Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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is our weekly trip to the supermarket. People demand low priced food.
This has worked quite well within the scheme of large-scale agricultural
production - high yield and low cost seem to go hand in hand. But there are
two problems with this system: it forces farmers onto an economic tread-
mill that decimates rural communities, and it causes serious environmental
degradation.
R
URAL DECLINE
Farmers trying to survive within the current U.S. agricultural system feel
they must buy the latest machinery, plant the newest genetically engineered
seeds, and apply the latest toxic agrichemicals in order to produce as many
bushels per acre as possible. They can only sell these high yielding crops
for low commodity prices. In the long run most family farms just barely
break even. Between 1984 and 1998, the price that consumers paid for food
increased just 3 percent, but the price that farmers received for their crops
dropped an incredible 36 percent (Lauck 2000). Attempting to survive this
economic crunch, many farmers are forced to take a disastrous jog on
the “treadmill of production”: the ever-increasing need for more land and
higher yields, even though the economic and ecological sustainability of this
system is short-lived (Cochrane 1993). Wendell Berry eloquently notes that
once a farmer shifts to industrial agriculture, “the economy of money has
infiltrated and subverted the economies of nature, energy, and the human
spirit” (Berry 1977, 46). Indeed, conventional farming is far from nature and
closely aligned to agribusiness and their latest technologies.
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uestioning Agricultural Biotechnology
GMOs or genetically engineered (GE) crops are grown from seeds that have
been genetically altered to have specific traits: for example, soybeans con-
taining a gene that makes them immune to a specific herbicide or corn
that has a toxic pesticide within it. The first GE crops were planted in
the United States in 1996, and these now include biopharmaceuticals and
“medical food” such as rice that has been engineered to contain human
proteins (Cummings 2004.) Due to strong opposition in much of the rest
of the world, particularly in the UK,Western Europe, and Japan, the United
States plants 72 percent of global GE crops today (USDA-ERS-GMO 2003).
Several African nations, including Zambia, have turned away American GE
commodities given as aid, due to their uncertain environmental and health
effects (
New York Times
,October30, 2002).
