Mark Bittman, who has to be my favorite food writer, had this op-ed in the New York Times two days ago. Armed with a new report from the United Nations Council on Human Rights, he rebuts the popular claim that organic, sustainable food production is only for rich foodie-types, and that it has no hope of being able to feed a growing world population that already struggles mightily with hunger and malnutrition. (Why the Council on Human Rights? It turns out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights endorsed by the UN includes a right to food. Good to know!)
The report presents a set of goals related to global food supply, cites numerous examples where agricultural methods that prioritize ecological sustainability have made good progress toward these goals, and notes the inability of large-scale, centralized farming to do the same. It stipulates that food needs to be available (supply meets need), accessible to everyone, and nutritionally adequate. In order to meet these goals, the authors argue, global food systems must be based on small-scale farms that prioritize ecological sustainability. The extent to which large-scale, centralized food production irreversibly depletes the resources it will depend on in the future makes it a poor model, even in areas where food is scarce and poverty is rampant. On the other hand, a small farm generates both food and income for its inhabitants, is less resource-intensive, and makes the local food supply less vulnerable to climate and other shocks that drive prices up for everyone.
Sustainable agriculture depends on "recycling nutrients and energy on the farm, rather than introducing external inputs." These practices not only preserve the ecosystem and promote food stability, they lower the cost to the farmer of working the land. The report cites many studies, mostly in Africa, that show various types of sustainable agriculture increasing yields, reducing poverty, and improving nutrition on small scales. Given these results, the report's message was that relatively cheap, sustainable agricultural methods have significant potential to feed the world's population, and would benefit greatly from more focused research and investment. While it may be able to produce more and cheaper food in the short term, the industrial model does not solve any of the long-term global problems cited by critics of the organic movement; if anything, it makes them worse.
The report also stressed that flexibility is important when it comes to sustainable agriculture. Sustainability is a spectrum, especially where there are no regulations in place that certify food as "organic" or some similar label. The idea is to move food systems toward the sustainable end of that spectrum in ways that make sense for the region, rather than imposing a broad, strict set of standards.
Yesterday, Slate.com published this article about a recent study comparing the yields of conventional and organic crops in the US in the same year. Although organic farming held its own in production of certain crops like regional sweet potatoes, peaches, and raspberries, commodity crops and "secondary staple" crops almost always produced substantially lower yields when grown organically. As the article's author notes, this finding is not promising for the idea of using organic production to feed the world's people as population continues to grow at an alarming rate.
However, I don't think these results are as discouraging as they may seem. For one thing, we don't know whether they're valid for agricultural systems outside the U.S., let alone whether the increase in yields justifies the environmental degradation it causes. Also, most agricultural research at the moment is geared toward increasing the yields of conventional farming, not organic farming, so it's not surprising that organic methods may be less productive for the time being.
But no matter what agricultural methods we use, we know that the earth's resources are not sufficient to feed the extra 2.3 billion people we're projected to add to our global population in the next 40 years, so this problem will require us to reach well beyond the realm of food supply for remedies. In the meantime, it seems like a clear course of action is to invest heavily in research that identifies sustainable agricultural practices and encourages their implementation in our own country. One way to do this is to redirect agricultural subsidies away from the corn and soy that make our processed junk food so cheap, and toward farmers who grow fruits and vegetables. Another way is to place stricter regulations on the chemicals used in food production, even banning them for certain crops that absorb them in greater quantities.
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