February 01, 2010 07:04 PM UTC
Agriculture from the perspective of an ancient culturalist
13 Comments- by: Sir Robin
and from a very intelligent software engineer in India:
Wisdom of the uncivilized crowds
Jan. 28th, 2010 at 8:55 AM
Picture this: A remote indian village in the Ganges delta a few hundred years ago. The farmer starts his day by letting his flock of ducks into his irrigated fields. The water from the river brings with it, besides nutrients and alluvium, some unwanted (for the crops) pests too. But that is not a problem – the ducks will keep the pests in control. Not only that, they will turn them pests into manure and drop it right inside the pool of collected water to be anaerobically decomposed under the water. Maybe the farmer doesn’t realize it and thinks the Sun god and Nature godesses are helping him. But that’s just a coincidence that’s helping him continue his ways. They worship the arrival of the Stork (which, btw, even the Japanese and Chinese do. Coincidence? (I’m willing to bet Mexicans do that too!)) There are still pockets in India where people’s lifestyles are frozen in time and haven’t pretty much changed.
The saying goes Unity in Diversity and its true for stable ecosystems. Agriculture as it has been practiced in India over centuries has relied and depended on nature’s forces and whether we evolved our practices, designed the system by hand or got it by sheer luck overnight… every Indian alive today is a proof that we survived in this region for several thousand years. The fertility due to the unique geographical structure of the sub-continent is a natural gift. Consciously/sub-consciously/systemically realizing it and living on it for thousands of years is wisdom.
The Great Change
Then came along the colonialists. We all kinda know what happened. I’d just like to place an exerpt from Lord Macaulay’s speech in the British Parliament on 2nd Feb 1835 (quoted elsewhere in various contexts on the web (typically nationalistic sounding ones). I first found it in Amartya Sen’s book The Argumentative Indian):
“I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”
Several things changed after the advent of the colonialists. Some for “our” good, one could argue? For instance, the Colonialists left at the end of a major war (one of the root-causes was Colonisation itself!). India was Freed, right? That specific form of exploiting India’s resources changed from that of direct occupation to a more subtle and effective form called “Free Trade”. The Bretton Woods system ratified all Capitalist nations’ interests in continued exploitation of natural resources by the still-ruling powers of the world (namely US, Britain, France, etc.,). Free Trade, in other words, is a system of exploitation of a so-called Third World nation’s resources by someone with Little Green Pieces of Paper on the lines of “If you let me take your stuff, you’ll get these little green pieces of paper using which you can buy the finished goods I produce using your nation’s resources”.
Female infanticide
Besides improvement in the quality of lives of those people who accepted the little green pieces of paper, there were arguably some other improvements. For instance, They ‘taught’ the peoples what it means to be “humane”. Female infanticide, what a terrible and ruthless thing it is! But… it is also important to realize that this so-called “inhumane” killing of the girl baby is a very effective means of population control. (By no means am I justifying or arguing for female infanticide here. Far from it.)
In the wild, many males go unmated. A male doesn’t mean more individuals. A female that survives, however, very likely results in more children. Educating the females coupled with eradication of female infanticide would have worked. But with India, it was a half done job… and that’s worse than not doing the job at all!
Take away that population stabilisation mechanism of Female Infanticide and add to it the joke called the Green Revolution, India saw her population rise and her once-stable ways of life completely changed forever. Today, we’re a billion+ and to feed that growing population we had to adopt ways of agriculture that was previously not thought of. Today, India boasts of vast areas of degraded soil on the planet. It is only imperative that she would end up in this situation given the decisions that were made by the so-called Leaders of that Era.
Where be the Wisdom?
… The colonialists are back (strong statement, indeed 😉 ) – under the name of Monsanto DuPont and several other MNC “Agri Businesses” who promise to solve the problem of world’s poverty (does that ring a bell?). Last time, it was by releasing the locked up Nitrogen in a finite endowment of Natural Gas to create Fertilizers, developing an infrastructure of Farm Mechanisation that relied (and still relies) on Fossil fuels (specifically Diesel) and quickly releasing up water stored in deep Aquifers through the use of, yet again, cheap fossil fuels (a significant portion of Electricity comes from Coal + Oil + Natural Gas).
This time, they’re back with the same old excuse of atempting to solve World’s poverty by manipulating our domesticated life forms’ DNA.
… so what exactly is their system of “solving world hunger”?
1. The company has had a successful herbicide product called Round Up. (remember, Agent Orange?) The herbicide kills just about anything in it’s way. Earlier, farmers had to exercise care when spraying the herbicide because they ran the risk of killing their crops too. Roundup is a non-selective weed killer. The paradox with Life is that, the more we apply Selection Pressure, the more “evolved” the species we’re trying to kill becomes. This is because those individuals that could be killed are already gone! The ones that remain are the ones who were difficult to kill in the first place and if they manage to leave their progeny, those progeny are likely equally difficult too! Over just a few generations, things become very difficult for one generation of humans. The use of just the herbicide alone didn’t scale well. We talk “scale” only when we talk growth. However, Stability needs resilience. The job done by the frogs, the sparrows, the spiders, the lizards and the earthworms were now replaced by one single plastic bottle with a TradeMarked logo on it. How neat?
2. Since the Herbicide solution didn’t scale they had to do a round 2 of their fight against nature – through Genetic Engineering. They “invented” a new “variety” of crop that were resistant to the herbicide (called “Round up ready $whatever”). All was good for a while, until recently (2 yrs ago) when farmers started reporting Super Weeds. Life evolves in amazingly powerful ways. This was just one example.
3. Genetic Engineering has two peculiar problems:
a. Bugs: If a Microsoft writes buggy code, they can send a “fix”. But what happens when there are “bugs” in the Genetically Engineered code? How do you fix a plant? Today’s Genetic Engineering methods are still crude. Its not like we insert a nano-particle that reads through the genes and ‘modifies’ the genes. They merely insert some other animal’s genes that produces the desired proteins!
b. Intellectual Property: Life replicates. That’s the equivalent of piracy, only naturally done by the bees.
To avoid these two problems, they introduced Terminator Technology. Simply put, the seeds produced by the GM crops aren’t seeds. They cannot produce new plants when sown. They’re merely grains for consumption. Seed saving – The very practice that brought about agriculture, will no longer be applicable since the seeds are all impotent. I’m sure we have all read about Farmer suicides and the wide-spread cause of suffering due to this very enslavement.
Ah, solve hunger by killing people? That makes sense! Oh wait, that “scale” requires farm machinery which, by today’s infrastructure, is all designed to run on Diesel.
Now, I’d like to draw you to the end of this post by instilling a sense of hope through this real life story that I’ve been quite proud of…
In our farm, We decided to sow only native variety rice seeds (we picked two varieties namely “Garudan Samba” and “Gandakasala”. We had to obtain them with much difficulty since the government makes only narrow-mindedly designed rice varieties from the IRRI available to the farmers). At first, the locals (having forgotten their own ways of traditional, resilient agriculture) laughed at us and even questioned if such things will be “practical” in today’s world. Grace be to the all merciless, non-existent God!The rains poured and destroyed their crops at a completely unseasonal time. Our crops were damaged, but not destroyed completely. Now, they are beginning to see the advantanges.
They’re curious to find out how to obtain these seeds. They’re stlil using pesticides. But they’re beginning to see the birds perched atop our now-growing trees helping with pest control. They’re still using fertilizers but that’s because 1. fertile, naturally rich soils aren’t anywhere around. Our soil has just begun the recovery from the damages due to prolonged nitrogen fertilizer use in the past (ie., before we bought this land). 2. Fertilizers are still pretty much free flowing in this Peak Moment.
I’ve become pretty much cynical that most of the times its only the shock doctrine that helps bring the masses to Reality. Those very things can also be learnt by applying thought. However challenging or even depressing that might seem initially.
If you’d like to “take away” anything from this post: All I ask the reader is to switch to locally produced foods that is not GM. Every paisa is a profit that helps further their ways of enslavement and suffering. It kills our wisdom, however foolish and ridiculous it might sound to the “Free Thinking” west. Ridicule works and we must not fall prey to their old ways. Free Thought brings with it a sense of confidence and a dash of arrogance. Knowing that arrogance is Wisdom. Evolutionary studies today show that the genetic differences amongst the so-called “races” is totally insignificant and that it has just been mere chances that led to the rise and fall of several civilizations. The people of this sub-continent didn’t use Coal in 19th century and Oil in the 20th century like what the “Colonisers” have been doing. But that’s just a finite resource. The success of the west is only temporary and eventually they’ll have to deal with reality in ways we’ve all come to accept in the past – thousands of years ago.
An American Indian quote to end the post:
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”
His blog is here:
http://sunson.livejournal.com/
Highly recommended. Thanks for the link to his blog.
Well done, Sir.
First, there is nothing in the post that argues strongly for locally grown food. Indeed, not trying to grow foods in places where they don’t belong naturally takes pressure off farmers to use genetic modification and non-organic methods to grow foods. Locally grown diets are less diverse, and usually, as a result, less healthy. Trade in food is not the problem.
Second, small scale farming is far less productive than “agri-business farming” per acre. The smallest 74% of farms (1,507,000 out of 1,912,000 in the U.S.) produce just 3% of U.S. farm products on 31% of U.S. farm acreage. Mid-sized farms make up 23% of U.S. farms (438,000)and produce about 40% of U.S. farm production on about 50% of U.S. farm acreage. About 57% of all U.S. farm production comes from just 4% of U.S. farms (69,000) that are the largest on 19% of U.S. farm acreage.
This productivity has allowed smaller and smaller percentage of people to be farmers, which has made it possible for people to do other things that sustain civilization. In 1820, 72% of of U.S. workers were engaged in farm occupations; in 1840 it was 69%; in 1860 it was 59%, in 1880 it was 57%, in 1900 it was 38%, in 1920 it was 27%, in 1940 it was 17%, in 1960 it was 6%, in 1980 it was 3%, by 2000 it is a little over 2%. Widespread subsistance farming a pretty miserable existence.
Sustainability and symbotic uses of land in agriculture are great. But, India will not be not a good model for agriculture, unless and until, it can manage to escape its own dire poverty, which is in part a function of low agricultural productivity.
Ancient agriculture wasn’t particularly sustainable either. Why is most of Iraq a desert instead of the forest that it was when it deserved the name “fertile crescent?” Irrigation salted the field and forst clearing destroyed the ecosystem. The pattern repeated itself time and again until the bread basket of agriculture in Europe and the Near East had shifted to Western Europe. (The trend may not be over yet.)
Ancient farms also made civilization possible mostly by genetically modifying, though low tech means, crops and domesticated animals. Native crops were cultivated and gathered thousands of years before they were genetically modified, but civilization didn’t take off until new, more productive crops came along. Genetic modification was vital in all of the dozen or so places in the world where agriculture arose (wheat and maize, for example, are both genetic monsters).
If we want to learn anything from India, it is that the low meat, high vegetable diet common there makes it possible to sustain much larger populations than American/European style high meat diets with similar levels of agricultural production.
If one measures agricultural “productivity” in terms of acres planted to crops or dollars per bushel produced or farmer-hours per ton of grain, I agree with you, ohwilleke, that agricultural “productivity” has risen incredibly.
However, if one measures productivity in terms of fossil fuel energy inputs for food energy outputs, agricultural “productivity” is actually negative. (For every food calorie in the American diet, approx. 10 calories of fossil fuel were required to produce it. Much of this fuel use if for the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.)
In short, we eat oil.
[For another example, if one measures productivity in terms of tons of food produced per inch of topsoil lost, again we have a negative relationship.]
These are the results of large scale agribusiness. And, because of the “amazing” “productivity” of (subsidized) farms in the US, it is not cost effective for people in many countries to grow their own food. The fact that imported grains from the US are “cheaper” perpetuates cycles of poverty elsewhere in the world (Mexico is a nearby example).
By shipping our products around the world, we have forced people off farms and they have become part of the mass of un(der)employed living in urban areas.
Small scale farming, focusing on human labor inputs, resulted in the production of 10 food calories for each calorie of input. Granted, because of the current global population size, we may never be able to willingly return to a more sustainable model of food production.
So, improvements in agricultural “productivity” in the US are positive if one is allowed to keep the vast majority of the costs in a separate ledger file. In some industries, keeping two sets of books is considered illegal. Here you are celebrating it as “improvements in productivity.”
Granted, this great advancement in agricultural “efficiency” has greatly improved the quality of my life. But it doesn’t change the fact that at some point someone is going to want a reckoning. Payback will be a bitch …
…but the pesticide/fertalizer run-off into our streams, rivers and aquafers means it ends up polluting our water supplies as well.
You could say we end up drinking it too.
It isn’t an argument for either small scale or local agriculture.
Link
Who do you think is going to be amendable to these types of conservation practices–a small scale/local/family farm who’s invested in the community or a corporate one who’s only concerns are counting their taxpayer subsidy and the bottom line?
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concentrated feedlot operations cause more of the “increased aquatic nitrate concentration” in Iowa ground and surface water than growing crops with nitrogen fertilizers.
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…are a relatively new (i.e., within the last 20 years) threat to the groudwater. Over fertilization of crops and resulting run-off has been a problem for a much longer period of time. However, they are still a very real concern.
Moreover, it’s not just the nitrates from these operations that are of concern:
produces 3% of farm output, and work on a “best practices” regime for larger farms.
Agribusiness owners have a longer time horizon than most business owners and are surprisingly interested in constructive criticism that will enhance sustainability.
not just agriculture.
The Industrial Revolution was initially a product of exploitation of coal (which fueled the many “steam age” inventions). Oil and natural gas followed.
Driving, lights at night, computers, buildings, heat, and more are all products of fossil fuels.
The grand bargain is that fossil fuels have bought us three or four hundred years to find an alternative. If we don’t find replacements (basically renewable or nuclear or vastly cheaper way to exploit currently inaccessible fossil fuels) then we fall back to a sophisticated version of the pre-Industrial era.
But, “eating oil” can in theory be sustained for centuries. Most of our oil goes to cars and trucks. The proportion of world oil consumption that goes to things like agriculture, lubricants, plastics, air travel, and the like is pretty modest by comparison. If we can find alternative fuels (like electric cars and trains that use renewable or nuclear source electricity) for the transportation sector, Peak Oil goes from being a looming catastrophe to a distant nagging concern.
Also, like a lot of things, not all uses of fossil fuels in agriculture (or water) are equally productivity enhancing. It isn’t at all unlikely that one can tweak the most oil hungry parts of agribusiness without disturbing the fundamental efficiency of that model. This seems more plausible than prospects of reasonably efficient small scale agriculture.
If you want a society where life is nasty, brutish and short, you want a society where everyone makes their own food and lives or dies based upon their ability to produce crops.
There are all sorts of things humanity can do. But, only if someone’s time is freed up to do something other than making their own food. A society where everyone farms is a deeply impovershed society.
Mexico’s improving standard of living flows from the off the farm activities that people have been permitte to engage in because they can get cheaper food.
Think of it this way: Would you prefer to have a grocery bill of $200 per person per month, leaving money left over for other things, or would you prefer to spend all of your income every month on groceries leaving no money available for anything else? This is what agricultural productivity means.
Rural migrants to urban areas mostly don’t starve. They mostly find productive employment that allows them to buy food and get other things and increases everyone’s standard of living. They mostly improve their standard of living. If they didn’t people wouldn’t migrate to cities.
Full employment at $200 a month is not obviously preferrable to 90% employment at $1000 a month.
I think I admitted in my first post that modern ag has benefited my quality of life. So, please refrain from stark conclusions that because I don’t see everything as rosy, that I think agri-business is nothing but a fetid mess.
BUT … there you go again claiming that people in Mexico (and elsewhere) have access to “cheaper” food because of large-scale ag.
This food is “cheaper” in dollars because we both subsidize production in the US and we encourage agri-business to keep their costs in a separate ledger.
Nearly equivalent CO2 is released due to modern agriculture compared to transportation. Soil loss, poisoned aquifers, manure lagoons, degraded wetlands, super weeds, biodiversity loss, obesity, nitrogen pollution of formerly pristine wild areas, etc. are some of the costs that are externalized.
Does our society think the benefits are worth the costs? We have never had the discussion. It might be that we’d decide the trade off is overall positive enough. For example, I definitely think that subsidizing food production has many benefits.
But while we’re in the mode of tossing out ridiculous false dichotomies, think of it this way: Do you want to pay the costs for cleaning up all the poisoned water, land and air, or do you want to keep forcing these costs onto the next generations? And what costs more: cleaning up or minimizing pollution in the first place?
Finally (well, nearly), I find your statement that
to be a less than happy thought.
[But enough with all this. I’m probably still painting a picture that suggests I think that modern agri-business is the root of all evil. I really don’t think this. I recognize that the world is seldom black and white and that there are multiple causes of the bad I’ve identified above. I’m nearly certain that you view the world in similarly nuanced ways.
My main complaint, really, is the obsession that too many of us have with measuring “efficiency” and “productivity” in relation to dollars outlaid. I’m convinced THIS perspective obscures the environmental and social damage that many of our decisions and actions lead to. If we instead measured efficiency and productivity in other terms (e.g., energy expended), I think we would make many different decisions.
]