Contrary to popular dogma, industrial agriculture cannot "feed the world." Below are seven key takeaways from a report comparing the industrial food chain to the smallholder peasant food web.
Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70% of the world’s people, and peasants produce this food with often much less than 25% of the resources — including land, water, fossil fuels — used to get all of the world’s food to the table.
The industrial food chain uses at least 75% of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but provides food to less than 30% of the world’s people.
For every $1 consumers pay to industrial food chain retailers, society pays another $2 for the industrial food chain’s health and environmental damages. The total bill for the industrial food chain's direct and indirect cost is 5 times governments’ annual military expenditure.
The industrial food chain lacks the agility to respond to climate change. Its research and development is not only distorted but also declining as it concentrates the global food market.
The peasant food web nurtures 9-100 times the biodiversity used by the industrial food chain, across plants, livestock, fish, and forests. Peasants have the knowledge, innovative energy and networks needed to respond to climate change; they have the operational scope and scale; and they are closest to the hungry and malnourished.
There is still much about our food systems that we don’t know we don’t know. Sometimes, the industrial food chain knows but isn’t telling. Other times, policymakers aren’t looking. Most often, we fail to consider the diverse knowledge systems in the peasant food web.
The bottom line: at least 3.9 billion people are either hungry or malnourished because the industrial food chain is too distorted, vastly too expensive, and — after 70 years of trying — just can’t scale up to feed the world.
@bezmiar this is from six years ago...but still incredibly relevant thank you for sharing this and for summarising the findings. Have started following you, my movement is #indigenousrights and #animalrights focused and all about boycotting palm oil and other industrial commodities in killing our world and irreplaceable animals and indigenous cultures, nice to meet you
Surprisingly I've only received one or two quibbling naysayers on this post so far and I just muted them. In a previous life on Twitter, I might have passionately argued with these quibblers but I just don't have time or desire to argue with moronic ideologues.
On top of everything, in the industrial food chain almost HALF the food that actually makes it to the distributors is never eaten. And fully 50% of the final cost of produce is just the damn packaging!
For an industry supposedly optimizing for efficiency, the waste is incredible. Especially when you begin to factor in the cumulative destruction of the land and soil.
Local production solves an incredible range of problems. Industrial agriculture cannot compete with the freshness, flavor, and diversity of locally ripened foods. Given half a chance, local production can and will take over a large portion of the market-- strengthening the resilience of communities in the process, as it reduces our reliance on precarious global supply chains (oh, and reducing vulnerability to diseases too-- remember the Cavendish?).
Consider kiwifruit: they're picked in summer and put straight into storage. But it tastes sharp and metallic even when taken out to sweeten – they taste disgusting to me.
Kiwifruit should be picked in winter after the vine has shed its leaves – not until then can the fruit sweeten with good flavour. But most people wouldn't know because they've never tasted one. The cartel hides that truth because duping us reduces their costs.
Crops are bred for their appearance, shelf life, and resilience in shipping-- not flavor, and not nutrition.
I think that has a lot to do with why people don't like vegetables-- the bitter styrofoam that passes for produce in the average supermarket is a sad excuse for the real thing, which most people have never tasted.
@violetmadder@bezmiar You've just tweaked my historian mind into wondering how far back we can find vegetable-hating and whether it varies substantively between contexts and periods. It would be so very interesting to find that "I hate broccoli" was triggered by a change in broccoli cultivation.
@violetmadder@bezmiar My family used to be market gardeners, incidentally. We spent three generations converting from refugee peasants to tractors and industrial fertilisers and gigantic monocultures and pesticides. Then we crashed in the 1980s when the supermarkets decided to contract directly with growers to bypass the auctions. The contracts were specific: an exact number of an exact grade on an exact date. No grower could afford to miss a contract, so we quit variety and grew "reliable".
@violetmadder@katlin@bezmiar I find that our local climate forum overlooks this, too. It's not very diverse – nearly 100% retired, wealthy, white people with fairly similar perspectives and experiences. Their hearts and worries are in a good place, but I still haven't figured out how to convince them to widen the potential – they think that what they're saying is "neutral" and "factual", and that their modes of interaction are open. And they can't figure out why different people don't join.
@violetmadder@katlin@bezmiar We all are, though. Diversity's the only way I can think of to address it, and diversity's difficult for people who aren't used to cosmopolitanism. Maybe even for people who are used to it.
All I am doing now is staying on the outside in order to repeatedly remind people why that is, especially when I get asked to join this or that group. Maybe enough little prods plus a long time to digest the idea will eventually open things up.
I keep remembering what Dr. King said about how it doesn't matter if the lunch counter gets desegregated, if you can't afford the burger. Inequality divides.
I'm from one of the whitest parts of the country, and when I started to get a clue just how bad things are (after moving to a big metropolitan area) it really hit me how segregated this country really still is in a lot of ways-- to the point that I had a tricky time figuring out how/where to get myself in the company of folks different from myself more often so I can improve.
Especially with the increasing lack of third spaces, and covid!
I've never understood people who actually WANT to stay insular. So dull! Moving to the big city, hearing other languages and so on was a big thrill for me, and I still hope I get to do more exploring.
I wonder about water, too-- people want to put heaps of sugar and flavor in any beverage, I know folks who practically refuse to drink plain water, but most tap water and even bottled water too just does not taste like the fresh stuff.
The results of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)* point in the same direction
understand it as the IPPC of agriculture, with the difference that it was only hold once, in 2008, partly because the results weren't what BigAg had wished for.
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