Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?

By Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted January 29, 2009.

RJ: OK, start with the necessity: How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?  

WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago, humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon -- the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil's carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil and natural gas. But through all that, we've continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That's the basic problem of agriculture.  

Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil and it is more degraded. We've masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals -- pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that "solution" is no solution and is, in fact, part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.  

RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?  

WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem -- we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.  

RJ: OK, so organic alone isn't the answer. Isn't that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?  

WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn't offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.  

RJ: So, where does that leave us?

WJ: Let's go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell [Berry] says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At the Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.  

RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?  

WJ: First, let's recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there's increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.  

At the Land Institute, we've been working on perennializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.  

RJ: Let's assume that natural systems agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis -- some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?  

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas, Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).

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