Ecological costs of conventional farming
The ecological consequences of giant agriculture (also known as conventional farming, agribusiness, green revolution and industrial and factory agriculture) are equally severe and dramatic. Giant agriculture is an industrial system that has very little to do with traditional farming. It relies on 'producing' one crop at a time on expanses of the land, plantations, huge spreads, feeding that one crop with synthetic fertilisers and protecting it from insects and diseases with powerful toxins. Giant agriculture also consists of concentrated livestock operations and food processing and marketing. Chemical-intensive and toxic means of pest control do kill anything (insects, pathogens, plants and animals) in competition with the plant or animal of the farmer. But the primary importance of those agricultural biocides is political. They make it possible for giant agriculture to stay giant.
In 1987, both the US Department of Agriculture and the National Academy of Sciences concluded that chemical pesticides `are responsible for a wide array of unacceptable negative effects on the environment'.15 They are right, but few people listen. America's fertile land is being poisoned to force the maximum production of a few cash crops.
One of the many nasty consequences of such a dangerous practice and policy is that more and more terata, yes, human terata, babies with severe birth defects (such as male infant born with two penises; or a child born with eight (8) arms), are born to farmers and to those who live near farmers. For example, researchers from the University of Minnesota and the US Environmental Protection Agency report that the deleterious human effects of agribusiness are pronounced in the spring wheat, potato and sugar beet regions of western Minnesota whose farmers use extensive amounts of chlorophenoxy defoliant herbicides like 2,4-D, MCPA and fungicides. These scientists documented life-threatening birth defects in rural Minnesota among children born in the spring to pesticide applicators, farmers and others who reside next to them.16 The National Academy of Sciences also concluded in 1989 that conventional farming in many states is 'the leading nonpoint source of water pollution'.17
"Most things in agriculture today (1992) are really death systems.... Agriculture today grows nonsensical crops for nonsensical reasons. It grows practically all of its soybean to feed animals; fish are caught to be turned into powder and fed to pigs ... Beef agriculture has destroyed the world’s drylands ... And the world’s largest agriculture is the European and American grass lawn ... Agriculture lost its way in the 1940s. Once it was there to produce food for people; now it’s there to produce money for large interests. With present day agriculture, the Third World is made to feed the First World, the reverse of aid in its true sense." — Bill Mollison, "A design science with an ethic", Ceres (Nov/Dec 1992), pp. 24-25.
Since 1945, conventional or green revolution-style agriculture has degraded an area of more than 2.4 billion acres of land, the equivalent of a region covering India and China together.18 Nearly half of that wrecked land, some of it moderately eroded, some of it severely degraded, is in Africa.19 Yet economic analysis obscures the degradation and, sometimes, the destruction of the natural resources in the absence of which no agriculture is possible.
Moreover, the persistent policies of conventional agriculture in using only a handful of crops to 'produce' most of the world's food (largely in huge farms, displacing the tiny peasant farms that are immensely rich in biological and cultural diversity) are responsible for the tragic loss of a considerable amount of genetic resources for food and agriculture. The last century alone witnessed the loss of some 75 per cent of the varieties of food crops. In the tropics, says Hugh Iltis, the world-renowned botanist at the University of Wisconsin, cash-crop agriculture causes biological genocide and utter devastation.20 The situation is so bad, in the impoverishment of both the cultural and biological diversity that determine what people have been worshipping, growing and eating for millennia, that one can describe the loss of agricultural biodiversity and the erosion of cultural diversity as a biological and cultural meltdown.21
SOURCE: E. G. Vallianatos, "All of Africa Weeps," Race and Class, Vol. 43, 2001.
Endnotes
15. National Academy of Sciences, Board on Basic Biology, Commission on Life Sciences, Research Briefing 1987: report of the Research Panel on Biological Control in Managed Ecosystems (Washington, DC, National Academy Press, 1987).
16. Vincent F. Garry et al., ‘Pesticide appliers, biocides, and birth defects in rural Minnesota’, Environmental Health Perspectives (April 1996), pp. 394-9.
17. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Alternative Agriculture (Washington, DC, National Academy Press, 1989), p. 7.
18. World Resources Institute, World Resources 1992-93: a guide to the global environment (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 3.
19. United Nations Environment Programme, Global Environment Outlook (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 26.
20. Hugh Iltis, ‘Extinction is forever’, Resurgence (November/December 1997), pp. 18-22.
21. Hope Shand, Human Nature: Agricultural biodiversity and farm-based food security (Ottawa, Canada, Rural Advancement Foundation International, December 1997), pp. 1-9. This report was prepared for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
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