This is a draft excerpt from our book _A Nation of Farmers_ forthcoming Spring, 2009 from New Society Publishers. In order to draw attention to World Food Day, in a world with more than 100 million new hungry people in the poor world, in an America where one in 10 Americans depend on food stamps, and where the people of Iceland, one of the richest nations in the world are increasingly uncertain that there will be food on the shelves, we offer this contribution to the discussion of whether we can feed everyone.
Can We Feed the World? More Importantly, Will We Choose To?
By Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
—Mark Twain
To answer this question, we must distinguish very carefully here between what is possible and what is likely. That is, the issue of whether and how we can feed the world must be addressed on three fronts. The first is by answering whether it is pragmatically possible, with minimal use of fossil inputs, to produce enough food to feed everyone a world population projected to grow and stabilize at around 9 to10 billion. This is the easiest of the questions to answer, as you will see, and ultimately, our answer is a qualified yes.
If we answer yes to that, the second question is whether we can continue to do so over hundreds and thousands of years—that is, whether doing so is sustainable. We take as a given that if this is not so, we must postulate some way of coming to a sustainable solution, with a transitional period leading in that direction. But postulation is not the same as accomplishment. A full-scale analysis of how this might happen on a world scale is outside the scope of this essay. We believe it is within the realm of the possible, but outside the likely, that this could be managed.
Finally, there is the question of whether it is possible to imagine creating systems to enable us to distribute food fairly. Both of us harbor some real doubts about the likelihood that we will change our practices sufficiently to ensure that everyone has access to food. But despite those doubts, we believe passionately that we must try to do so, that we must find ways to change both the way we grow and eat food, and also, how we distribute it.
Let us also be very clear about what it is we are attempting to claim here. We are not attempting the perfection of human nature in any sense—that is, we are not, fundamentally interested in idealistic solutions, but in ones that are achievable. We do not claim that any solution we propose will eliminate problems of access, make all poverty disappear or make the world a nobler place. What we do claim is that we can feed the planet as well or better without fossil fuels as we have with them, and in relocalized, sustainable agriculture. We discuss in prior essays the reasons that this will be necessary, and will begin here from the presumption that for a host of reasons, it is necessary to reduce or eliminate many of the fossil fuel inputs to food systems.
It is easy to “know” that a world in which a human right to food is enforced is “unrealistic” or “naïve.” It is easy to know that there simply too many people, and that the powers that be are too entrenched to turn around. And it may, unfortunately, turn out to be true that we fail to create a society that would permit these things. But we would fail either because we did not try or because we did not try hard enough, not because it was never possible. Beginning from the assumption that greater equity is impossible naturalizes disaster—it says that the reason people starve is because we can’t do anything about it, and it makes it easy for us to wash our hands of the whole project of justice. This is wrong. What we can accomplish in terms of equity is debatable, and accomplishing it will be challenging. That does not free us not to attempt the project.
It is simply true that there have been times and societies that were better at equitable distribution than we are at present. It is true that people have at times been willing to do with less so that they could share with others. It is also true that human rights, once established, can be fulfilled. And there is no question that a universal right to food is an acknowledged and extant principle worldwide. As George Kent, University of Hawaii professor and author of Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food, argues, having acknowledged such a right places an obligation upon all of us.
The human right to adequate food and all other human rights imply strong obligations on the part of national governments to their own people. However, if the obligations were limited to those of one’s own national government, the idea of global human rights would be little more than a cruel joke. Human rights do not end at national borders, and neither do the corresponding obligations. Thus, the second major message here is that all of us have obligations in some measure to ensure the realization of all human rights for people. A child may have the misfortune of being born into a poor country, but that child is not born in a poor world. The world as a whole has the capacity to sharply reduce global hunger and malnutrition. It is obligated to do that.[i]
Where are these mystical, strange societies that have shown such concern for others that they were willing to allocate resources based on something other than personal greed? We imagine they must be far-away indigenous populations or the residents of lost Atlantis. In fact, however, there is a credible example in our own recent past—the response of Americans after World War II. Among the populations willing to endure hardship to increase the equity of people far from them were your own grandparents and great-grandparents.
As Amy Bentley documents in Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity, there was a time, about 60 years ago, when Americans were prepared to endure food rationing and hardship in order to keep other people alive. Here we are not talking about World War II, but shortly after it, during the last time in our history that so great a percentage of the world faced death from famine.
At the end of World War II, in 1945, the US was thriving, but up to one-quarter of the rest of the world’s population was facing hunger. Whole economies had been destroyed by the war, and a subsequent drought dramatically reduced crop yields. In 1945, food production world wide was 12 percent below pre-war levels, and the 1946 harvest was similarly affected.
Europe’s harvest levels were 25 percent below normal. Mexico was in the grip of massive inflation, with tortilla prices out of reach of many; more than half of all Mexicans were spending 90 percent of their income on food. In Korea, the whole year’s food donation supply was consumed by June. Rations in Japan were at 520 calories per person, per day—well below starvation level. Worldwide, 500 million people faced death by starvation. Only a few nations, most notably the US, were in any position at all to export grains for relief.
Meanwhile, the US was newly released from wartime rationing, and food consumption rose to 3,300 calories per day on average. People celebrated unlimited meats, sugars and fats that they’d been denied during the war. And Americans were preoccupied with the return of family and the re-creation of American society. In the winter of 1946, Harry Truman made a radio address on the world situation, asking Americans to help conserve food in order to earmark 16 percent of the total US harvest for food relief. His policies included the prohibition of wheat use in alcohol production and strict limitations on feeding grains to livestock. He also asked Americans to voluntarily restrict their food consumption in order to free up more food to be sent for relief.
What is remarkable is that when Americans turned their attention to the subject, they showed willingness to endure even stronger restrictions than the voluntary ones that Truman and his aid czar, Herbert Hoover, proposed. Seventy percent of Americans indicated their willingness to endure shortages of meat, butter, sugar, gas and other goods to give food to the hungry in Europe.
Herbert Hoover gave the following speech, after traveling to famine struck regions:
I have seen with my own eyes the grimmest spectre of famine in all the history of the world. Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one named War has gone, at least for a while. But Famine, Pestilence and Death are still charging over the earth…. Hunger hangs over the homes of 800 million people—over one-third of the people on the earth.
Americans were further moved by this—and by the recognition that much of the world viewed them as gluttonous and selfish. Critics who claimed that the US could meet its commitments to provide food aid only with rationing demanded its reinstitution. Americans wanted to see rationing instituted to ensure fairness, as they reduced their consumption.
In 1944, in the heart of World War II, 85 percent of all Americans believed that rationing should be retained after the war to prevent hunger and shortages. In March, 1946, 59 percent of the American public was willing to reinstitute full-scale rationing to be able to relieve hunger in other nations. Think how radical that is. After Truman’s eloquent radio address about the world’s suffering, the numbers rose to 70 percent of all Americans.
Perhaps the most astounding statistic was that almost one-third of the American public acknowledged a willingness to reinstitute rationing to save the starving Japanese—that is, despite national fury at the most demonized enemy we may ever have had, those who bombed Pearl Harbor, fully one-third of the American population was willing to give up food to save the lives of their enemies.[ii]
This suggests that it is possible to imagine a society in which people are, in fact, willing to make sacrifices for greater food equity, particularly when they come to understand the relationship between hunger and the violence in can engender.
II. Did We Ever Care About Feeding the World?
It is well that thou givest bread to the hungry, better were it that none hungered and that thou haddest none to give.
—St. Augustine
We began with the question “Can we feed the world?” but what needs to be said first off is that the question itself is fundamentally misleading in a number of ways.
First of all, “feeding the world” is a moving target. Are we talking about feeding the current population of 6.6 billion? Or the projected 2050 population of 9.1 billion? Are we talking about 9 billion mostly vegetarians, or 9 billion people who try to eat like most Americans, including heavy consumption of meat and processed foods? What about the cars? Are we imagining that we must also feed more than a billion cars that consume grain and legumes in the form of ethanol and biodiesel?
What level of equity are we imagining? Will we continue the progression of inequity on which we’ve embarked, with wealth concentrated in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of rich people? Are we going to ration food by price, as we do it now? Under the current system, if you have money, you eat, if not, you don’t. Or might we work under some other system, one that recognizes the established universal right to adequate nutrition?
Moreover, we believe it is fundamentally and utterly in error to believe that the current industrial system has ever had the goal of “feeding the world.” That is, much of the rhetoric of the Green Revolution was merely rhetoric. As George Kent has documented in his book The Political Economy of Hunger, while grain yields rose most of the benefits of Green Revolution yields went into the mouths of rich world denizens, in the form of meat and cheap processed foods.
Setting up a scenario in which we compare the ability of industrial agriculture to “feed the world” against the ability of small-scale, food-sovereign, localized agricultures begins from the premise that agribusiness has the noble goal of feeding most of the world. But this is manifestly untrue.
Helena Norberg-Hodge makes this argument about the idea that we need to think of this in terms of “feeding the world”:
The myth is that this [The Green Revolution] is necessary to provide cheap food for this very large global population. In actual fact, if you look at what goes behind it, you will see that large chemical and pharmaceutical corporations got involved—particularly in a major way after the Second World War—in food production, turning the same chemicals that we use for bombs, to the land. And that the system did become dominated by the need for profits for corporations, not the need to feed the global population. And that, whether you go back to the earlier days of the Green Revolution and look at how many farmers were destroyed because Green Revolution technologies demanded ever more expensive inputs: large scale technology, lots of petroleum, lots of toxic chemicals, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, hormones.
All of this destroyed the farmer’s ability to produce, generation after generation, without spending any money, without being beholden to either banks or large corporations. The net result was whole parts of the world suffering from famines. Sometimes a generation earlier, sometimes many generations earlier, those same parts of the world had been flourishing agricultural areas as well as with a lot of wilderness. And of course, the population at that time in many places was lower, but the main reason for the change was not some kind of sudden explosion in the population. The main reason was the concentration of food production in the hands of for-profit corporations.[iii]
In commercial industrial agriculture there is an enormous amount of rhetoric about “feeding the world.” But this conceals the fact that industrial food companies have been more than willing to sacrifice the lives of the hungry in the name of enormous profits—and to increase the thing most responsible for famines: economic inequity. For example, the agricultural speculation divisions of large companies in 2008 made billions in profit—mostly by driving up food prices and putting millions in danger of starvation. Any of these companies or their aggregate could easily have met the World Food Program’s call for 700 million dollars in emergency hunger relief to keep the world’s poorest from starving. None did. Instead, they continued raising prices through speculation and sought further agricultural subsidies by enforcing commodity food programs—that is, they asked to be paid again.
Yes, we must feed our people. But feeding the world is as much about equity and economic justice as it is about absolute food supplies. The 2007 rice harvest was a record, and the 2008 projected to be larger still—and yet despite this plenty, 175 million new poor found themselves unable to afford a simple bowl of rice by autumn 2008. This has nothing to do with our practical abilities to feed the world, and everything to do with issues of distribution and justice. And equitable distribution and justice cannot be achieved when multinationals seek to profit on hunger—that alone should be sufficient justification for deindustrializing agriculture—because it willfully, consciously causes hunger.
III. The Limits of the Green Revolution
The seed is starting to take shape as the site and symbol of freedom in the age of manipulation and monopoly of life. The seed is not big and powerful, but can become alive as a sign of resistance and creativity in the smallest of huts or gardens and the poorest of families. In smallness lies power.
—Vandana Shiva
Although there have long been critiques of the Green Revolution, many people assume that without the work of scientists who brought us new hybrids and who convinced much of the world to convert to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, we could not feed the world. It is certainly true that grain yields rose dramatically during the Green Revolution, but despite the tendency to imagine that “grain” is equivalent to “all food,” it isn’t certain how much, if at all, food supplies truly increased.
The first part of the story, many of us already know. Many of us know that the introduction of massive quantities of fertilizer, the replacement of traditional staple crops with hybrids, and the other changes of the Green Revolution meant total grain yield increase of 250 percent over 35 years, with an increase in fossil energy inputs of 50 percent over traditional agriculture. It would seem that that rate of return was quite gratifying—put in some energy and get 2.5 times the total food. That was, however, a short-term success, one that couldn’t be sustained. The quantity of fossil fuel inputs required to maintain these increased yields and keep up with population growth has grown steadily, and as Dale Allen Pfeiffer observes in Eating Fossil Fuels, “Yet, due to soil degradation, the increased demands of pest management, and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.”[iv]
For those who don’t think much about agriculture, the last bit of information should disturb you. The world’s population is set to grow for some time, and we are only just holding steady (actually, there’s been a bit of a decline lately) in the amount of food we’re able to grow in relationship to energy inputs and population. This matters—right now we still produce more than we need. But population is growing steadily, and the climate is changing steadily, and the day is not so far away when our total food yields may not feed the world. And if oil and natural gas peak soon, as seems not unlikely, one might assume that yields will decline still further. That’s a scary prospect.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. Because the Green Revolution actually cost us something too—and not just the costs we’ve already discussed in fertility, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, etc. A whole realm of food that we once used to grow and eat was lost to us.
Though the Green Revolution increased grain yields, it also cut back on other food sources. For example, the pesticides required for the cultivation of the miracle rices produced in the 1960s killed fish and frogs that provided much of the protein in the diets of rice-eating people, resulting in, as Margaret Visser points out in Much Depends on Dinner, “the sadly ironic result that ‘more rice’ could mean ‘worse nutrition.’” The same can be said of the loss of vegetables often grown in and at the edges of rice paddies. The famous “golden rice” that was supposed to alleviate blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency, a common problem among poor people who have little but rice to eat, ignored the fact that one of the reasons for the decline in Vitamin A consumption was that nutritious vegetables and weeds traditionally grown or harvested with rice were no longer available or were contaminated by pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer runoff.
The same is true of food grown in the US, in our very own breadbasket. As our corn and wheat and soybeans were produced by larger and larger farms, with more and more industrial equipment, we began to stop producing other, smaller crops that were less amenable to industrialization, but that made up a significant portion of people’s diets.
For example, virtually every farm family in the US had a garden in the first half of the 20th century, and most of those gardens produced most or all of the family’s vegetables. Since we’re talking about a time when one-third to one-fifth of the US population lived on farms, that is an enormous quantity of produce. The significance of gardens is easy to underestimate, but it would be an error to do so. During World War II, 40 percent of the nation’s produce was grown in home gardens. The figures were higher in Britain during the same period. Much of home-grown produce was lost to industrial agriculture, either directly, in the transformation of family farms from polycultures to monocrop farms, or indirectly, through agricultural subsidies that made purchased food often nearly as cheap as growing your own, and even through social policies that encouraged suburbs to become places of lawns, not vegetable gardens. What was the point of growing food when buying it cost so little? And how were we to grow food when our time was now needed for more “valuable” work. We went from producing 44 percent of our produce to less than 2 percent in home gardens over four decades.
When evaluating the importance of our gardens, it would be a mistake to see produce as watery vegetables like lettuce, and thus believe that few of our calories came from our gardens—among the vegetables lost were also dense calorie crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes, which can substitute for grains in the diet. As writer and community organizer Pat Murphy observes, over the years many of the most nutritious vegetables have effectively fallen off the government agricultural statistics, in part because of changes in our eating habits, but also because so many of these were originally grown primarily not in thousand-acre fields but in backyards and truck gardens.[v] So collards and kale, once a staple in the South, and their nutritional value were lost in the industrialization of agriculture.[vi]
Going back to what the Green Revolution, and its ugly step-child globalization, did to the American farm family. the exhortation by US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to “get big or get out” and the systematic farm policies that favored large commodity growers and regional specialization cut back enormously on the quantity of food we produced. Small farmers in the 1940s might have raised corn or wheat as their central crop, but they also grew gardens, had an orchard, raised some pigs for sale and milked a cow. The loss of all that food value, spread over millions of farm families, was a significant one.
A farmer might have tapped his sugar maple trees and sold the syrup, and would probably have sold some eggs. He might also have sold a pig to a neighbor or had a calf butchered and shared the meat. The industrial commodity farmer rarely does these things, and in many cases, the areas allotted them—the woodlot, the barn, the chicken coop—have been removed to allow unhindered access to more acres. In a bad crop year, a farmer might have planted a late crop of sunflowers for oil seed, lettuce or something else, which is also not calculated into our total consumption. In many cases a family member might also operate a small truck garden and sell produce locally—even children did this routinely.
All these are foods that were removed from the food stream, and this systematic deprivation over millions of households represents an enormous loss of total calories and, most importantly, nutrition.
The economic pressure of farms to specialize also took its toll. Joan Dye Gussow documents that before World War II, the state of Montana was self-sufficient for 70 percent of its food, including fruit.[vii] Montana is one of the harshest climates in the US and has very little water, comparatively speaking, and yet this was possible in part because the economic pressure of big business had not yet persuaded small farmers that they couldn’t grow fruit effectively in Montana, but should leave it to Washington and Florida. None of us know how much food was lost this way, but it is almost certainly an enormous quantity. And this systematic removal in the name of efficiency and specialization happened all over the world to one degree or another.
All this is particularly important because of the distinction between yield and output. Peter Rosset has documented that industrial agriculture is, in fact, more efficient in terms of yield of a single, monocrop. That is, when five acres of soybeans and five thousand acres of soybeans are compared, you usually get more soybeans per acre by growing 5000 acres. But when you compare output—that is the total amount of food— and fiber you can get a piece of land using fsmall-scale polyculture , the five-acre farm comes out not just ahead, but vastly ahead. That is, small scale farms produce more edible product, if less of any single crop.. It isn’t just that five acres are more productive in terms of total output, they are often 2–200 times more productive.[viii] Rosset’s figures are not in dispute, as Rosset points out here:
Surveying the data, we indeed find that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger farms. This is now widely recognised by agricultural economists across the political spectrum, as the “inverse relationship between farm size and output”. Even leading development economists at the World Bank have come around to this view, to the point that they now accept that redistribution of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity.[ix]
This difference in total output rises further when you talk about garden models. A half-acre garden is often tens or hundreds of times more productive than the same acreage in industrial agriculture. A small farm is generally more productive per acre than a large one. And when fossil fuels are, by necessity or choice, removed from the picture, the distinctions become even more dramatic. The displacement of home and farm gardens by industrial agriculture represents a dramatic loss in important food crops. On a given acre of land, the Green Revolution might have increased rice or wheat yields by several times (although organic agricultural techniques have since caught up), but because the garden, henhouse and berry bushes that could have been on that acre would have been many times more productive in total than what was granted to us by fertilizers and hybridization, what we are experiencing is a net total loss, not a gain in many cases.
Grain crops are important, but so is the enormous diversity of food in our diets (or that should be in our diets). And many of the vegetable crops that have been lost were significant sources of food, oil or flavoring (now displaced by corn syrup and soybean oil) in the not so distant past. We cannot correctly assess the global food supply by focusing only on grains or by failing to recognize how much of the calories produced in grain were once produced, often more nutritiously, by vegetable and fruit crops. As Hope Shand notes,
There is no doubt about the global economic importance of these major crops {rice, maize, wheat and soybean}, but the tendency to focus on a small number of species masks the importance of plant species diversity to the world food supply. A very different picture would emerge if we were to look into women’s cooking pots and if we could survey local markets and give attention to household use of non-domesticated species. [x]
In the US, during most of the past 50 years, we have had enormous grain surpluses, mostly of corn, and as Michael Pollan documents in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, industrial food production has been challenged to keep finding new ways to use up our spare corn. Processed foods are all sweetened with our extra corn, made of processed corn, or made of meat from corn fed to livestock. And we have seen a rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease—all associated with high-meat, low-vegetable, processed-food diets. We kept raising our yields, at the cost of our outputs, and our diets came to reflect that—we ate fewer kinds of vegetables and fruits, and fewer of them. To a large degree, what happened was that we gave up foods that we did need to be healthy and have good, varied, tasty diets, and replaced them with a couple of grain crops that we did not particularly need more of, and we harmed ourselves doing so.
Not only have most of the benefits of the Green Revolution accrued not to the poor but to the already rich, but most of the plans for future yield increases involve trying to increase food production in places where there is already plenty of food—the US corn crop, for example, doesn’t need to be increased if our primary goal is feeding people. But even if GMO seeds or new fertilizers could raise yields, the odds are excellent that already-strapped poor farmers could never afford them. Our focus on high-technology agriculture creates greater inequity by concentrating food yields in places that currently have enough and to spare, if only we would allocate it wisely.
This also ignores laws of diminishing returns—the truth is that pushing up yields in areas where they are already quite high is challenging. Increasing them enough to compensate for continually stripping the soil and contaminating the water is nearly impossible. Scientists describe the increase in yields as enormously challenging—and they are. However, increasing yields in poorer countries with organic matter, new techniques and integrated pest management potentially has enormous returns—but historically economists have disdained enriching poor farmers by helping them farm better. Techno fixes are far shinier and more exciting, but ultimately less effective.
It is impossible to discover precisely how much food was lost to us worldwide by the Green Revolution and its industrial agriculture. But there is no question that it was enough food to feed millions, maybe even billions of people. We must, in our analysis of what the Green Revolution cost us, recognize that we lost an uncertain but enormous quantity of future food, mortgaging the future to overfeed the present.
IV. Stealing from the Future
Whenever people say “we mustn’t be
sentimental,” you can take it they are about to
do something cruel. And if they add, “we must
be realistic,” they mean they are going to make
money out of it.”
—Brigid Brophy
The price of industrial agriculture is uncalculated quantities of food that future generations will not have to eat. How is this so? Well, for example, though cities grew up in good spots for trade, they also by necessity grew in areas surrounded by fertile, productive agricultural land that could support large populations. The displacement of large populations of agrarian people into cities has meant that all over the world, more and more land is transformed into city and suburb, paved over and no longer producing.
As the ability of soils to hold water decreases because of erosion and climate change, arable land becomes desert. As soils are depleted of nutrients and the price of natural-gas-based nitrogen fertilizers rises, untold people will find the cost of growing their own food in their depleted environment prohibitive. We are seeing this already.
As artificial fertilizers produce nitrous oxide and feedlot meat production warms the planet with methane, millions risk losing the sources of water that allow them to grow food. As we deplete aquifers by growing inappropriate crops in regions that cannot sustain them over the long term, we risk future hunger.
That said, however, we should not underestimate the resilience and power of local, indigenous, sustainable agriculture. For example, in Bringing the Food Economy Home Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merrifield and Steven Gorelick cite several World Bank and FAO papers that indicate that as recently as the mid-1990s, 2 billion people—35 percent of the world’s population—were being fed by traditional agriculture with minimal or no fossil fuel inputs.[xi]
Often these farmers do so on marginal land, because the best agricultural land in the Global South has been turned to non-food or luxury food items. Shrimp farms displace rice farms in coastal India; coffee displaces small polyculture farms or food providing forests in Latin America and Africa; flowers displace food in much of Latin America and Asia; cotton to feed our endless appetite for cheap clothing displaces food in many nations. It will be a non-trivial problem to return this land to sustainable food production, but it is possible. These statistics, along with the others here should at least raise some significant questions in those who believe we know what the earth’s proper carrying capacity is. That does not make the issue of population irrelevant, but it does mean we may have time and choices that we did not know we had. And if 2 billion people can feed themselves on the poorest available land organically and with minimal inputs, how many could do it if sustainable agriculture received the same supports commercial agriculture now does?
Vandana Shiva describes (and we will quote this at some length, because it is very important) what the Green Revolution has done in the third world, but it is important to remember that the loss of calories that occurred there also happened to us. For us, the cost came in the form of our loss of nutrition. That is, though we had more calories than we needed, we replaced nutritious foods with non-nutritious ones, to our detriment. For the poor of the world, it came as a significant loss of food value, as well as nutrition.
Industrial agriculture has not produced more food. It has destroyed diverse sources of food, and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of specific commodities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water and toxic chemicals in the process.
It is often said that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.
Green Revolution varieties produced more grain by diverting production away from straw. This “partitioning” was achieved through dwarfing the plants, which also enabled them to withstand high doses of chemical fertilizer. However, less straw means less fodder for cattle and less organic matter for the soil to feed the millions of soil organisms that make and rejuvenate soil.
The higher yields of wheat or maize were thus achieved by stealing food from farm animals and soil organisms. Since cattle and earthworms are our partners in food production, stealing food from them makes it impossible to maintain food production over time, and means that the partial yield increases were not sustainable. The increase of yields in wheat and maize under industrial agriculture were also achieved at the cost of yields of other foods a small farm provides. Beans, legumes, fruits and vegetables all disappeared both from farms and from the calculus of yields. More grain from two or three commodities arrived on national and international markets, but less food was eaten by farm families in the Third World.
The gain in “yields” of industrially produced crops is thus based on a theft of food from other species and the rural poor in the Third World. That is why, as more grain is produced and traded globally, more people go hungry in the Third World. Global Markets record more commodities for trading because food has been stolen from nature and the poor. [xii]
This may be the most important point we can make—drawing down future food, and starving our children and grandchildren should not be an option in an agricultural system. High yields for us now and hunger for them later is not a viable choice in a growing world—period.
There is, in truth, no way to be certain what we gained and what we lost in the Green Revolution. What is virtually certain is that its gains were overstated, and that allocation of resources, whether from future generations or from poor to rich were inequitable. When someone make the statement that grain yields rose by so much, that looks impressive. But the practical realities of that are very different. We have to ask whether those yield increases actually made it from field to the mouths of the hungry, and whether it was possible to duplicate them through any other method.
V. Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World Better
It’s really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you’re going to get it to these people.
—Bob Geldof
To discover whether we can feed the world, first we need to ask whether increased yields have actually meant more available food and nutrition. In fact, this question has been answered—even the World Bank admitted in 1986 that more food does not mean less hunger. Access to food is the primary issue—if it were not, the US would have no hungry people instead of 35 million food-insecure people. Food access is the most important issue in feeding the world, as economist Amartya Sen, among other people, has discussed at length. In Donald Freebairn’s analysis of more than 300 research reports on Green Revolution results, he found that 80 percent of them showed that inequity increased with the adoption of Green Revolution techniques.[xiii]
If the Green Revolution had responded to real material shortages of food worldwide, the environmental costs might be worth it. But it did not. As Freebairn documents, the food supply was sufficient to feed the world’s population in 1950, just as it is now. Claims that Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution saved “a billion lives” are almost certainly wildly overstated—there was sufficient food to go around before the Green Revolution, had equitable distribution been in place, just as there is now. In fact some analysts have suggested, whether rightly or wrongly, that population growth itself is a product of that growth. (That last is a subject we’ll return to shortly.)
And, as we’ve noted, industrial agriculture actually undermines our ability to continue to feed the world, by contaminating soil, increasing global warming, depleting water stocks and promoting erosion.
Dissecting figures about hunger in World Hunger: 12 Myths, Lappé, Collins, et al. note that though figures at first seem to suggest that the Green Revolution made real gains in hunger reduction because total food available between 1970 and 1990 rose by 11 percent and the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, this is not really true. If you take China out of this discussion, the figures look very different. Removing China from the equation, the number of hungry people in the developing world rose from 536 to 597 million. And,
In South America, while food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent.… In South Asia there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger, the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution? [xiv]
This suggests that first of all, though absolute food availability is relevant, it is not as relevant as distribution and economic justice. And because China was a comparatively late adopter of Green Revolution seeds and techniques, it also suggests that the Green Revolution itself may be less important than improved agricultural techniques that apply just as much to organic agriculture as to chemical agriculture.
It is a commonplace to assume that organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture and that we would have to endure enormous losses in yield were we to give up chemical inputs. The yield increases of the Green Revolution are commonly articulated in isolation, without discussion of comparisons with organic yields. To determine how important the Green Revolution was, then, we need to go through the outputs of the Green Revolution and ask whether increased agricultural yields depend upon Green Revolution techniques. If, for example, agricultural yields depended on mechanization, we would expect mechanized agriculture to consistently out-yield hand labor. If they depend upon chemical inputs, we would expect organic agriculture to be heavily outyielded by conventional industrial agriculture. And if they depend on plant breeding, we would expect older varieties to be out-yielded by newer ones.
Are these things true? Well, not in absolute terms. That is, small farms, which generally speaking use much less mechanization, fewer inputs and are more likely to use older plant varieties and save seed than large ones, actually are more productive per acre in total output than large farms. At the extreme ends of this, we can see this disparity in Ecology Action’s biointensive gardening methods, which offer yields per acre much, much higher than industrial agriculture can achieve—without fossil fuel inputs, using open-pollinated seeds.
But on a larger scale this is true as well. In Deep Economy Bill McKibben argues that the 2002 Agricultural Census confirms this greater productivity of small farms using more hand labor—small farms produce more food per acre by every measure, whether calories, tons or dollars.[xv] What mechanization does do is reduce the amount of human labor required. However. in a world with 6.6 billion humans and growing, human labor is a widely available resource.
It is also true that organic agriculture as a whole can consistently match yields with conventional agriculture, suggesting that we do not depend on artificial fertilizers or pesticides. In a 2007 paper, “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” the authors demonstrated that organic methods would offer a substantial net increase in yields in the Global South, while continuing comparable yields in the Global North. In a world-wide organic only policy “farms could produce between 2,641 and 4,381 calories per person per day compared to the current world equivalent of 2,786 calories per person per day.”
In other studies, agronomist Jules Pretty studied 200 sustainable agricultural projects in 52 countries and observed that, per hectare, sustainable practices led to a 93 percent average increase in food production. Grain yields, as discussed in his volume Agri-Culture, had average yield increase of 73 percent over studies including 4.5 million farmers.[xvi]
The Rodale Institute has been running test plots of conventionally farmed corn and soybean rotations (the practice of most Midwestern farms) against organically grown plots, where soil is maintained wholly by cover crops, and another where a fodder crop is grown and fed to cows whose manures are returned to the soil. The difference in total yields between the three3 plots is less than 1 percent. And during drought years, the organic plots dramatically outyielded conventional ones because of higher organic matter in the soil. The cover-crop-fed plots produced twice as many soybeans as the conventionally farmed ones. [xvii] As we go into increasingly difficult times, one of the great strengths of organic agriculture is its resilience in the face of less-than-optimal conditions; when fertilizer prices spike, in drought or flooding years, organics can continue to produce successfully. In times of stress, organic agriculture tends to outyield conventional—and what is coming is many more stressful years.[xviii]
Even the much touted problem of lowered yields as fields stripped by conventional agriculture are converted to organics can be overcome, as a German study found. Making the first crop a nitrogen-fixing legume can prevent an initial drop in yield.[xix]
Moreover, most of those assuming that industrial agriculture must “feed the world” are assuming that a few grain exporting nations—the US, Canada, Brazil—must feed the poor world. But yields could be doubled in poor nations. Not with commercial fertilizers, already out of the reach of many poor farmers, but organic cover crops, composting and new techniques could have dramatic results in enabling poorer nations to feed themselves and also in creating an agriculture of richer soil, higher in humus, that can withstand difficult weather. For example, in Benin in the 1990s, the government experimented with subsidizing seed for cover cropping, and found that eroding soils could be repaired with a comparatively small investment in velvet beans, which also reduced weeding. Maize production tripled, without the importation of expensive commercial fertilizers.[xx]
So although, seen in isolation, the Green Revolution did increase yield of grain, organic and sustainable agriculture have kept pace and in some cases exceeded the results of Green Revolution techniques. We need not depend on chemical agriculture, mechanization or any other fossil (or eventually renewable) fueled technology to feed ourselves.
VI. How Many Can We Feed…And For How Long?
MALTHUSIAN, adj. Pertaining to Malthus and his doctrines. Malthus believed in artificially limiting population, but found that it could not be done by talking.
—Ambrose Bierce
At present the world produces enough calories to feed everyone on earth about double the amount of food they actually need.[xxi] This is an easy thing not to understand, particularly as hunger spreads and the food crisis accelerates. It looks as though we are coming up against real limits to the food supply, what we will call “absolute scarcity.” This is different than the kind of scarcity some Americans have recently experienced at Costco—that’s a supply chain failure, where there isn’t enough of the particular brand of rice that a company has contracted to buy to go around. But there is plenty of rice in the world. The problem is that millions of people can’t afford to buy any.
As of this writing, the planet has about 6.6 billion people on it, and because we produce about twice as many calories as they need, this means that in a world where food was perfectly distributed, relying on techniques that simply matched and maintained presents yields, we could feed about twice as many people as we have now. Since perfectly equitable distribution cannot ever happen, however, we need a cushion—that is, we need to make sure that there’s enough food for everyone in the world, plus extra to compensate. How much extra is a question of what lifestyle people live—10 billion vegetarians, who ate mostly whole foods, farmed sustainably, didn’t use biofuels and had a high degree of equity could live quite well (for a while—more on this later) at the present rate of food production. Three billion heavy meat eaters who drove cars using biofuels would probably rapidly overwhelm resources, leading to an environmental crisis even more acute than the one we currently face.
But most rich world denizens would prefer not to live in a society with a high degree of equity, since this means a major shift in their wealth. Most Americans, quite reasonably have no desire to live on $2-$5 per day with 9 billion other similarly poor people. Now that $2 a day figure is a bit misleading—it can cover a surprising range of life situations, from the hellaceous to the pretty comfortable. That is, $2 a day sucks pretty badly if you live in an urban slum, and have to spend 90 percent of that on food and rent. On the other hand, if you live on a small farm and grow almost all the food you eat, produce the heating and cooking fuel you need and need just a little money, you might not have such a tough time. For example, the average savings rate for poor Chinese farmers is a full 20 percent of their income—they are able to put aside a reserve, in large part because they don’t need their money for the most basic things.
So maybe there’s a glimmer of hope in here—because a lot of us could get a lot closer to equity if we could meet more of our needs at home. But that still doesn’t get us all the way to equity, and most of us are a long way away from having an inherited small farm, passed down from family to family, and a property tax assessor who accepts eggs and zucchini.
If perfect equity isn’t going to happen anytime soon, why bring it up? Because there are a host of fairly simple ways we could make the food go further. The first would be to minimize biofuel production, unless we develop a method that doesn’t compete with people food. Cars simply shouldn’t get a share of the world’s food—when cars compete with people, the cars win, because most people who own cars can out purchase those who don’t. So biofuels as we do them now can’t exist on any scale.
The next culprit (bigger than biofuels, but more ethically defensible than feeding cars) is meat, egg and dairy production. We are not suggesting that everyone become vegetarian, merely that we in the US could easily cut our consumption of animal products by half, and reduce the feeding of grain to cows and other animals that not only don’t need it but don’t thrive on large quantities of grain.
Is that so hard to imagine? That’s still more meat than our grandparents ate. And we’d still have as much fuel as our grandparents had for a good while. If we were to do this, along with raising outputs by capturing animal manures and human urine, intensive small-scale agriculture and a host of other strategies, there’s a good chance we could feed 9 billion people without any more poverty and starvation than we have now, maybe less—probably.
Why probably? Well, the big caveat here is climate change. As we showed in Chapter 1, the vast majority of the implications of climate change for agriculture are bad. Though there will be some areas (Siberia, parts of Canada) that benefit, those benefits will probably be overwhelmed by losses. If we stabilize the climate (one of the reasons small-scale agriculture is preferable—because it does double duty in both reducing emissions and storing carbon), we can probably feed 9 billion people—for a bit.
The next biggest challenge is the ability of wealthy people (which includes most of us reading this, even if we don’t feel wealthy) to recognize that a real drop in some measures of standard of living is to their benefit, and this is a very hard thing indeed. For example, if we allow the rainforest to be destroyed in order to make more farmland, we will pay a heavy price as climate change decimates future generations. The loss of biodiversity is already harming us economically. All of this is another important reason to say the land we most need to use is the land on our house lots and public parks and all the places that are already disturbed heavily by man.
And there are other caveats. Feeding the world depends on the availability of oil to transport food from areas that will have surpluses to the areas that don’t. We can do a great deal to make many areas more food secure than they are, but some regions will always rely on imports. It would be easy to say that there is no point to food sovereignty then, but this is false—the more a region can feed itself, the smaller the needed surpluses, the smaller the quantities of energy needed to transport it, and the more likely it is that food will move to where it needs to be eaten.
An equitable future also depends on the ability of people in areas that have surpluses to contain their appetites for meat and fuel, and to recognize that the world is not served by the upheaval created by billions of starving people. It depends on a set of economic assumptions completely different from the ones currently in place.
As mentioned above, fairly inexpensive organic inputs and training techniques could dramatically raise yields in many poor nations. This is perhaps the best hope of sustainable agriculture—that it could result in equal yields all around the world, yields not dependent on the rising market prices of fertilizers. Thus, instead of poorer nations in the Global South depending on large grain producers to offer them increasingly unaffordable grains, nations could feed themselves and their regions.
As we said early on, the distinction that applies here is between what is technically possible and what is likely. We both reluctantly conclude that it is unlikely, unless we are truly able to alter our present path quite quickly, that we will avoid more famine. But we want to emphasize that if we fail to do so, this will be a decision made by the world, largely by the world’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens—the starvation of millions or billions will not be an accidental tragedy, but a conscious choice.
We would also point out that even if we are unable to perfectly avoid the death of many hungry people, it makes an enormous difference whether millions or billions starve. That is, the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good here.
Reallocating food would make it possible for the world’s population to reach 9 billion (about the midpoint of UN projections) by the middle of the century, with no more hunger than there was in 2006—that is millions of people would die of hunger every, day, but this would be ordinarily horrible rather than extraordinary..
But let’s go from there. Yes, it is possible to match and exceed existing agricultural output—and without failing forms of industrial agriculture. Yes, it is possible to produce enough food to feed 9 billion people, if the richest ones were will to give up some of their privileges both because it is right and to reduce inevitable conflicts.
But once we’d done so—could we keep on feeding 9 billion people forever? Certainly not. Even if all of us were willing to reduce our standard of living dramatically, the wealthy among us are unlikely to be content to live like Keralans or other poor world denizens. And as long as the wealthy are unwilling to do this, then others will try to become like the wealthy. And though it is possible to feed 9 billion people without more destruction of rainforest, it is not possible to begin the process of repairing land and restoring our losses with 9 billion people. We’re going to be struggling just to keep up, and undoubtedly, while sustainable agriculture can do much to mitigate climate change and peak oil, we’re also going to lose a great deal of biodiversity. We will deplete our fossil water supplies from underground aquifers in this scenario, even if we use them more wisely.
We have chosen, with some ambivalence, to say that protecting human lives is more important than losing wildlife of all sorts. Although we’ve chosen here to say that preserving human lives outranks preserving biodiversity, to the extent that we can have both, we’ve chosen both. That is, we’ve chosen to use the most productive, most sustainable, most climate mitigating, least fossil intensive way of feeding 9 billion people, but we recognize in doing so, that we’re going to do harm.
We have debated with ourselves the ethics of this, but have come to the conclusion that it is necessary. First, we both broadly derive from ethical traditions that prioritize human lives. We’re both aware of the ambiguities of saying that humans outrank gorillas and polar bears and other creatures whose whole populations may become extinct, but for better and for worse, we prioritize the minimization of human suffering—whether we should be able to or not, we can’t live with ourselves if we allow human beings to starve, though horribly and perhaps shamefully enough, we can live with ourselves if the sockeye salmon becomes extinct. It would be more pleasant and easy to cloak our decision in nobler language, but this is the ugly truth. We hope that there’s another choice, which we will discuss in a moment, but if the choice is between children and salmon, children win.
We also make this choice for pragmatic reasons—because starving people often lay waste to landscapes even more than ordinary people, eating grass, stripping bark from trees, killing any animal they can to feed their families. Hunger also leads to resource wars and violence—and the potential ecological destruction of nations battling over water and the remaining food is far vaster than the ecological destruction of feeding everyone. For example, scientists recently suggested that even a small-scale exchange of nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan would be enough to plunge the world into a nuclear winter.
The other pragmatic reasoning is that a die-off, the starvation of billions, wouldn’t fix the problem. That is, it would certainly leave more food for everyone else in the very short term, but as long as the world had a burgeoning group of people who wanted to live like middle and upper class Americans, we would still end up struggling with the food issues for a long, long time.
As we’ve seen, the majority of the carbon emissions per person come from the Global North, where people are richer. The majority of hungry people come from the Global South, where people are poorer. But those in the Global South don’t use very much of the fossil fuels or make very many emissions. So even if we imagine the world’s population dropping by half in famine (horrifying image though that is) it doesn’t fix the problem. It doesn’t create enough world resources to manage the problem of rich people’s ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels. And it doesn’t do enough to mitigate climate change—we would still get to the disaster point, and fairly quickly. And as that happened, yields of food would fall—that is, we’d eventually be struggling just as hard to feed 3 billion in this scenario as we will be to feed 9 billion. No matter how the scenario goes, we have to find a way to increase equity and deal with the population issue.
If we can’t accept world-wide famine, and we can’t feed 9 billion people forever, without harming the oceans and running out of water, what options do we have? The only possible choice is a managed population decline.
The best hope we can see is to try and stabilize population by using the best techniques available to us. What are these? They involve more education and power for women all over the world, access to basic medical care so that children survive infancy and women who want contraception can get it, and basic food security. And if you translate that, it comes down, generally speaking, to greater equity. That is, the things we need to do in order to stabilize the population problem are also the things we need to do for reasons of justice and for ecological stability.
Over the past few decades, reproductive rates have halved worldwide. It is almost impossible to overstate how important this fact is—and, except in China, it has overwhelmingly been achieved by women choosing to have fewer children. One ecologist called it “women’s gift to the planet.” In many versions of UN population projections, world population begins to fall rapidly after its peak at 8.5 to 9.5 billion people, reaching as low as 5 billion by the end of the century.
Reproductive rates fall fastest in societies where women have access to basic security. For example, the state of Kerala, with its high well-being, medical care and food security has a dramatically lower TFR (total fertility rate) than the rest of India. But in most of the rest of India, literacy rates are lower, women are less politically engaged, and, as Vandana Shiva points out, without social security-like programs and with high infant and child mortality, a woman has to have five children to ensure that she will have a living adult child to support her in her old age.[xxii]
In many very poor countries, children begin to produce more than they consume by the time they are six, and are producing as much as an adult by the time they are 12. That is, for very poor people, children are the one hope of economic stability. If we can give people greater security and stability, more hope that the children they do have will grow up, evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children.
Birth control has a role here too, but not in isolation from these larger issues of food and other forms of security. Taken in isolation, Western medical care and birth control engender resentment and take power away from women—that is, they work in exactly the wrong direction. Consider this example from Bangladesh, where sterilization is often offered as a bribe to women, whether they want it or not, taking away control of their bodies, and stripping them of power in the interest of outsiders’ goals.
The trend towards enforcing final solutions is aimed particularly at women. This is borne out by the fact that, in Bangladesh, food-aid earmarked for distribution among the most distressed women is used to blackmail them into accepting sterilization in exchange for a few kilograms of wheat. Thus, the Vulnerable Group Feeding Programme (VGF) has been used to force the poorest women to be sterilized…. Old women, women already sterilized and widows are not entitled to food relief.[xxiii]
Birth control has value, but only if it is offered to women in combination with the power to make good choices. If birth control strips women of political power, then the larger social goal of creating a society where women voluntarily constrain childbirth is impossible.
Jim Merkel, author of Radical Simplicity, has calculated that if everyone on earth had one child, we could reduce the population to 1 billion by the end of this century.[xxiv] Even if we were to have two children, and encourage somewhat delayed childbearing (the later you begin having children, the fewer generations in a period, and the smaller the total impact of your children), we could get the planet down to about 3 billion people, voluntarily, without famine or war. Three billion people willing to live a lower-energy life, without the expansionist economy, is probably within the range of the planet’s carrying capacity, and a two-child self-limit would further reduce the world’s population over time.
The good thing is that it isn’t necessary to create a perfect world or to bring about lots of fossil-fuel usage or high-energy economic development. The world had schools for thousands of years before fossil fuels. Women’s access to political power does not require lots of fossil energies. Access to birth control and to basic medical care, including sufficient food, hygiene and oral rehydration syrups that prevent death in early childhood are really quite inexpensive to provide. But to imagine that a society reducing its energy use would provide these things to billions of people, we must imagine a world in which there is greater equity. Again, we come back to this large question of equity.
[i] George Kent, Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food. Georgetown University Press, 2005, p. 4.
[ii] Amy Bentley, _Eating For Victory_ p. 143–157.
[iii] http://globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/232 (accessed August 28, 2008).
[x] Hope Shand, “Human Nature: Agricultural Biodiversity and Farm-Based Food Security,
[xi] Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Merrifield and Todd Gorelick], p. 4.
[xii] Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, 2000, pp. 12–13.
[xiii] Donald Freebairn, “Did the Green Revolution Concentrate Incomes? A Quantitative Study of Research Reports,” World Development, 23, No2, 1995, [page number].
[xiv] Lappé, et al., p. 61.
[xvi] Jules Pretty, Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land, and Nature, Earthscan Publications, 2002, [p. ??].
[xvii] Donella Meadows, “Our Food, Our Future,” Organic Gardening, Vol. 47 No. 5 September/October 2000, p. 54.
[xxi] http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e01.htm. (accessed August 29, 2008).
[xxii] Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, p. 286.
[xxiv] Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth, New Society, 2003, p. 183.
. There is a very good chance that in the next few decades we will no longer have the option of treating our manures as waste. The project of readapting our infrastructure to use them should be a priority, because of the terrible consequences of not carefully handling human outputs.
