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Hudson Sustainability Report, part 3
Agricultural export opportunities offer enormous potential for rural
communities. The income from increased commodity sales would benefit the
entire community. Value-added processed exports mean more jobs in and
support of processing facilities. By their nature, most of these jobs are in
or adjacent to rural areas. An extra $50-75 billion a year in income from
exports, most of it going to farms and rural-oriented agribusiness, would
mean more in real dollars to rural communities than any of the federally
funded rural-development programs ever did. It would also generate far more
jobs and income than the small niche market for organic produce.
If Americans and the government are concerned about viable rural
communities, we should work to eliminate international barriers to free trade
in agricultural products, improve infrastructure, and allow competitive
farming structures to define themselves.
Community Food Security
“Community food security” (CFS) has emerged recently as a popular
“sustainability” issue for urban and suburban activists. Many of these same
groups are involved in the sustainable agriculture movement and that is why
we’ve decided to briefly discuss it in this paper. These groups have drafted
the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, and have congressional sponsors
to attach it to the 1995 farm bill. Their proposed Act defines food security
and the movement’s goal as “all persons obtaining at all times a culturally
acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources.”
(emphasis added) They propose a core redirection of USDA’s mission, massive
increases in urban and “community-based” gardening and farming, and large
increases in government food assistance programs.
It is an extremist proposal if taken at face value, and there is little
chance that Congress would invest much of its now-scarce budgetary resources
to it. But it is revealing of the kind of food system that these groups
envision and the lengths they are willing to go to fulfill their own narrow
goals.
The basic concept of the proposal is that local sources of food are the only
secure sources, and that local food security is undermined by relying on
production from other regions. This assumption is flawed to an extreme. It
denies the existence of regional crop limitations, an efficient
infrastructure, transport technology, the higher cost of land close to
metropolitan areas and the health benefits derived from year-round supplies
of diverse foods from all regions of the globe.
What is their real objective?
The CFS movement focuses on the problems of food availability inside the
inner cities and the apparent exodus of major full service food markets from
these areas. However, the real problems for the inner-city food markets have
been theft and vandalism. The proposed solution, as outlined in the CFS
Empowerment Act, would not address those underlying social and economic
problems. If enacted as currently written, in fact, it would obliterate any
real food security for the inner city and for a large portion of the rest of
society as well.
By requiring that “all persons obtain at all times their diet through local
non-emergency sources,” the variety, quality, quantity, and availability of
foods would be severely narrowed, while the prices of the available foods
would skyrocket. It would be an impossible nightmare for large cities like
New York and Chicago.
Urban poor populations would be devastated by high prices and shortages.
Community gardens could only supply a tiny fraction of the food and calories
their populations consume -- and would produce that only seasonally unless
huge investments were made in heated greenhouses.
In keeping with their strong alliance to the alternative agriculture
movement, the CFS movement places a high value on organically-grown food.
But there is no evidence to support the idea of putting public money behind
their preferences. There are no studies showing that organic foods produce a
lower cancer or heart disease rate, or that organic foods contain any secret
nutritional factors.
The “community food security” movement is energized -- but it has hardly any
members with experience in agriculture.
Conclusion
As we examined the panoply of claims and counter-charges about farming
sustainability, it became abundantly clear that the opponents of modern,
high-yield, chemically supported farming have made no attempt to objectively
examine the sustainability of food production. Rather, they have started
with an opposition to farm chemicals, thinly-based claims that such chemicals
harm humans and the environment and an idealization of the rural communities
of the past. They have gradually added other “sustainability” claims, not on
the basis of real-world food production but on whether they seemed to
resonate with a public that has little understanding of agriculture.
The activists would like us to believe they can deliver sustainability
through organic and low input sustainable agriculture (LISA.) In reality,
their “sustainability” would have to be based on shirking some of farming’s
major responsibilities: preventing hunger, producing sufficient high-quality
protein, or protecting wildlife from the loss of habitat. Success in
“environmental stewardship” is hardly success if it fails in any of these
three duties.
Applying the term sustainable to alternative agriculture does not make it
sustainable. Alternative agriculture may rely less on chemical inputs, but
this is not a prerequisite for sustainability, and could actually make
farming less sustainable -- through increased land requirements.
Today’s modern, high-yield farming practices are the most sustainable we’ve
ever had. They are continuing to change and improve in efficiency, safety,
and sensitivity to the environment in direct proportion to our investments in
agricultural research and technology.
Moreover, the evidence of mainstream farming gains in yield and
sustainability endorses additional research investments to further develop
high-yield technologies to meet the goals and increasing demands placed on
agriculture -- safely and without failing in our long-term responsibility to
wildlife or the environment.
This is the single, major, inescapable conclusion of this study, which we
believe is based on the real issues of agricultural sustainability, not on
secondary social issues or unfounded fears.
___________
Dennis Avery is Director of the Center for Global Food Issues, a project of
the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. He was formerly the senior
agricultural analyst in the U.S. Department of State. He studied
agricultural economics at Michigan State University and the University of
Wisconsin.
Alex Avery is a research associate at the Center. He holds a degree in
biology from Old Dominion University and spent several years working toward a
doctorate in plant physiology at Purdue University.