I am so fascinated by the subject of the Green Revolution. On the surface it can seem hard to resist it - people were starving and then a very immediate solution was offered. It is a really good example of the precautionary principle having been ignored and now that the gains very clearly (which is totally regardless if people have been acknowledging the side effects/repercussions) are wearing off.
A brief overview of the immediate consequences:
The practice monocropping requires an over-reliance on chemicals that damage human health, destroy eco systems, release carbon into the air and wreck soil. The monocrop method is responsible for a decrease in the quality of diet, leading to massive malnutrition which is not much better than all out starvation in my opinion. Another major problem is that it requires an intensive dependence on water to irrigate the crop in order to support a high yield which is leading to droughts world wide (especially prevalent in India where wells are being dug well below 200 ft!). It reduces agricultural biodiversity- which could lead to an increased susceptibility of food supplies to pathogens that cannot be controlled or are resistant to agrochemicals and it also requires a massive amount of pesticides to be sprayed and synthetic fertilizers to be used- which really pollute the scarce water sources and soil. Pesticides are nasty nasty chemicals- when doing landscape work I refuse to spray them- not even for the earth but for my own health- I have seen what happens when it spills on your hands- I don’t want to imagine what happens when ingested. The use of these new crops has lead to the permanent loss of many valuable genetic traits bred into traditional varieties of crops over so many years and generations.
And if we even needed more reasons to not love the Green Revolution it has resulted in greater corporate control of agriculture due to farmer debt from droughts- which was talked about in the NPR series.
What is the hardest part of this for me- is that the lesson has not been learned- some people see the solution to the end of the green revolution as an opporuntity to develope a new seed that will be drought resistant as oppose to looking at the agricultural and economic infrastructure for much needed shifts. I find the argument for bioengineered foods as a silver bullet as a whole hard to swallow- Michael in the class posted a video where Louise Fresco talks about how white bread isn’t so bad- and I found some of her argument to hold water- I know for instance nyc can’t have all of its food produced locally but what about within 100 miles- I think innovation in this case is less about bioengineering and more about the government’s practice around farming and its infrastructure being overhauled- which in the US around the Great Depression had been done before! FDR appointed an Iowan as his Secretary of Agriculture named Henry Agard Wallace. He spent his two terms as secretary expanding the U.S. Department of Agriculture and establishing a powerful system of government relief for farmers. With his Farm Credit Administration, Agricultural Adjustment Administration and Soil Conservation Service, Wallace encouraged farmers to limit corn production in order to keep prices high when their crop hit the market.
Then Earl Butz the Secretary of Agriculture who worked for Nixon in 1973 decided to deregulated the corn market (which I learned thanks to King Corn)- promoting the Free Market to determine prices- and that the crashing prices farmers would experience would soon be fixed by exporting and new creative uses of the surplus- enter stage right- corn syrup- America’s friend and the diabetes aid.
Time line of corn in the 1950s- to now
1968: Experimentation with corn Syrup- the modern version of that high-fructose corn syrup was first produced for commercial use in 1968. Today, 6% of field corn grown in the United States--more than 545 million bushels--goes toward the production of high-fructose corn syrup.
1973: Expansion - President Richard Nixon signed the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973 into law. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, championed an expanded system of government price supports that encouraged all-out corn production.
1976: Concentration - the EPA gave a special designation to feedlots with a dense population of animals raised without access to vegetation. Dubbed Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations--or CAFOs--these feedlots were made possible by the widespread production of Yellow Dent corn, which provided an affordable and abundant source of feed. In recent years, more than 50% field corn grown in the United States has ended up as animal feed.
1984: Conversion – High costs of sugar soft-drink giants Coca-Cola and PepsiCo approved the wholesale replacement of sugar by high-fructose corn syrup in their recipes in November 1984.
1998: Modification - Buoyed by the success of their genetically modified soybean seeds, the biotechnology corporation Monsanto introduced the first genetically altered corn seeds to U.S. farmers in 1998. Marketed as Roundup Ready Corn, the seeds were engineered to resist Monsanto's particular brand of glyphosate herbicide. In their first year on the market, glyphosate-resistant corn seeds like Roundup Ready were planted on 950,000 acres. By 2007, 41 million acres were planted in the modified seeds.
2007: Culmination - U.S. corn farmers harvested more than 13 billion bushels of corn in the fall of 2007, surpassing their previous record by more than a billion bushels and achieving the nation's largest corn harvest ever.
SO what does this mean- When around the FDR new deal era had policies that encouraged farmers to keep production low so that crop prices would remain high.
But the our current Farm Bill bears little resemblance to its 1930s counterpart. We can thank Earl Butz who did away with production limits in the early 1970s, with the subsidy system that was said to protect and guarantee corn farmers a livable income even when the market is flooded with corn.
In theory this subsidies aren’t bad- they were initially meant to protect farmers from the vagaries of weather and the ups and downs of the free market system- however the subsidy system now rewards big growers over small- and mid-sized producers.
It also has lead to the gov payments ending up in the select hands of a few producers “Between 2003 and 2005, for example, American taxpayers paid $34.75 billion in crop subsidy benefits to farmers, but only the top one percent of farmers received nearly one-fifth of that amount. In Iowa, 70 percent of subsidy payments go to only 20 percent of the state’s commodity farmers.”.
So all of this massive increase in production ended with a huge crash and the government bailing out farmers with millions in subsidy payments in 1990s and early 2000s (which tax payers footed the bill for). All this means that corporations and large scale farmers profit and small family farmers suffer- the farmers rely on subsidies and the corporations profit from low corn prices and have succeeded in the consolidation and industrialization of our food system.
So we need to get rid of a “free market” that lacks a price floor for crop prices and decentralize our food system- because as of now…..
2 companies dominate 58% the corn seed market- mainly GMO
3 companies control 90% of the grain market
4 companies control 85% of the High Fructose Corn Syrup Industry
I just think further exploits in bioengineering like in the green revolution are not the answer- I think restructuring the policies around farming and going back to what we had is what is needed.
Npr has done a great 2 story series on it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102944731
http://www.chewswise.com/chews/2009/06/the-new-green-revolution-organic.html
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/bushels
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