Dr. Vandana Shiva is - in my view - the world's most visionary and inspiring authority on food and farming issues. Here is her latest commentary:
Posted at www.navdanya.org/blog
on Friday, September 7th, 2012
by Dr Vandana Shiva
Organic farming is the "only way to
produce food" without harming the planet and people's health.
Reports trying to create doubts about Organic Agriculture are suddenly
flooding the media. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, people are fed up
of the corporate assault of toxics and GMOs. Secondly people are turning to
organic agriculture and organic food as a way to end the toxic war against the
Earth and our bodies. At a time when industry has set its eyes on the super
profits to be harvested from seed monopolies through patented seeds and seeds
engineered with toxic genes and genes for making crops resistant to herbicides,
people are seeking food freedom through organic, non-industrial food. The food
revolution is the biggest revolution of our times, and industry is panicking.
So it spins propaganda, hoping that in the footsteps of Goebbels, a lie told a
hundred times will become the truth. But food is different. We are what we eat.
We are our own barometers. Our farms and our bodies are our labs, and every
farmer and every citizen is a scientist who knows best how bad farming and bad
food hurts the land and our health, and how good farming and good food heals
the planet and people.
One
example of an industrial agriculture myth is found in "The
Great Organic Myths" by Rob Johnston, published in the August 8 issue of The Tribune. It tries to argue:
Organic foods are not healthier or better for the environment – and
they’re packed with pesticides. In an age of climate change and shortages,
these foods are an indulgence the world can’t afford.
This article had been published in the Independent and rebutted, but was
used by the Tribune without the rebuttal.
Every argument in the article is fraudulent.
The dominant myth of industrial agriculture is that it produces more
food and is land saving. However, the more industrial agriculture spreads, the
more hungry people we have. And the more industrial agriculture spreads, the
more land is grabbed.
Productivity in industrial agriculture is measured in terms of “yield”
per acre, not overall output. And the only input taken into account is labour,
which is abundant, not natural resources which are scarce.
A resource-hungry and resource-destructive system of agriculture is not
land-saving, it is land-demanding. That is why industrial agriculture is
driving a massive planetary land grab. It is leading to the deforestation of
the rainforests in the Amazon for soya and in Indonesia Africa , displacing
pastoralists and peasants. Industrial agriculture is responsible for 75%
biodiversity erosion, 75% water destruction, 75% land degradation and 40%
greenhouse gases. It is too heavy a burden on the planet. And as the 270,000
farmers’ suicides in India Bhopal Punjab ’s
Cancer train.
Navdanya’s forthcoming report “Poisons in our Food” is a synthesis of
all studies on the health burden of pesticides which are used in industrial
agriculture but not in organic farming.
UNEP’s Global Chemicals Outlook, released on 6th Sept
2012 highlights the major economic burden caused by chemical hazards,
particularly in developing countries.
The report reveals that the estimated costs of poisonings from
pesticides in sub-Saharan Africa now exceeds
the total annual overseas development aid given to the region for basic health
services, excluding HIV/AIDS.
Between 2005 and 2020, the accumulated cost of illness and injury linked
to pesticides in small-scale farming in sub-Saharan Africa
could reach USD $90 billion.
Industrial agriculture is an inefficient and wasteful system which is
chemical-intensive, fossil fuel-intensive and capital-intensive. It destroys
nature’s capital on the one hand and society’s capital on the other, by
displacing small farms and destroying health. It uses 10 units of energy as
input to produce one unit of energy as food. This waste is amplified by anther
factor of ten when animals are put in factory farms and fed grain, instead of
grass in free range ecological systems. Rob Johnston celebrates these animal prisons
as efficient, ignoring the fact that it takes 7 kg of grain to produce one kg
of beef, 4 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of pork and 2.4 kg of grain to produce 1
kg of chicken. The diversion of food grains to feed is a major contributor to
world hunger. And the shadow acres to produce this grain are never counted.
Europe uses 7 times the area outside Europe to
produce feed for its factory farms.
Small farms of the world provide 70% of the food, yet are being
destroyed in the name of low “yields”. 88% of the food is consumed within the
same eco-region or country where it is grown. Industrialization and
globalization is the exception, not the norm. And where industrialization has
not destroyed small farms and local food economies, biodiversity and food are
bringing sustenance to people. The biodiversity of agriculture is being
maintained by small farmers. As
the ETC report states in "Who
Will Feed Us", “peasants breed
and nurture 40 livestock species and almost 8,000 breeds. Peasants also breed 5,000
domesticated crops and have donated more than 1.9 million plant varieties to
the world’s gene banks. Peasant fishers harvest and protect more than 15,000
freshwater species. The work of peasants and pastoralists maintaining soil
fertility is 18 times more valuable than the synthetic fertilizers provided by
the seven largest corporations” (ETC Group, “Who Will Feed Us”).
When this biodiversity-rich food system is replaced by industrial
monocultures, when food is commoditized, the result is hunger and malnutrition.
Of the world’s 6.6 billion, 1 billion are not getting enough food; another
billion might get enough calories but not enough nutrition, especially micronutrients.
Another 1.3 billion who are obese suffer the malnutrition of being condemned to
artificially cheap, calorie-rich, nutrient-poor processed food.
Half of the world’s population is a victim of structural hunger and food
injustice in today’s dominant design for food. We have had hunger in the past,
but it was caused by external factors – wars and natural disasters. It was
localized in space and time. Today’s hunger is permanent and global. It is
hunger by design. This does not mean that those who design the contemporary
food systems intend to create hunger. It does mean that creation of hunger is
built into the corporate design of industrial production and globalised
distribution of food.
A series of media reports have covered another study by a team led by Dena
Bravata, a senior affiliate with Stanford’s Center for Health Policy, and
Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, MS, an instructor in the school’s Division of
General Medical Disciplines and a physician-investigator at VA Palo Alto Health
Care System, who did the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of existing
studies comparing organic and conventional foods. They did not find strong
evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks
than conventional alternatives, though consumption of organic foods can reduce
the risk of pesticide exposure.
This study can hardly be called the “most comprehensive meta-analysis; the researchers sifted through thousands of papers and
identified 237 of the most relevant to analyse. This already exposes the bias.
The biggest meta analysis on Food and agriculture has been done by the United
Nations as the International
Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
(IAASTD).
400 scientists from across the world worked for 4 years to analyse all
publications on different approaches to agriculture, and concluded that
chemical industrial agriculture is no longer an option, only ecological farming
is. Yet the Stanford team presents itself as the most comprehensive study, and
claims there are no health benefits from organic agriculture, even though there
were no long-term studies of health outcomes of people consuming organic versus
conventionally- produced food; the duration of the studies involving human
subjects ranged from two days to two years. Two days does not make a scientific
study. No impact can be measured in a 2-day study. This is junk science parading
as science.
One principle about food and health is that our food is as healthy as
the soil on which it grows is. And it is as deficient as the soils become with
chemical farming.
Industrial chemical agriculture creates hunger and malnutrition by robbing
crops of nutrients. Industrially-produced food is nutritionally empty mass,
loaded with chemicals and toxins. Nutrition in food comes from the nutrients in
the soil. Industrial agriculture, based on the NPK mentality of synthetic
nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium based fertilizers leads to depletion of
vital micronutrients and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, calcium,
iron.
David Thomas, a geologist turned nutritionist, discovered that between
1940 and 1991, vegetables had lost – on average – 24 percent of their
magnesium, 46 percent of their calcium, 27 percent of their iron and no less
than 76 percent of their copper (Ref: David Thomas ‘A study on the mineral
depletion of the foods available to us as a nation over the period 1940 to 1991′.
Nutrition and Health 2003; 17: 85-115)
Carrots had lost 75 percent of their calcium, 46 percent of their iron,
and 75 percent of their copper. Potatoes had lost 30 percent of their
magnesium, 35 percent calcium, 45 percent iron and 47 percent copper.
To get the same amount of nutrition people will need to eat much more
food. The increase in “yields” of empty mass does not translate into more
nutrition. In fact it is leading to malnutrition.
The IAASTD recognizes that through an agro-ecological approach “agro-ecosystems
of even the poorest societies have the potential through ecological agriculture
and IPM to meet or significantly exceed yields produced by conventional
methods, reduce the demand for land conversion for agriculture, restore
ecosystem services (particularly water), reduce the use of and need for
synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, and the use of harsh
insecticides and herbicides.”
Our 25 years of experience in Navdanya shows that ecological, organic
farming is the only way to produce food without harming the planet and people’s
health. This is a trend that will grow, no matter how many pseudo-scientific
stories are planted in the media by the industry.
Dr
Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of
more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for
biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights - winning the Right Livelihood
Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1993.
