Arthur Somers with harvest from Rock Ridge Farm

Agroecology

Speakers at the Food Conference included Anna Lappé (daughter of Frances Moore Lappé) and Raj Patel. Raj Patel explains that “rather than being temples of choice, supermarkets are in for lots of the same in different packaging. Add marketing to limited choice and we’re really being driven to what the supermarkets want us to buy. At the end of the day we are the people who put food in our mouths, but a lot of that actually isn’t chosen.” His recipe for a modern global diet is to stay out of supermarkets and instead do what your parents used to do: shop at the local butcher shop and green grocer and the farmers markets. I’ll eat to that!

Yes folks, if like me, you have become tired of the “choices” being offered in your supermarkets, it’s time to do something. I’d advise everyone who wants to get up to speed to check out Raj Patel’s “Stuffed and Starved” youtube videos.

Here’s a short summary of what he says. He explains how it was a political decision taken in the 1960’s that the majority of the world should use fossil fuel intensive agricultural chemicals to produce what was called “the green revolution”. But modern industrial agriculture does away with a miillenia of knowledge that we have learned about intercropping - it destroys ecosystems, because monocultures are about selectively growing one thing and then having to replace all the ecosystemic functions that you’ve lost by monocropping and substitute for those by using chemicals, by using inorganic soil fertilizers and relying on pesticides instead of relying on natural predators. The companies who supply these chemicals are the ones who at the end of the day are the winners - companies like Monsanto and Syngenta and Dow - they are rebranding themselves as the “life science” companies, which is a painful distortion of the truth. These companies are not just fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers - they are also now the world’s largest seed companies - and that control of the basic tenets of the food system is another symptom of this concentration of power that happens under modern industrial agriculture. Monsanto’s genetically engineered “terminator seeds” for example, are seeds which cannot be replanted and must be bought over and over again (from Monsanto) each season.

We are now in the process of finding new ways of feeding the world, through agroecological science. This is not about going back to the bucolic past - no one wants to go back to the dark ages - we want to go forward, but we want to draw on the lessons of the past, bringing to bear the most cutting-edge science. And one of the ways of doing that is through agroecological science - building soil fertiltity using the ecology, using nature, using life’s own infrastructure, to selectively bring out of the soil the best kinds of things, and to put into the soil the possibility of sustaining life in the future. This is the very antithesis of modern industrial agriculture.