‘Farmageddon’ Looming

Large Monoculture Farming Is Unsustainable and Unhealthy

By PF Louis

The current model of modern day farming was ostensibly created to produce lots of affordable food. It has succeeded in over feeding a population with high calorie, low nutrient foods while making a few multinational corporations rich. But millions still go hungry.

Those corporations--whether grain gatherers, producers of processed foods, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or GMO seeds--are constantly merging and cross cooperating to ensure their monopoly on food. We need to escape this farmopoly before it becomes farmageddon.

As far back as 1936, a research paper commissioned by Congress in the USA, Senate Document 264 of the 74th Congress made a startling statement on the quality of food: "...99 percent of the American people are deficient in...minerals, and...a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease."

The report also informed Congress: "It is not commonly realized...that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and that in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. ...lacking minerals, the vitamins are useless."

Trailer for Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms, directed by Kristin Canty
Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems—most often the industrial food chain—policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.

Farmageddon highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals’ rights to access food of their choice and farmers’ rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasonably burdensome regulations. The film serves to put policymakers and regulators on notice that there is a growing movement of people aware that their freedom to choose the foods they want is in danger, a movement that is taking action with its dollars and its voting power to protect and preserve the dwindling number of family farms that are struggling to survive.

This finding was based on farming topsoil mineral depletion. Large monoculture farming had become prominent. In the early 1950s, the great cancer healer Dr. Max Gerson announced that we are being exposed to toxins while eating foods lacking nutrition.

Big Ag was born. Pushing rapidly for more yields--using artificial fertilizers year after year without crop rotation or fallow periods (when soil is plowed but not seeded) to allow topsoil to regenerate minerals--had already created topsoil mineral depletion.

Then after WW II, the 'cides arrived: Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. And these 'cides are used in soil (sprayed on plants then soaked into the soil), seed soaking, and storage preservation. Adding GMOs exacerbates the toxic, non-nutritional commercial food chain to a point of agricultural self destruction, as several GMO farmers are now discovering the hard way.

This is the result of large monoculture factory farming with only a few large corporations in charge of food storage and distribution as well as corporate food processing.

Add large grocery retail chains to this food monopoly. It all stacks up as a huge network of centralized food cartels. Evidently, the food cartels care more about control over the world's food supply and profit than feeding the world and getting rid of hunger.

Many grains are purchased by large food processing corporations that adulterate those grains even more. Cheap food has proven to take a high price in worsening public health. But even cheap food is threatened by potential food shortages due to excess centralization and commodity traders' price manipulation.

Yes, Wall Street has gotten into the commodity trading act with derivative "bets,” leading to inflated food commodity price peaks that already have jeopardized millions worldwide.

Escaping the Foodopoly Matrix

What's needed is gradual food distribution decentralization phased in by organic farming near enough to urban centers to feed most consumers in those local areas. Farmers need to have their rightful dignity restored and to escape their virtual serfdom from the Cargills, Monsantos, Archer Daniels Midlands, and Wall Street banksters.

Then local markets should be promoting and pushing their foods. Okay, this may not be the way to get bananas in Chicago or cherries in the winter. But at the rate the food cartel octopus is destroying the food chain, there may be a point where bananas and cherries are no longer available anywhere anytime.

At the premiere of Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms. Includes an interview with filmmaker Kristin Canty.

A 2010 United Nations commissioned committee report, taking four years to produce by hundreds of international experts, concluded that diverse organic farming, not biotech monoculture forced on the world, is the best option for sustainable food production capable of curbing world hunger. It's easy to understand why this report has been kept from public awareness.

Sources for this article include:

UN Report favoring diverse organic farming (PDF)

"Foodies, Get Thee to Occupy Wall Street"

1936 mineral deficiency report

Various mega cartels that are strangling humanity

The world's top ten food seed companies

Global Food Cartel Fast Becoming World's Supermarket

Learn more at Natural News

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Work proceeds apace at CloudView Eco Farm in Royal City, WA. Cloudview believes in intentional, sustainable food production and healthy environments. While redefining its reliance on industrial systems of ag-production and distribution, it is improving the quality and nutrition of the food we eat. The CloudView group of co-creators is dedicated to growing vitalized food in a sustainable, ecologically friendly, and collective manner. With a holistic approach to farming, CloudView is working to ‘be the change’ it wants to see in the world. The farm encourages day and weekend visitors, offers week- and month-long internships and also offers year-long employment. For more information about available positions, call Jim Baird at 509.760.4777 or email [email protected].

UN: Eco-Farming Feeds the World

By Paula Crossfield

For years now, the most-asked question by detractors of the good food movement has been, “Can organic agriculture feed the world?” According to a United Nations report, the answer is a big, fat yes.

The report, Agro-ecology and the Right to Food, reveals that small-scale sustainable farming would even double food production within five to 10 years in places where most hungry people on the planet live.

“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report, said in a press release. “The solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation, and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.”

The report suggests moving away from the overuse of oil in farming, a problem that is magnified in the face of rising prices due to unrest in the Middle East. The focus is instead on agroecology, or eco-farming. “Agroecology seeks to improve the sustainability of agroecosystems by mimicking nature instead of industry,” reads a section.

The report shows that these practices raise productivity significantly, reduce rural poverty, increase genetic diversity, improve nutrition in local populations, serve to build a resilient food system in the face of climate change, utilize fewer and more locally available resources, empower farmers and create jobs.

Of 57 impoverished countries surveyed, for example, yields had increased by an average of nearly 80 percent when farmers used methods such as placing weed-eating ducks in rice patties in Bangladesh or planting desmodium, which repels insects, in Kenyan cornfields. These practices were also cost effective, locally available and resulted from farmers working to pass on this knowledge to each other in their communities.

While the report admits that agroecology can be more labor-intensive because of the complexity of knowledge required, it shows that this is usually a short-term issue. The report underscores that agroecology creates more jobs over the long term answering critics who argue that creating more jobs in agriculture is counter-productive. “Creation of employment in rural areas in developing countries, where underemployment is currently massive, and demographic growth remains high,” states the report, “may constitute an advantage rather than a liability and may slow down rural-urban migration.”

Mark Bittman put it aptly in his column on the UN report at the New York Times, saying:

Agro-ecology and related methods are going to require resources too, but they’re more in the form of labor, both intellectual—much research remains to be done—and physical: the world will need more farmers, and quite possibly less mechanization.

This is not the first time such a report has declared more productive ways to feed the world other than leaving that important task to large corporations. In April 2008, the IAASTD report (the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development)–which was supported by the World Bank, the UN Food & Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, among others, with the participation of over 60 world governments and 400 experts–found that not only would industrial food production not be able to feed the world in the long term, but the practices being employed are actually increasing hunger, exhausting resources and exacerbating climate change. However, the U.S., under the Bush Administration, was one of the countries that decided not to endorse the findings.

Though agroecological farming has benefits for industrialized countries too, both reports focus largely on what to do in the least-developed nations on the globe. The status quo for U.S. foreign policy in agriculture up until now has been to leverage our political muscle to force countries to except our subsidized crops, even if it meant destroying local agricultural economies. (Former President Bill Clinton apologized for this policy last year, saying that it has “failed everywhere it’s been tried,” and “we should have continued to work to make sure [Haiti] was self-sufficient in agriculture.”) Will the Obama Administration be more receptive to these findings and could there be a change in the way we work with other countries in our support for agriculture?

Looking back at this (proudly pro-business (www.grist.org) administration’s follies in hiring a pesticide lobbyist as our Agricultural Trade Representative, maintaining the USDA in the confusing role of promoting and regulating agriculture, and focusing on “improved seeds,” which usually means funding for the development of genetically modified crops for poor countries and you might be discouraged.

But De Schutter argues that real change to improve the livelihoods of rural farmers requires governments to be on board. “States and donors have a key role to play here,” he said. “Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical products or improved seeds.” In other words, feeding the worlds hungry should not be left to the market alone.

The report makes these specific recommendations for governing bodies:

•making reference to agroecology and sustainable agriculture in national strategies for the realization of the right to food and by including measures adopted in the agricultural sector in national adaptation plans of action (NAPAs) and in the list of nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs) adopted by countries in their efforts to mitigate climate change;

•reorienting public spending in agriculture by prioritizing the provision of public goods, such as extension services, rural infrastructures and agricultural research, and by building on the complementary strengths of seeds-and-breeds and agroecological methods, allocating resources to both, and exploring the synergies, such as linking fertilizer subsidies directly to agroecological investments on the farm (“subsidy to sustainability”);

•supporting decentralized participatory research and the dissemination of knowledge about the best sustainable agricultural practices by relying on existing farmers’ organizations and networks, and including schemes designed specifically for women;

•improving the ability of producers practicing sustainable agriculture to access markets, using instruments such as public procurement, credit, farmers’ markets, and creating a supportive trade and macroeconomic framework.

The report also gives recommendations for donors seeking to decrease hunger and improve rural livelihoods and for research organizations.

Paula Crossfield is the managing editor of Civil Eats. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio where she focuses on food issues. An avid cook and gardener, she currently tends a vegetable garden on her roof in the Lower East Side. You can follow her on Twitter for the latest food policy news.

From Civil Eats (PDF)

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Human Rights Council
Sixteenth session
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development

Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter

Summary

The reinvestment in agriculture, triggered by the 2008 food price crisis, is essential to the concrete realization of the right to food. However, in a context of ecological, food and energy crises, the most pressing issue regarding reinvestment is not how much, but how. This report explores how States can and must achieve a reorientation of their agricultural systems towards modes of production that are highly productive, highly sustainable and that contribute to the progressive realization of the human right to adequate food.

Drawing on an extensive review of the scientific literature published in the last five years, the Special Rapporteur identifies agroecology as a mode of agricultural development which not only shows strong conceptual connections with the right to food, but has proven results for fast progress in the concretization of this human right for many vulnerable groups in various countries and environments. Moreover, agroecology delivers advantages that are complementary to better known conventional approaches such as breeding high-yielding varieties. And it strongly contributes to the broader economic development.

The report argues that the scaling up of these experiences is the main challenge today. Appropriate public policies can create an enabling environment for such sustainable modes of production. These policies include prioritizing the procurement of public goods in public spending rather than solely providing input subsidies; investing in knowledge by reinvesting in agricultural research and extension services; investing in forms of social organization that encourage partnerships, including farmer field schools and farmers’’ movements innovation networks; investing in agricultural research and extension systems; empowering women; and creating a macro-economic enabling environment, including connecting sustainable farms to fair markets.

Read the entire report here (PDF)