story features Lester Brown, who was interviewed recently at treehugger.com. Last week the NY Times ran a story on the failed corn crop in much of the West.
The Independent article blames population increase plus growing ethanol demand, then goes on to say the solution is to help poor countries grow more of their own food. And there’s the rub. Just this morning my friend Mike was telling how his nephew just returned from Peace Corps duty in Zambia, where he was teaching the locals how to farm-raise Tilapia. “The problem,” says Mike “is that they are subsitence farmers and have no concept of cash crops.” To his credit, he caught himself and said “Actually, who knows whether that’s good or bad.”
The green revolution was based on cheap oil and exporting destructive practices that produced more in the short term but created conditions in which few people could and did farm. The US in the 1960’s is a great example, and Wendell Berry quotes then Secretary of Agriculture McGeorge Bundy as saying how great it is that only 3% of the US population produces all its food. The fact is that subsistence farming has been systematically destroyed. Ostensibly this is to make way for global agricultural products markets, but Doha and the EU Constitutional crises should show that we have a long way to go before there is anything like a level playing field in global farming.