Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to produce cheap food while competing in international markets. Agri-
culture became globalized in an unprecedented manner, as the adoption
of several multilateral and bilateral trade agreements among countries
allowed for the freer import and export of agricultural products across
national boundaries. Intricate food chains now cover thousands of miles
and involve many middlemen, particularly because many processes that
used to occur on farms now occur downstream. Agricultural activities
currently have among the largest environmental footprint of any human
enterprise.44
In places like India, agriculture has become ever more industrialized
since the Green Revolution, a system of agricultural intensification that
the government launched in the 1960s to escalate domestic food produc-
tion. This intensification involved introducing technologies such as irri-
gation, heav y machinery, high-yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds whose
progeny did not produce viable seeds, and chemical inputs. Abandoning
the free or cheap technologies and methods they had been using, farmers
began to buy more and more of these commercial inputs with the hope of
obtaining higher yields. To encourage this transition, the Indian govern-
ment subsidized farm inputs such as fertilizers.45 Many farmers in states
like Kerala became completely reliant on the annual purchase of these
new inputs in order to grow their own food.
Globally, as a result of the increased use of chemical inputs and new
farming technologies, yields of agricultural staples have grown faster than
the world's population. Unfortunately, this triumph of technology has
brought with it serious problems. Industrial agriculture today is rife with
environmental and social abuses and inefficiencies around the world. For
example, as mentioned previously, for about thirty years a public sector
company aerially sprayed the pesticide endosulfan over Kerala's cashew
plantations and neighboring areas—about forty-ive hundred hectares
—to control agricultural pests. As Sugathakumari reported at the 2010
biodiversity conference, this spraying, and similar efforts by other farm-
ers in the area, contributed to the birth of several children with develop-
mental defects, as well as a significant decline in biodiversity. Pesticide
use also caused severe health problems in adults.
At the same time, the rising yields of staple crops, the main goal of
