Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
based on economic criteria, and therefore production largely depends on
the tastes and preferences of consumers. Because of this dependence,
growers need to pass on to the consumer any extra costs associated with
mitigating environmental damage, or go out of business. Consumers rep-
resent the monster, and they are in control.
A corollary of the dilemma invokes the size and complexity of this food
system and suggests that conventional farming systems are much more
economically effi cient on a large scale for feeding the billions of people of
the world. In this example, a grower warns of the danger of abandoning
conventional methods of production:
Grower: They're been farming the United States for 250 years—I mean,
how sustainable do you want it to get? . . . I happen to be old enough to
remember what organic really was. Damn near was. I remember when DDT
came out in the '40s, it was a miracle. We found tomatoes without bugs
in 'em. Now it killed birds, and that's unfortunate and I'm glad that we
don't have it anymore. It might have caused cancer, and I'm certainly glad
we don't have it anymore if that's true. But...I can remember, [as an]
elementary school student picking tomato horn worms off of the tomato
plants because that was the only way you could kill 'em. You picked 'em
off, threw 'em on the ground and stomped on 'em. That killed 'em. It's
very ineffective. You sure as hell don't feed 250 million people or a billion
people by picking tomato horn worms off by hand.
This version of the dilemma raises the specter of mass starvation, with
ineffi cient organic methods of production causing food shortages. Agricul-
ture is again depicted as a dependent variable; the rest of the world is criti-
cally reliant on conventional agriculture and its advantages of productivity,
scale, and technologies; and the hero at the heart of this cautionary tale
is a pesticide. This grower emphasizes both the structured weakness of
growers and their responsibility for feeding the world. He implicitly admits
that the system needs repair but claims that a truly transformative act of
repair would be dangerous, perhaps even impossible.
These narratives of economic and technological determinism are clear
examples of discursive repair, a means for justifying and maintaining the
logic of a system of production. It would be a mistake to underestimate
the power of these discourses for regulating perceptions and shaping the
practical and institutional structure of production itself. Recent social
Search WWH ::




Custom Search