Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
8
A UTOPIAN PERSPECTIVE ON GLOBAL FOOD
SECURITY
Paul Stock and Michael Carolan
One of us (Mihael) was recently involved in bringing famed environmentalist Lester
Brown (founder of the Worldwath Institute and more recently the Earth Policy In-
stitute) onto campus at Colorado State University to give a series of public lectures.
When word began to spread through the agriculture community about Lester's invit-
ation, the pushbak was palpable and immediate. Colorado State University, you see,
is a Land Grant University, with a particularly strong history in livestok production.
Colorado is home to some of the largest beef CAFOs (confined animal feeding opera-
tions) in the world (the largest in the state has a one-time feeding capacity of 811,000
head of catle). So the University has a close working relationship with large-scale
beef feeders. The outrage stemmed from the belief that the University, and specific-
ally the College of Agriculture (where the invitation originated), had invited someone
who preahes eating lower in the food hain; someone, in other words, who was un-
abashedly anti-feedlot. Chests were puffed as not-too-veiled threats were made about
what would happen if his invitation was not retracted. Ultimately, Lester made his
trip to Fort Collins, gave his talks (he crafted his message carefully in recognition of
his audience), and left.
The criticisms levelled at Lester and his messages are common, we've both heard
them many times before. To boil it down to its core, the argument often goes
something like this: the problem of global food security needs science-based solutions,
not pie-in-the-sky theories - 'people live off fish not fantasies' to adapt the famous
proverb. That's the critique, at its heart, that conventional agriculture directs at the
competing alternatives (organic, local, etc.): that they are too long in the later (val-
ues) and too short in the former (facts). Or, to sum up the critique in one word, suh
competing visions are - gasp - utopian (see for example Avery, 1999).
