Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? by Eric Holt-Gimenez

Author:Eric Holt-Gimenez [Holt-Giménez, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509522040
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Climate change

The classical political economists who studied agriculture and capitalism couldn’t have predicted the most irreversible consequence of the metabolic rift: global warming. Industrial crop production is directly responsible for over 14 percent of global

GHGs.22 One reason for this is that 50 percent of all applied fertilizer ends up in the atmosphere or in local waterways. Livestock alone produces 18 percent of GHGs.23 Deforestation, much of which is undertaken to make way for agriculture, constitutes another 18 percent of global emissions.24 As Annie Shattuck points out, “What we eat is responsible for more carbon pollution than all the world’s planes, trains, and automobiles. Between the forests and fields converted to agriculture and pollution directly from farming, what we eat accounts for nearly a third of all the gases contributing to climate change.”25

Land clearing for agriculture is a major contributor to GHGs. Conventional environmental wisdom blames peasant farmers for the 1.7–2.4 Gigatons of carbon emitted yearly due to deforestation. It is true that during the latter half of the twentieth century peasant farmers engaged in substantial land clearing in places like the Amazon and the Central American rainforest. But they were often part of a larger agrarian transition in which industrial agriculture pushed peasants out of prime agricultural areas. To avoid the issue of land reform, government “colonization” programs encouraged poor farmers to migrate to the “agricultural frontier” where they felled tropical forests with slash-and-burn agriculture. Large cattle ranchers followed close behind, pushing the peasants deeper into the forest.26

According to one global estimate, over 70 percent of deforestation results from growing commercial crops.27 The bulk of GHG emissions resulting from land use change is driven by gigantic plantations of soy, maize, sugar cane, and palm oil. Small farmers displaced by these plantations must clear new land, thus increasing carbon emissions even more. In sub-Saharan Africa, displaced farmers encroach on the rangeland of pastoralists, weakening the resilience and livelihoods of both. The tragic irony of this model of food production is that 24 percent goes to waste, 35 percent goes to animal feed, and 3 percent goes to biofuels.

But, as we have seen, not all agriculture systems are created equal. While industrial agriculture represents the majority of emissions from global agriculture, agroecological practices – used primarily by small-scale farmers – not only contribute fewer emissions, but also sequester more carbon and other GHGs. No matter, when the figures for agriculture’s negative impact on the ecology of the planet are calculated, all forms of agriculture are thrown into the same, industrial sack.

The blatant conflation of different production systems not only ignores the benefits of approaches like agroecology and agroforestry, it hides the destructive dynamics of the grain–oilseed–livestock complex and invites us to believe that measures like “sustainable intensification” and “land-sparing” implemented on vast soy and maize plantations are actually offsetting the increased emissions resulting from the spread of feed and fuel crops. Further, it ignores how grains and oilseed grown for feed (no matter how “sustainable” the methods), support the growth of an

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