Faced with the bleak choice between mass
starvation and the negative environmental and human health consequences of many
agrochemicals, most people are likely to accept the lesser of the two evils.
This places critics of the agrochemical industry on the defensive. While it
seems that we have to demonstrate how to feed 10 billion people by alternative
methods, the agrochemical scenario is in fact based on several major fallacies.
Adults need between three-quarters and one million kilo (k)
calories of food per year. Taking the lesser energy needs of the young and the
aged into account, the 10 billion members of our species will require about 7.5
x1016 k calories per year. According to nutritionists, this energy should be in
the ratio of 11% protein, 25% fat and 64% carbohydrate to provide a healthy
balanced diet. Our energy requirements can be translated into the land required
to produce it.
Supposing we all ate just cereals, which provide roughly
3,300 k calories per kg. We would need to grow three billion tonnes of cereals
to feed the 10 billion and this would require about 1,300 million ha of land
because the current world average yield of cereals is about 2.3 tonnes per ha.
There are almost exactly 1,300 million ha of arable land in the world so it
would be possible to feed the 10 billion on such a diet.
Few people want to live on cereals alone. However, since most
fruits and vegetables yield more calories per ha than cereals, whilst most
protein and oil crops yields less, they balance out so that a varied diet can in
fact be produced for 10 billion people from 1.3 billion ha of arable land. In
addition to the arable land, we also have over three billion ha of pasture in
the world which can be used for the production of meat from herbivores. No one
need go hungry even if the average yields of our domesticated plants and animals
decline to 70% of what they are today. The planet can feed 10 billion people.
(See table.)
In other words, if we divide the world's arable and pasture
land by our predicted human population, in the year 2020 we will each have 0.13
ha of arable and 0.33 ha of pasture. That is 1,300 m2 of arable and 3,300 m2 of
pasture-which together make a patch of land measuring just under 66 x 66
metres. This might seem very little but anyone with an allotment knows that it
can be used to produce enough food for a whole family and more. The two billion
peasants in the world who grow their own food also know that they can eat well
from such a small patch of land-so long as they are not forced to sell most of
their harvest to pay rent or service an inherited debt.
Greed
If people remain greedy and use their economic buying
power to eat foods that require far more than 4,600 square metres of land to
produce, others will go hungry. Almost anyone who eats large amounts of animal
products is indirectly using more than their fair share of land.
Poverty
If people do not have the money to pay for the food
that they need at the price being demanded by the market, they will go hungry;
instead of being eaten by the people who need it, the food will go into store,
or be used as animal feed or it will be systematically destroyed to maintain
prices. The majority of famines are caused by economic inequalities rather than
an absolute shortage of food. It is also a brutal fact that most famine-stricken
regions have continued to export agriculture crops throughout the famine.
Inefficiency
If our agricultural land continues to be used for
whatever makes the greatest profit rather than for the efficient production of
food for people there will be hunger. Agricultural inefficiency takes a number
of forms, each of which is encouraged by the market.
Mechanisation
Whilst mechanisation cuts costs by replacing
animal and human labour with artificially cheap (ie below replacement cost)
fossil fuels, it does not maximise yields per ha because it results in the
growing of monocultures that are compatible with the machinery employed.
Symbiotic poly-cultures (eg maize and beans, or cereals and clover) are more
productive but the machinery required to sow and harvest complex combinations
does not exist. All comparisons show that polycultures worked by simpler
technologies will produce more food per ha from comparable fields.
Specialisation
Machinery is expensive and generally forces farmers
into specialising-as milk, beef, wheat or potato producers, for instance. This
reduces the biodiversity of their farms, increases the exposure of crops and
animals to disease and pests (thus increasing their dependency on chemical
methods of control) and eliminates biologically efficient and productive
rotation systems.
Productionism
Until the McSharry Reform of the CAP, Europe's
agriculture was organised on what amounted to a 'war footing' for the
maximisa-tion of production, largely irrespective of either its economic or
ecological costs. Even though the rewards are now reduced, the mentality of
European agriculture remains productionist. Most wheat breeding still aims to
breed or engineer plants that will yield 10 tonnes per ha and require copious
inputs of pesticides and fertilisers to grow. Cattle breeders now aim for cows
that can produce 12 tonnes of milk per year and thus require a concentrated diet
of cereals and oilseeds rather than grass, plus many medicaments to keep them
going for their short lives.
The result of this obsession is that our agricultural
production is neither economically viable in a free market, nor economically or
physiologically sustainable. It is actually energy inefficient and exceedingly
wasteful of natural resources. The most energy-efficient milk in the world is
produced by four-tonne cows that eat grass and do not compete with humans for
cereals: it also happens to be the cheapest to produce.
However, the main problem with produc-tionism is its
blinkered focus on single products and failure to look at the productivity of
whole farms. The monocultural mind is short-sighted, simplistic and leads to a
reduction in the productivity of the whole system because it is obsessed with a
limited definition of the productivity of a single crop or animal.
Continuous production systems
Field crops take between three and nine months from
sowing to harvesting, during which time the capital investment is locked up,
earning nothing. It is much more profitable to invest in continuous production
systems based on animals in which, egg, meat and milk production circulates
capital in a matter of weeks using systems not much different from those
designed for car factories. These systems remove domesticated animals from their
traditional ecological niche and place them in direct competition with human
beings for grain and oilseed concentrates. It takes a chicken about eight
calories of grain to produce one calorie of egg. A cow can produce one calorie
of beef from 20 calories of grain. Each time we feed grain or oilseeds to
animals we multiply the reduction of food available for human consumption. On
average humans gain 85% of our nutrition from vegetable sources and a mere 15%
from animals. In the G7 countries, however, the ratio is nearer to 60:40 making
modern food production systems in the words richest nations the least efficient.
The food is also less healthy: when we feed peanuts to pigs we turn healthy
vegetable protein and fat into saturated lard.
It is difficult to find efficient farms producing a rich
variety of crops and animal products anywhere in Europe because they have been
systematically eliminated by the CAP, at enormous cost to the tax payer. It is,
however, still possible to see what we have lost by travelling through rural
Switzerland or Norway, where highly efficient small-scale agriculture is still
protected as a matter of policy.
There are a number of measures of energy efficiency that can
be applied to a farm:
energy outputs as a ratio of energy inputs
energy outputs per ha
energy inputs per tonne of output
energy outputs per unit of labour
Industrialised monocultures are only
efficient in the fourth sense, which has nothing to do with feeding the world
and everything to do with making money, modern farms are increasingly
inefficient in every other sense, including energy yields per ha, though this
only becomes apparent when monocultures are compared with polycultures.
Inefficient agriculture , poverty and greed are closely
linked by the market which is increasingly being applied to food production,
thus ensuring that it is organised for profit rather than according to need. The
globalisation of the food market is now a fait accompli because of the
inclusion of agriculture for the first time ever in the latest GATT round. The
policy of leaving food production to the vagaries of the world market is further
accelerated by the 'structural adjustment' programmes being imposed on poor
Third World nations by the World Bank-in which national food security policies
are being replaced by food export strategies in a world market that is already
in glut. A huge global experiment based on un-researched free market dogmas is
now being imposed on the whole of humanity. It has never been tried before, it
involves enormous risks with millions-maybe billions of lives, and no one
knows what the consequences will be.
|
Comparison of calories per ha from
carbohydrate and protein crops; |
|||
|
Crop |
Yield (kg/ha) |
Energy (k cals/kg) |
Food* |
|
Cereals |
2,300 |
3,300 |
7.59 |
|
Potatoes |
14,200 |
870 |
12.35 |
|
Peas (dry) |
1,140 |
2,860 |
3.26 |
| * k calories/ha x 000,000 | |||