Feeding the world through forced debt and destructive monoculture?

I am especially interested in food sustainability because of its integration of all “branches” of sustainability.  Sustainable agriculture is a hotbed of innovative, ecologically sustainable practices.  Many of the most sustainable agricultural practices are embedded generations deep in indigenous cultural practices, valued by those cultures for their sustainable, integrated benefits to environment and community.  And as food fulfills the most essential need for sustenance, enacting political and economic policies that ensure production and equal access to it is essential to sustaining peace and justice worldwide.

Unfortunately, even many of those in the industry of sustainable food evidently fail to recognize the importance of that social sustainability and its integration into any solutions for our global food crises, if the panel that brought me to tears is any evidence.  It was called “Feeding the World by 2050 through Sustainable Intensification.”

Perhaps I should have expected the worst from a panel that included representatives from DuPont, a fertilizer company, and Smithfield Foods.  However, the description promised a look at food security through an innovative method called “intensification,” and the rest of the conference had proven I should listen to many representatives from these big corporations an open mind.

The panelists spent 75 minutes arguing the way to feed the world was through monocultures, which have demonstrated tendencies to destroy soil health and are inherently less resilient to natural disasters; genetically-modified crops and fertilizers bought on credit that increase worldwide dependencies on American economic systems; and a rejection of many cultural practices that have fed indigenous populations – and their ecological homes – for centuries.

Near the top of my notes for this session I scrawled the words “greenwashing” over a few lines about Mosaic Company’s mission.  Then when Dennis Treacy from Smithfield asserted that people around the world just want American food and more of it, I became even more suspicious of the “sustainability” being proposed by the men at the front of the room.  When Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund claimed “You tend to make better decisions when you have fewer dollars to spend,” I couldn’t help but think of the decades of social and political upheaval around the world with roots in malnutrition and famine being a pretty convincing rebuttal to that claim.

Chris Lambe from Mosaic Company was probably the most insulting, however, when he argued that establishing a credit system for Mayan farmers to buy American fertilizers would get them out of debt.  He ignored the fact that before many Mayans were bribed with short-term dollars and cents to switch diversified crop production to fields of single strains of corn, they had fed entire communities by planting crops in rotation and in strategic combinations that ensured sustainable soil richness, resilience to disease and damaging weather conditions, and culturally embedded practices that ensured the entire community was engaged and fed by the fruits of their labor.

It is certainly true there is no easy solution to the growing food crisis.  And the panelists did claim that collaboration and infrastructure were keys to success.  (Food distribution is an area of particular personal concern, domestic just as critically as international.)

However, I was and remain shocked that there was no effort by the moderator or conference organizers to balance the scientifically innovative approaches proposed by DuPont, Smithfield, and Mosaic with anything resembling true, global ecological, social, or economic sustainability.