Ronnie Cummins: America's Fatal Harvest--Sixty Years of Industrial Agriculture

Fatal Harvest: Sixty Years of Industrial Agriculture

Biodemocracy Bytes #3
By Ronnie Cummins
Feb. 7, 2006

The last sixty years of "modern" industrial agriculture in the United
States, characterized by ever-higher chemical, technology, and energy
inputs, can only be characterized as a "Fatal Harvest," for small farmers,
the environment, biodiversity, and public health.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/IndustrialAg502.cfm

This industrialized junk food system has not only polluted the environment,
depleted aquifers, destroyed topsoil, and released enormous greenhouse and
ozone-depleting gases; but has also engendered an epidemic of obesity, heart
disease, and cancer, as well as reproductive and hormone disorders--not to
mention 86 million cases of food poisoning a year.

Whether we're looking at the annual impact of 12 billion pounds of chemical
nitrate fertilizers; a billion pounds of toxic pesticides, herbicides, and
fungicides; thousands of tons of antibiotic residues and hormones in dairy
products and meat (80% of all antibiotics produced in the country are added
to animals to force the animals to grow faster and to survive the hellish
conditions of factory-style farms and intensive confinement); massive
applications of industrial waste and sewage sludge on the nation's
farmlands, and literally billions of pounds of tainted slaughterhouse waste,
blood, fat, and raw manure fed to animals on non-organic farms, it's a
wonder we¹re not all dead.

Now with the advent of so-called "Free Trade" treaties such as the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the General Agreement on Trade
and Tariffs (GATT) of World Trade Organization, this Fatal Harvest of
American-style industrial agriculture and genetic engineering is being
touted as the preferred model for the entire world.

Even ignoring the health hazards of junk food, genetic engineering, food
irradiation, and industrial agriculture for a moment, the likely global
environmental and socio-economic consequences of adopting the American-style
system of energy and chemical-intensive factory farming and long distance
food transportation are apocalyptic.

Using the USA as a model, let's look at the end results of 60 years of
industrial agriculture, of taxpayers being misled or brainwashed into
subsidizing corporate farms and industrial production techniques to the tune
of $20-40 billion a year, of consuming increasing amounts of cheap
convenience food, and of allowing giant wholesale and retail monopolies
(Cargill, ADM, Wal-Mart, McDonald¹s, ConAgra, Kraft, Monsanto) to control
the food, seed, and fiber marketplace.

First of all the dynamics of corporate-dominated, energy and
chemical-intensive industrial agriculture have driven most of America's
family farmers off the land. The total number of farms in the United States
has declined from 6.5 million in 1935 to around 2 million in 1997. Most of
this decline has taken place among small and medium-sized family farms. Even
the small number of farmers remaining today exaggerates how many family
farms are left, because most are part-time residential or retirement farms.
Recent USDA statistics show that 61% of USA farm production is coming from
the nation¹s largest 161,000 farms (8% of all farms), while only 39% of all
production is coming from the remaining 92% of small farms.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census stopped counting "farm residents" in 1993
because there were so few farmers left. In contrast, in 1900, farm residents
made up 35 percent of the total population. The average non-organic farmer
in the U.S. Is 58 years old.

Squeezed by the ever lower prices paid to them by giant agribusiness
oligopolies for the food and fiber they produce, and, on the other hand,
forced to pay the continually increased costs of agricultural inputs
(pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, equipment, fuel) to giant chemical and
biotech companies, American family farmers are being relentlessly driven off
the land.

In order to stay on the land, many of our farmers and ranchers are now
forced into poorly paid off-farm employment, which currently provides 90% of
the net income they have to meet their survival needs. The only economic
"winners" in American agriculture today are large corporate farms;
semi-monopolistic grain and commodities traders; seed, biotech, and chemical
companies; and giant processors, fast-food restaurants, and supermarket
chains. For the rest of rural America, the factory farm, chemical-intensive
monoculture cash crop model has proved to be an unmitigated disaster.

Genetically engineered crops have simply exacerbated this trend of driving
small farms and dairies out of business. The UK-based Financial Times has
reported that in the U.S., larger farms are planting genetically engineered
crops, while smaller farms are more likely to be looking for the GE-free
premium price.

In his book, Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology, Brewster
Kneen points out that genetic engineering is just the latest tool in the
hands of transnational food giants and chemical companies to maximize their
profits while maintaining control over our food chain and those who produce
our food and fiber. With cheaper raw materials and multi-billion dollar
taxpayer subsidies, transnational food corporations can force their way into
any market in the world and put their smaller competitors out of business.
With the advent of NAFTA since 1994, for instance, Archer Daniels Midland
and Cargill have been able to dump hundreds of millions of dollars of
taxpayer subsidized corn (six million tons per year) on Mexican markets and
drive over a million small indigenous farmers off the land. Similarly the
grain giants, export oligopolies, and retail giants (McDonald's, Wal-Mart,
etc.) use their control of subsidized crops and animal feeds to dominate the
global marketplace and put their competitors out of business. Gene engineers
look forward to the same "success" with their herbicide resistant and
Bt-spliced GE seeds, helping "more efficient" farmers beat out their
inefficient competitors.

Just as chemical fertilizers, toxic pesticides, hybrid seeds, and factory
farming were supposed to lead us into the promised land of the Green
Revolution after World War Two, today's bioengineers promise to use genetic
engineering to feed the world's growing population, solve modern society's
food-related health problems, and clean up the mess they've made with
chemical-intensive agriculture over the past fifty years.

Even a number of the agrochemical companies now admit that the Green
Revolution of chemical-intensive agriculture has not been sustainable. Soils
are eroding, crop yields in many places are declining, water for irrigation
is ever more limited, and drinking water supplies are increasingly
contaminated by agricultural runoff. One billion pounds of toxic pesticides
and twelve billion pounds of nitrate chemical fertilizers are being applied
to America's farmlands every year, devastating our rural environment.
Meanwhile weeds and pests damage or eat up the same proportion of our food
crops as they did fifty years ago.

Many of America's rural communities are literal ghost towns. And yet even
with this decimation of rural America, the US Department of Agriculture
warns that 70% of remaining US family farms are "too small" to be
economically viable. As a former USDA Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts,
told US family farmers, you must "Get big or get out." Apply this model on a
global scale, and we¹re talking about driving approximately two billion
"inefficient" small farmers and rural villagers off the land. But where will
these displaced farmers and their families go? And what will they do for
work?

Looking at North America, more and more family farmers and ranchers are
indeed "getting out," selling their land to corporate agribusiness
operations or land developers, and retiring. This is hardly surprising given
that the giant wholesalers and buyers of US farm products (Cargill, ADM,
Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Tyson¹s, Kraft) are unwilling to pay farmers a fair
price, or even pay them money enough to meet the costs of production. Corn
for example costs non-organic North American farmers approximately $3.40 to
produce a bushel (59 pounds) of corn, while monopoly buyers, such as ADM and
Cargill, are generally unwilling to pay more than $2.40 a bushel, with US
taxpayers picking up the difference.

Industrial corn provides a case study of what's wrong with American
agriculture. As Michael Pollan and others have pointed out, energy-
intensive, corporate-controlled, taxpayer-subsidized, pesticide-intensive,
and now genetically engineered corn is an unmitigated disaster for the
environment, family farmers and public health.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/toxic/toomuchcorn071902.cfm

Environmental Destruction & Public Health Threats:

America's industrial-style farms are the number one source of water
pollution in the country, routinely contaminating surface waters, municipal
water supplies, and aquifers with billions of pounds of chemical fertilizer
runoff, pesticides, and animal manure every year. Fish, frogs, and other
creatures that depend upon clean water and wetlands are slowly being
exterminated, while consumers are turning more and more to bottled water to
avoid contaminated tap water. In terms of the energy crisis, climate
disruption and destroying the protective ozone layer, America's energy and
chemical intensive farms and long-distance food transportation not only use
up enormous amounts of non-renewable fossil fuel, pollute the air, and
destroy the ozone layer with pesticides such as methyl bromide, but generate
up to 20-25% of climate disrupting greenhouse gases as well. In addition
non-organic farms are depleting the topsoil at an alarming rate.
Factory farm meat production is a major factor in this environmental
devastation, in part because feeding grain to farm animals to produce
meat--instead of feeding it directly to humans--involves an unsustainable
amount of land, as well as a large loss of energy. It takes 10-20 times as
much land to feed people meat as it does to feed them with grain. The
routine use of antibiotics in animal feed, residues of which are ingested by
humans in every bite of non-organic meat or portion of non-organic dairy,
helps to create germs which are antibiotic resistant, thereby threatening
the effectiveness of antibiotics in medical use. In addition the
over-consumption of meat and dairy products are implicated in many of the
chronic degenerative diseases that afflict industrial and newly
industrializing societies, particularly heart disease and cancer. The
pesticides and herbicides used heavily in industrial agriculture are linked
with elevated cancer risks for farm workers and consumers and are coming
under greater criticism for their links to hormonal and reproductive
disorders. Moreover, chemicals, artificial sweeteners and preservatives,
added to modern processed foods, are linked to an epidemic of food
allergies, food sensitivities, hyperactivity, and a range of learning and
behavior disabilities in children.

In addition, feeding blood, slaughterhouse waste, tainted fat, and animal
manure to animals has lead to the spread of fatal brain-wasting diseases to
humans (Mad Cow Disease). And finally due to the industrialization, filth,
and inhuman speed of massive slaughterhouses, added to the disease rampant
on factory farms, the bulk of non-organic beef, poultry, turkey, and pork
coming out of America¹s slaughterhouses and processing plants is riddled
with dangerous pathogens including e-coli 0157H, salmonella, campylobachter,
and listeria. Even the USDA has recommended that all US beef be irradiated,
and that American consumerss treat their cutting boards and kitchen surfaces
as bio-hazard zones. No wonder more and more U.S. consumers are turning to
organic food.

Industrial Agriculture: Destroying Biodiversity

For over 10,000 years farmers have been saving and selecting the seeds of
their "best" agricultural food crops and herbs. If a plant variety was easy
to harvest, produced a good yield, tasted good, did well in a particular
type of soil, exhibited vigor or hardiness to survive pests, diseases, and a
variety of weather and climate changes or stresses, then farmers saved these
seeds, exchanged them with their neighbors, and planted them for the next
harvest. By planting a variety of naturally pollinating seeds, each with
their own slightly different characteristics, farmers were able to raise
resilient crops whose genetic variance allowed them to be brought to
harvest. Without the work of these seed savers and diligent horticulturists
over many centuries, we as consumers would not be able to enjoy the variety,
quantity, and quality of the foods we eat and take for granted today.

Over time, thousands of different varieties of rice, wheat, corn, potatoes,
and hundreds of other food and fiber crops were developed and nurtured,
guaranteeing that just about every ecosystem and every micro-climate in the
world had an ample supply and diversity of seeds and plant species to
survive. Farmers and ranchers of course did the same thing with their
domesticated farm animals, selecting and breeding the "best" animals for the
world's varying climates and terrain. Until recently, the typical farmer in
the United States and around the world cultivated a variety of field crops
as well as garden vegetables, and also raised animals, who provided not only
meat, milk, and eggs, but wool, leather, and manure for fertilizer.

The need for plant diversity became evident in Ireland in 1845 when a
million people starved to death because a potato blight devastated the
entire monoculture (single variety) potato crop planted on the island. A
similar disaster occurred in the U.S. in 1970 when a corn disease or blight
ravaged the national corn harvest, destroying 15 percent of the entire crop
and reducing yields by as much as 50 percent.

With the onset of modern agriculture the traditional sustainable and
diversified approach to farming began to change. Over the past 60 years
agriculture has become highly industrialized and specialized with a vast
decrease in the varieties of individual crops being grown. Agribusiness seed
corporations learned to mass-produce "hybrid" seeds by crossing or
interbreeding different purebred strains of particularly high-yielding or
disease-resistant plants. Whereas farmers had traditionally cross-bred a
wide variety of plants (and animals) on a small scale for their own use and
to trade or exchange in their local communities, new giant seed companies
such as Pioneer Hi-Bred (now owned by Dupont) rose up to sell their hybrid
seeds to thousands and eventually millions of farmers.

The advantage of hybrid seeds is that you get a higher yield, producing more
of a particular crop per acre. As market forces and the consolidation of
agriculture companies pushed modern farmers from polyculture (multiple
crops) to monoculture (one crop), from variety to volume, farmers abandoned
traditional self-pollinating (non-hybrid) varieties of seeds and began
purchasing hybrid seeds and concentrating on producing vast quantities of
one or two cash crops such as corn, sorghum, wheat, and cotton. The economic
disadvantage of hybrid seeds is that farmers need to buy a lot more chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation equipment, which not only raise
their costs and make them dependent on bank loans or government credit, but
also negatively impact the soil and the environment. And in many cases,
banks have made credit dependent on whether farmers are using the most
updated technology. Another fundamental problem with hybrid seeds is that
hybrids are generally sterile or else do not "breed true." If you tried
saving your seeds after harvest, either you'd get no crop, a reduced crop,
or a crop with lower yields and different characteristics than those in the
original hybrid strain. Many farmers stopped saving and exchanging seeds and
instead went back to the seed dealers every year for their supply of ever
more expensive seeds. The result has been a dramatic decline in plant and
crop varieties and a dangerous over-reliance on a handful of vulnerable
hybrid seed types.

As Michael Fox states in his book Eating with Conscience: The Bioethics of
Food:

"Conservationists estimate that we have lost more than half the varieties of
the world's 20 most important food crops that existed at the beginning of
the century. These include corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, and bananas. Over
the same period we have allowed 80 percent of the varieties of horticultural
fruit crops in the United States to disappear. More than one-third of
livestock and poultry breeds in the United States are rare or in decline,
and half of the breeds in Europe that existed at the turn of the century are
now extinct."

Squeezed by the ever lower prices paid to them by giant agribusiness
oligopolies for the food they produce, and, on the other hand, forced to pay
the continually increased costs of agricultural inputs (pesticides,
fertilizers, seeds, equipment, fuel) to giant chemical and biotech
companies, American family farmers are being relentlessly driven off the
land.

Fatal Harvest:
Driving Two Billion "Inefficient" Farmers Off the Land

The promise of industrial agriculture, so-called Free Trade, and biotech
crops, as championed by the industry, is that it will help feed the poor
around the world, and will be necessary as our population grows.
Unfortunately, the causes and solutions to hunger are political, not related
to food production. In fact, we are producing more food per person than at
any time in world history, according to Food First, an international hunger
organization. And for the first time in history there are as many people
overweight, 1.1 billion, as underfed, according to a March 2000 report by
the Worldwatch Institute.

But the root causes of hunger around the world will not be solved with a new
technology. As Food First's Peter Rossett wrote in an editorial published in
the New York Times, "The real problems are poverty and inequality. Too many
people are too poor to buy the food that is available or lack land on which
to grow it themselves."

Genetically engineered crops do nothing to address these two root causes of
hunger. In fact, they will likely do more harm than good. The two primary
types of genetically engineered crops thus far, Roundup Ready and Bt, both
pose potential pitfalls for the 40 percent (2.4 billion) of the world's 6
billion people that are farmers or rural villagers.

Roundup Ready crops, designed so the farmer must buy the seed and pesticide
from the same company, at best produce only equal yields to conventional
crops, and in some cases yield decreases. While Roundup crops allow farmers
to dump as much pesticides as they want, destroying any neighboring plants
around the crop-many non-crop plants are used by farmers in smaller
countries as other food sources, or feed for animals.

Genetically engineered Bt crops also allow the seed producer to charge
farmers for the seed and pest control system in one shot. At the same time,
these crops threaten the effectiveness of natural Bt sprays, used by farmers
around the world-particularly organic farmers.

Half of the world's farmers rely on saved seeds for their harvest. Yet the
contracts farmers sign with GE companies forbid them to do this. The biotech
industry has even gone so far, with the assistance of the USDA, to develop
technology to make seeds sterile after one growing season-the so-called
"Terminator" technology. The Terminator technology has been highly
criticized around the world, as well as being the source of many protests by
farmers.

Third world farmers are threatened by dumping, Free Trade agreements, and
genetically engineered crops in the same way that U.S. farmers are. In fact,
genetically engineered crops and treaties like NAFTA and GATT are
instruments to expand the failed U.S. farm policy around the world.
Specifically, genetically engineered and industrial agriculture crops are
all about monoculture, producing cash crops for export and the so-called
open market, which is actually controlled in every sector, by a handful of
giant corporations, who drive down the prices paid to farmers and dump the
surplus on the developing world. Industrial agriculture is not about
growing a diverse set of crops to feed yourself, neighbors, and local
communities. But non-industrial, organic farming is exactly this kind of
sustainable farming that is needed to support and maintain the 40% of the
world¹s population who are farmers or rural villagers.

The economic, health, and social damage created by industrial agriculture,
corporate globalization, the patenting and gene-splicing of transgenic
plants and food-producing animals, is inexorably leading to universal
"bioserfdom" in which two billion small farmers will be driven off the land,
the environment and climate stability will be destroyed, and public health
will continue to deteriorate.

The only solution to this Fatal Harvest is to make organic farming once
again the dominant force in agriculture (as it has been for most of the last
10,000 years), to make healthy organic foods and lifestyles the norm, and
to restructure global agriculture and commerce so that local and regional
production for local and regional markets and Fair Trade become the dominant
paradigm. And most importantly we must quickly begin to address the global
energy crisis (at the root of the wars and conflict in the Middle East) and
stabilize the global climate crisis, through drastic greenhouse gas
reduction and a global conversion to renewable forms of energy in the
agriculture, transportation, and utilities sectors.

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