Food
It's very easy when you're hungry to understand interdependence.
People used to say you are what you eat. It sounded sort of cool... and we didn't know what it meant.
But there is a sense in which you are what you eat is very radical. Ask yourself, what else are you? All our physical substance comes from water, air and eating. We are part of the food chain. Like all animals, we must eat other living beings or die. Aside from water or air almost every molecule, speck or atom in our bodies comes from or through another living being.
I don't have to tell you how living beings make food. Farmers always joke about city kids who think that milk comes from bottles. Perhaps farmers know more about the connection between things than we do in the city and we can learn a particular view from the farmers.
Food originates with photosynthesis.
Almost all human food (apart from fish and marine foods) is dependent on the integrity of soils, as all food comes either from plants, or from animals which depend on plants.
For most of human history people got their food by gathering and hunting. Their impact on the environment was not as small as some like to imagine. They burnt forest, hunted certain species to extinction, and modified the environment in their favour to whatever extent their technology and understanding would allow. But the changes they wrought in their habitat were minimal when compared to the alterations in the environment caused by agriculture, which started around ten thousand years ago.
Agriculture involves not just existing within an ecological system - even one that people modify - it involves replacing an entire eco-system with another, much simpler system which needs all sorts of special inputs to keep it going. The return for these inputs (work, fertilisers, water etc.) is that, because the new system is devoted to food-producing animals and plants, agricultural societies can support much higher populations.
Part of the problem with agriculture is precisely its dependency on soil. Soil creation happens over such a long time that it can, for practical purposes, be seen as a non-renewable resource. The problem is that most soils are built up by natural systems, and tend to be destroyed rather than maintained by agricultural systems.
Soil is not just dirt
 | Soil is the product of an ecosystem | ||||||
| It has been created by living systems over thousands of years. | ||||||
| It is not separate from, but includes the living beings which have made it, and which sustain it. | ||||||
| One acre of good soil from a temperate region will contain about 125,000,000 small invertebrates (worms, insects, etc.) 30 grams of that same soil will contain: | ||||||
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The above definition of soil is incomplete. The reason is that soil, like all other living systems, can't be seen in isolation. The plants themselves, by binding the soils with their roots and by removing and replacing nutrients, form part of these systems. Animals, from insects to mammals exist in a co-dependent relationship with the soil. They extract food and put manure, urine and ultimately their own bodies back into the soil systems. Air, water and solar energy are also vital to soil.
Over time, people changed natural systems, replacing the bigger mammals with livestock and themselves. They also replaced complex plant systems with simple agricultural systems.Unfortunately they did not always pay enough attention to the state and quality of the soils. Instead, they regarded the earth as a 'given', the dirt into which seeds are put. The result of this attitude has been the destruction of soil systems and soil loss on a vast scale, planet wide.
Some of the main causes of soil loss are:
| Water erosion: We've all seen the dongas and gullies on farmland where the land is laid bare because the vegetation has been destroyed and the soils washed away. | ||||||||||||
| Wind erosion: Once soil is exposed, wind can simply blow it away, especially during periods of drought or times of little rain. | ||||||||||||
| Salination: Water used for irrigation in arid (dry) areas contains traces of various salts. These salts build up in the soil. Unless the soil is washed by rain or left fallow the salts eventually form a hard crust and the soil becomes useless to agriculture. According to the UN Conference on Desertification, over a tenth of the world's agricultural land suffers from salination, and the area grows daily. | ||||||||||||
| Desertification: Deforestation, overgrazing and stupid agricultural policies mean that the land, especially in dry areas like most of South Africa, is stripped of the protective covering of plants. Erosion sets in and the area eventually becomes a desert. The soil becomes sand with little or no organic matter to hold it. As much as one third of the earth's land surface is already affected by desertification. Caught early, desertification may be halted - but in situations of poverty or lack of political will, this is unlikely and land becomes permanent desert. Desertification is not seen as a threat to the Western Cape region of South Africa but we should remember that only a few kilometers north of us is the semi-desert region of the West Coast. With Climate Change caused by global warming, it is possible that the Western Cape will become drier and that desertification will become a real threat. | ||||||||||||
| Urban expansion: Towns and cities have traditionally been built in good farming land. This is especially true of the area around Cape Town. As towns expand into cities, farming land is lost by being paved and built over. | ||||||||||||
| Pollution of soil: Soil pollution has a number of causes. Some are: | ||||||||||||
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Nearly all are caused or made worse by agriculture and herding of animals.
The most extreme form of soil loss is desertification - the permanent loss of land to deserts. The twentieth century has seen the steady advance of deserts into once productive areas. Desertification now affects the south western parts of the United States, Northern Mexico, North Africa, the Sahel, large parts of southern Africa (particularly South Africa where because of apartheid three-quarters of the population live in only fourteen percent of the land, most of it of poor quality) and parts of Australia. [...] The livelihood of 650 million people who now live in arid and semi-arid areas of the world is threatened by this encroachment of deserts.
Clive Ponting: A Green History of the World
There is evidence that the boundaries of the Karoo are widening in all directions. Overgrazing by sheep, cattle and goats, exacerbated by drought, has ruined vast tracts of South Africa's interior - areas that were once fragile but (dynamically) stable ecosystems teeming with species ranging from soil bacteria to big mammals.
Desertification and soil loss are also endemic in the former Bantustans. There small areas of inferior land were made available to large numbers of people whose agricultural and herding methods were unsuitable to the cramped areas and poor soils. As subsistence farmers they did not have the resources to improve the land, and it inevitably degraded. In spite of the repeal of Apartheid, the problems in these areas continue to grow.
| Millions face starvation; |
| Malnutrition damages children physically and mentally; |
| Endemic diseases like schistomiasis and malaria lower people's working efficiency; |
| Poverty means that the people do not have the resources to improve their lot; |
| Women in particular, whose traditional role has been the tending of crops and food providing, face additional hardship |
Fleeing from conditions of poverty and ecological breakdown, rural people congregate in the vast urban slums which surround all our cities. Neither political will nor economic means exist to bring these eco-political refugees into the dream of modern life. The conditions in the squatter townships present appalling situations of environmental degradation.
In the Western Cape, soil loss happens mainly through urban expansion and water erosion, though we lose proportionally less soil than in other parts of the country. But this should not blind us to the problems or make us ignore the search for better systems of living with the land. Much of our food comes from elsewhere. Drought and desertification affect us all by affecting our food and its price. The poor are, of course, hardest hit.
As global and local populations rise, we need to bring more and more land into food production. But this has involved damaging vulnerable eco-systems or putting more pressure on those already changed by human use. Deforestation and soil loss have increased hugely. These problems have been made worse by unequal land distribution, particularly in the South.
As we have seen with the former Bantustans, many people in the South must end up trying to scrape a living from small areas of poor land or else be reduced to the state of landless labourers. The problem that has affected all agricultural societies throughout history - ensuring an adequate supply of food for all - has not been solved on a global scale. Because of our natural dependence on food, we are tied to and part of the soil. Healthy soils can be used to grow food for healthy people, but we must remember that serving humans is not the purpose of natural systems. Soil loss is a loss to all living beings.
Agriculture, has allowed the human population to grow as never before. But it has tied us into a various systems of surplus redistribution. Our society supports many people who are not involved in food production, and so food must be redistributed. Nowhere in history has the distribution of goods been equal (though this is not to imply that vast improvements in food distribution are not possible.) The system which currently extracts renewable as well as non-renewable goods from the bio-physical environment, and redistributes them, is the business system. The production and distribution of food is a part of this system.
The ideology of business wants us not to see connections. We are encouraged to see ourselves as isolated economic units who buy and consume things, not questioning where they came from, not seeing that to get this desirable thing, these workers had to go without, those lands had to be poisoned, this area water had to be fouled. We must not see the cost of profit or the interdependence of things.
Development and the 'Green Revolution'
Until early in this century all farming was organic - the chemicals and pesticides did not exist to do any other sort of farming. This did not mean that farming was always sustainable or that it did not harm the land. In fact, in the 10 000 years or so that agriculture has been practiced, farming has devastated vast areas of land, turning much of the Middle East, for example, into desert. During the second half of this century, as colonial powers got rid of their 'possessions' in the South, the idea arose that development would be the solution to the South's problems of population, poverty, malnutrition and unequal access. Countries or regions came to be seen as 'developed', 'developing' or 'Underdeveloped'.
The idea was that 'under-developed' countries would become more and more developed, more like countries in the North. In practice this has not happened. While development has promoted the interests of a small class of bureaucrats and traders, the rural poor are undoubtedly worse off.
Since the '60's and '70's, the so-called Green Revolution has been pushed by world development agencies (World Bank etc.) as part of the development package which would supposedly solve the problems of Southern countries. Although higher yields from crops were possible in some cases, the Green Revolution also involved:
| Increased dependence on petrochemicals, fertilisers and pesticides; |
| Increased reliance on irrigation and vulnerability to drought; |
| Destruction of large areas of complex eco-systems and the introduction of monoculture farming, with vulnerability to insects etc; |
| Increased reliance on mechanisation; |
| Squeezing out of small farmers who could not afford Green Revolution technology; |
| Reliance on export cash crops to pay for Green Revolution technology, with export of food in areas where hunger and starvation were an increasing problem; |
| Increased poverty for the very poor. |
Alternatives
Though there are severe problems with the way that 'development' has been practiced, this does not mean that we should not strive to make our environment (where we live) better (develop it.) A realisation of interconnectedness, of the way that we are connected into and dependent on the many complex systems of the planet, can mean that we approach things differently. Out of respect to ourselves and each other, we must take a longer view when we plan to improve our world. Politics and human self-interest have traditionally taken the short-term view (a typical political term of office is four or five years) but once we realise that we are not separate from the world our selfishness must take a different expression.
There do exist alternatives to the way our societies practice agriculture. One is Organic Farming.
The advantages of Organic Farming include:
| It does not pollute the soil and rivers with nitrates from fertilisers; |
| It does not introduce harmful toxins into natural systems for the control of insects; |
| It encourages the practice of crop rotation, which ensures that different layers of the soil are exploited and none over-exploited. Crop rotation also adds to the soil by the use of 'green manures' - crops grown to be ploughed in; |
| It produces more nutritious food; |
| It improves soil structure with organic wastes; |
| By rotating crops and growing many different types of crop together, it provides smaller niches for insect pests; |
| It requires less capital and lowers farmers' debt; |
| It uses less energy; |
| It is two and a half times more productive per unit of energy than chemical farming. |
There are various types of organic farming, including permaculture, bio-dynamic farming and organic farming as such.
Some disadvantages of organic farming include:
| Lower revenue (but also lower cost) |
| Lower yields (but of higher quality) |
| Organic farms are often situated among non-organic farms and must endure pests etc. which spill over from these. |
| It is more labour-intensive (but less capital intensive) |
The organic farming movement has not developed itself as a political or economic movement, nor does it have allies in politics (except Green Politics, which, in South Africa is an almost non-existent force.) Traditionally, it has concerned itself with farming technique in a highly competitive context, where other farmers are using chemicals, pesticides etc., to boost yields. But many problems around agriculture are political ones, or are problems of social organisation and global relations. Pressures to repay development debt, pressures for profit and pressure by the manufacturers of agricultural chemicals can cause farmers to opt for the short-term advantages of higher crop yield over longer-term sustainability. This means that supporters of alternative farming will have to face problems of distribution and economics. In order to make a difference, they will have to organise and find allies in the political world. With political support, sustainable organic farming could offer a real alternative. They will have to enlarge their vision of interconnectedness, seeing how economics and social organisation also connect us all.
Some Questions
| ? | Do we produce enough food to feed our population well? |
| ? | Can you think of some reasons why some people are starving in our country |
| ? | In a land with high unemployment and little money, why is most of our agriculture tending to become more and more capital intensive? |
| ? | How can progressive politics and organic farming (a traditionally conservative occupation) enter into a meaningful dialogue? |
Food connects us to the earth. This means food connects us to the planetary biosphere, to the global economy. You don't really have to be an expert to know this. Eating bread is also eating politics and economics. We are economic beings and eating is an economic act.
