There has been much talk recently about what the world
will be like in 2050. Speculation on a future economy in a world of nine
billion people, how we will deal with decreasing oil and natural gas reserves,
and the effects of climate change top the list for most people. Author Sarah
Elton, in her book Consumed: Food for a
Finite Planet, combines all of these – along with increased urbanization –
to ask the question: how will the world feed itself in 2050?
Today’s industrial food system is affected by everything
on this list. Elton argues that in order to best use the finite resources
available to us, we need to find alternatives to the industrial food system
that are sustainable, based in ethics and human rights, and maintain ecological
balance. She outlines a decade by decade set of targets to be met which she
believes is the path that will lead us to food security.
Elton travels to India where she meets with organic
farmer Chandrakala Bobade, who epitomizes the first decade’s target: ending industrial
farming and making agricultural systems sustainable. Many of India’s farmers
are in crisis. They are indebted to companies from which they purchase
expensive inputs for their crops – fertilizers, seeds – yet the returns are too
little to pay for the next round of inputs. Thousands of farmers commit suicide
each week as their farms fail. Others, like Bobade, have decided to go organic and
cut out the expensive fertilizers and seeds. They have been successful,
increased yields, run successful farmers’ markets, and shown that organic
farming can feed a country the size of India.
Elton interviews Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, professor of
rural studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who believes
industrial agriculture is “on its death bed” as it does not pay farmers
sufficiently to grow food and is environmentally damaging. In his opinion, the
small-scale farming model followed by Bobade and others will become the norm. However,
Elton argues that this transformation must also include a move away from a farm
system based on created cheap, processed food that results in further depressed
farm workers’ wages. Instead, says Elton, there need to be localized markets
for food so that people have “a real choice about what to eat and the right to
choose food grown in a particular way”.
Farmland itself is under pressure as governments and
developers snap up whatever acres they can grab – forests, wetlands, farms – to
build industrial parks and housing developments, or to plant cash crops for
biofuels and the export market. Countries like India are buying up land in Burma,
Kenya and Ethiopia to grow the food it needs as it paves over its own farmland.
In a world suffering the effects of climate change, Elton states that
sustainable agriculture would have farmland near to the urban markets needing
the food and governments should be actively protecting it instead of opening it
up to speculators waiting for a food crisis.
Elton’s second decade target is to ensure food security
through diversity in the seed supply. While in China, she visits a remote Hani
village that farms local rice varieties in terraced paddies irrigated by a
stream dammed with rocks, the soil worked by animals and birds. Each rice variety
is adapted to the local microclimate and is resistant to local pests. At one
point centuries ago, this mountainous landscape supported over ten thousand
hectares of rice paddies and in the 14th century it was known as the
Eastern Grain Barn.
Pressures on farmers even in this corner of China mean
they are foregoing planting traditional rice varieties, instead using the
high-yielding hybrid rice varieties. These new varieties are not well adapted,
requiring fertilizers and pesticides that harm the fish and ducks that help
keep the paddies healthy, as well as the wild foods once gathered. Not saving
seeds mean that the genetic material within them is lost forever, and the
diversity within food crops diminishes. Lower genetic diversity means that
crops will be more susceptible to increased levels of carbon dioxide or certain
pests because there are fewer genes to recombine to find a vigorous one that
will survive.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 75
percent of crop diversity was lost in the 20th century. India in the
1950s could boast thirty thousand wild varieties of rice; by 2015 is it likely
that number will have dropped to 50 wild varieties. North America 50 years ago
had multitudes of varieties of apples, but today most grocery stores carry only
a few varieties year round. Food supply is closely tied to the diversity of the
gene pool in the seeds of wheat, rice, corn and other crops.
For Elton, it is in the best interest of human survival
that seed banks continue to collect seeds, and publically-supported research
continues into development of crop varieties able to survive the conditions
predicted in a globally warmed future world. While Elton does not come out
fully against genetically modified seeds, she does say that patented seed
technologies hinder gains and the free exchange of scientific research into new
varieties is necessary.
The third target Elton outlines is more difficult to pin
down, but hearkens back to a time when societies were less urbanized and “more
connected” to nature. European countries like France still show this trend,
though it too is struggling against the “modernization” of food culture.
Monsieur Valadier is a 78 year old cattle farmer who never gave up the
traditional peasant life of the mountainous Aubrac region, where they kept the
cows and continued to make the famous Laguiole cheese used in the traditional dish
aligot. Elton writes of the food
grown in a certain region as having a terroir
– a unique taste created by the air, water and soil. It is these things that
connect people to the land around them.
However, “cultures of food are eroding” as urbanites do
not experience this same close connection, instead learning the taste of the
supermarkets with their pre-roasted chickens and boxes of salad mix. Price and
convenience are more important in busy lives than taste and nutrition. The
danger, says researcher Harry Balzer, is that food habits learned at a young
age are difficult to change later in life. Basically, he says, growing up on a
diet of processed foods means it will likely be in your diet as an adult.
Reconnecting with the terroir of
locally purchased and “home-cooked” foods may be what is needed to raise a
generation concerned about the farmland that sustains them and wanting to take
part in the process.
To achieve this requires a food production revolution. It
may take Elton’s many urban gardens, small organic farms run by peasant
farmers, seed banks and culture-awakening terroir.
It may take and entire change to the economic system. What is obvious is that
tying food and food production into the current system has been a disaster,
leading to price fluctuations in staples, increased poverty as farmers are
driven off their land by corporations, and environmental degradation. The ideas
in this book are good starting point for the changes needed as we move towards
2050.
This review was previously published here: http://www.socialist.ca/node/1797
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