Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Can Organic Agriculture Feed the World? And Is That the Right Question?

Can Organic Agriculture Feed the World? And Is That the Right Question? Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman and political economist, published a treatise in 1798 that riveted the world’s attention on the “problem” of human population growth.1 Malthus argued that population growth was bound to outstrip food production, because human population would increase geometrically while the food supply could only grow arithmetically. Malthus’s powerful thesis has been used to justify many social doctrines ever since, everything from “survival of the fittest” to the “green revolution” (GR). The question “Can organic agriculture feed the world?” is posed against that backdrop. What the question is asking is this: can organic farming methods produce enough food to feed an ever-expanding human population , or will its methods of production reduce yields and therefore hasten the time of the massive famines envisioned by Malthus? The question usually raises a moral issue as well as a technical one. In his essay in praise of Norman Borlaug, Gregg Easterbrook blames all those who oppose GR agriculture for the starvation of people in Africa.2 Borlaug is, of course, the agronomist who helped develop the high-yielding grain varieties (and the input-intensive technologies required to produce those yields), ushering in the new era of industrial agriculture. The moral implication of Easterbrook’s essay is clear: those who oppose high-input agriculture will have starving millions on their conscience. Description of the Problem Posed this way, the food/population issue appears to be a simple matter of producing enough food and inventing the technologies capable of pro141 This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in For All Generations: Making World Agriculture More Sustainable, edited by J. Patrick Madden and Scott G. Chaplowe, 154–72 (Glendale, Calif.: OM Publishing, 1997). 142 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience ducing it. However, the imbalance of humans relative to the millions of other species with whom we coevolved now disrupts the biotic community and the delicate ecological relationships that have evolved over billions of years. This disruption and deterioration now threaten the food supply of the human species. The reason we need to consider an alternative is that our current model of industrial agriculture is contributing, dramatically, to this ecological disruption. So while the green revolution may have enjoyed success in increasing the yields of a few crop varieties for the short term, it now threatens the ability of future generations to feed themselves. In other words, the question “Can organic agriculture feed the world?” is a much more complex question than is often implied. This is not simply a question of whether or not the technologies to farm organically can outperform the technologies to farm industrially. The question is, how do we regain and maintain the evolutionary stability of the various ecological neighborhoods in which we humans live? Apart from such stabilization, we will lose the “ecosystem services” that provide not only food, but all of the life-sustaining elements that make human life possible on this planet.3 So, the “agriculture” question (inside that larger question) is: What kind of agriculture can best mirror and maintain that evolutionary stability? Niles Eldredge gives us some examples of our utter dependence on these complex biological relationships. Insects, which humans generally hold in low regard (we’d love to expunge many of them from the face of the Earth altogether), are so important, says Eldredge, that “humanity probably could not last for more than a few months” without them.4 Most of us would probably support a proposal to eradicate termites from the face of the Earth. But Eldredge reminds us that termites, because of their symbiotic relationship with spirochete bacteria, are one of the few creatures on the planet that can digest cellulose. Consequently, we humans are absolutely dependent on termites for a huge portion of the recycling of the world’s biotic material. “No recycling, no ongoing life,” he says.5 Put another way, without termites you can forget about the problem of producing enough food. There wouldn’t be any humans—or much of any other kind of life as we know it—to feed! What is often posed as the food/population problem can more accurately be described as a population/ecology problem. In other words, the real problem with the unprecedented increase in human population is that it has led to the disruption and deterioration of the natural functioning of [18.227.114.125] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:14 GMT...