Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (4 page)

The race was on to chemically synthesize nitrogen compounds both for war and for agriculture. Given the population pressures and the political climate at the turn of the century, the stakes were high. Finally, in 1908, the German chemist Fritz Haber figured out how to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery in 1918 “for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.”
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Another German chemist, Carl Bosch, took Haber's technical discovery and figured
out how to do it faster and cheaper; that is, he industrialized it by coming up with methods to produce it on a larger scale and keep the unit-cost down. The Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create large amounts of ammonia, and the industrialization push of World War II scaled it up into a very profitable business.

Wayne Roberts, in
The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food
, writes that in the post-World War II era, “the road to junk food, rural poverty and agricultural pollution was paved with good intentions,” as Franklin Roosevelt urged the war-weary world to turn its energy toward putting “an end to the beginnings of war.”
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And those beginnings of war were often hunger and food insecurity. Finding a way to provide enough food for all became a global mission of sorts for the United States. And with the war machine's infrastructure already built and operating, it not only became easy to switch over some of the efforts of the military industry to create an agricultural industry, it became an important domestic postwar policy.

With the infrastructure already in place to produce ammonia, munitions factories were tweaked to produce chemical fertilizer, and chemical-warfare science like nerve-gas production was redirected at insects in the form of pesticides. Chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer became standard practice for commercial agriculture for the first time ever. They were so universally adopted that we now refer to the routine use of chemicals on the farm as “conventional agriculture.”

The amount of food that the earth could grow seemed unlimited due to our newfound ability to replace traditional practices like crop rotation and composting, which relied on slower natural rates of renewal and regeneration of the soil's nutrients, with chemical fertilizers. And a population explosion in turn created the need to use more and more chemical compounds to keep up with all those hungry mouths. Economies of scale and regional specialization flourished, with the help of pesticides, herbicides, and heavy equipment, another legacy of modern industrial warfare turned agriculturally inclined.

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Throughout the 1950s, the United States was gripped with Cold War concerns that social and political instability due to famine and hunger in the Third World would provide the conditions for communism. In the name of feeding the hungry and staving off communist expansion, the United States donated billions in food aid to certain nations and exported its industrial agricultural system—high-yield, high-tech grains and the pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers that supported them—to others. Mexico would be the test case for exporting this Green Revolution, and indeed it changed from a net importer of wheat into a net exporter in the 1950s. The side effect of this Green Revolution, however, was that as larger-scale industrial agriculture replaced traditional subsistence farming in Mexico, millions of independent family farmers could no longer compete in the marketplace. People migrated off the land, into cities, and across the US-Mexico border.

In the 1960s, as the Green Revolution fanned outward, producing record global crops, the global population ballooned with an unprecedented annual growth rate of 2 percent late in that decade. Stanford biologist Paul Erlich ignited a firestorm of panic when his 1968 best-selling book,
The Population Bomb
, predicted apocalyptic scenarios of global starvation in the 1970s and 1980s due to unrestricted population growth, both at home and in developing countries. The book's doomsday scenarios were the push that the US government and its allies needed to rapidly industrialize the agriculture in what was then termed the Third World. Mass starvation due to famine was being predicted for India, and the Indian government invited Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist behind the agricultural transformation in Mexico, to see if he could help avert the worst-case scenario. The Green Revolution succeeded in India, as it had in Mexico.

Human populations have continued to boom hand-in-hand with
industrial agriculture and more-or-less cheap oil. And this has led to a transformed world. We have more than doubled the population of the planet since 1960.
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In 2008, the global population passed another benchmark. No longer tied to the land, over half of the world's inhabitants were living in cities.
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In places like North America and Europe, 80 percent of the population is urban. There are now twenty-one “megacities”—urban clusters of over ten million people—around the world.
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And these megacities are tipping the balance of global power. Writing in
Foreign Policy
magazine, geopolitical economist Parag Khanna notes that “Africa's urbanization rate is approaching China's, and the continent already has as many cities with a population of 1 million or more as Europe does.”
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In a battle that is still ongoing in places like China, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Central America, and South America, industrial farming is displacing smaller, more sustainable, adaptable mixed-family farms. Migration to cities is happening at an unprecedented rate. Rural populations are leaving their land with crops selling at such historically low prices that they can no longer afford to stay on the farm. They come to the city fleeing poverty in the countryside, but the life they find in the city is often worse. One in seven people alive today live in slums.
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Industrial farming takes from the land faster than even the most liberal applications of high-tech chemical fertilizers can replace. Crop yields are now dropping after a few honeymoon decades as the last of the farmlands’ natural capital goes into a final waltz of industrial food production. This is why the industrialized nations are turning to ever-more extreme food-production methods, like genetic modification of crops, even for infinitesimal yield increases.

Since the 1980s, the same companies that brought us chemical fertilizers
and pesticides have been tinkering with the crop and livestock at the genetic level to try to bump food production once again. Since 1984, when the first genetically modified plant was produced, 170 different crops have been created in a lab and planted in field trials.
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And the agribusiness public relations campaigns are an oddly unsettling mix of altruism and apocalyptic predictions of what will happen if we don't accept their genetically modified creations—but it may already be too late to object.

Genetically modified crops have been commercially planted only since 1996, but already, 70 percent of processed foods contain some genetically modified ingredients.
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The United States currently has 165 million acres (66.8 million hectares) of genetically modified crops planted.
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Brazil, a relative latecomer to the genetically modified crop game, has 63 million acres (25.4 million hectares) of genetically modified crops.
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The problem is that many food crops, such as corn, alfalfa, and canola, pollinate when the wind blows or when bees transfer pollen from plant to plant. You can't really control the genetic transfer, so genetically modified (GM) crops can cross-pollinate with non-genetically modified crops if they are in the vicinity. For those who are trying to preserve traditional varieties of certain crops or who want to be certified organic producers, finding genetically modified genes that have infiltrated your crop can be devastating. Farmers in remote regions of Mexico are complaining that they are finding evidence of GM corn in their traditional wild varieties, and they fear losing thousands of years of tradition within just one generation.

Another consequence of GM crops is that “superweeds” have emerged that are now resistant to the chemical herbicides being used routinely in the farming of pesticide-resistant crops like GM cotton, corn, and soy.
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This mimics the healthcare consequences of the routine overuse of antibiotics, which has created antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”

According to the United Nations, we'll add another two billion people to the face of the planet by 2045. The question on everyone's
minds is whether we can produce (and distribute) enough food to feed even more people. Undoubtedly, the schism between the genetically modified, patent-protected corporate vision of the future of food and the open-source, small-scale, broad-based view will get wider as the stakes get higher.

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In 2006, the United Nations’ Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published a report called “Tracking the Trend toward Market Concentration: The Case of the Agricultural Input Industry.” It identified an alarming narrowing of the players in our global food system. Through “vertical integration,” just a few companies own the seeds, fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and now even the patented genetic property of the main crops that form the base of the food chain.
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Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, and BASF control half of the agricultural chemicals on the global market. Monsanto controls one-fifth of the global proprietary seed production, a 25.2 billion-dollar industry.
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The report echoed the findings of another report issued two years after the UNCTAD's paper about the alarming concentration of the seed-food distribution business: by 2005, three companies controlled 90 percent of the world's grain trade: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge.
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The large corporate agribusinesses are squeezing the independent farmers to the point of desperation. Yields of genetically modified crops are dropping, but the prices of seed and proprietary fertilizer-herbicide-fungicide combinations stay high. The concentration of agriculture into the hands of a few major multinationals allows them to keep the sell-price of commodity crops low enough that only high-volume producers can turn a profit. Farmers in Pakistan, India, and Korea hope to farm their way out of the debt they have taken on to buy these genetically modified inputs, and many are committing suicide out of despair and to
protest a system that they feel no longer has any place for the individual. (Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae stabbed himself to death in 2003 outside a World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, Mexico, to bring attention to the victims of globalization—peasant farmers.
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) As of 2010, the Indian government estimates that there have been over two hundred thousand suicides of farmers in just over thirteen years because of debt and other effects of globalization.
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And even if you want no part of this global, industrial, genetically modified food chain, it's virtually impossible to avoid, even if you have your own piece of land and decades of traditional farming experience. Just ask Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser.

In a decade-long David-and-Goliath court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Schmeiser was found guilty of a type of indirect patent infringement because he unknowingly (and, in his opinion, unintentionally) grew some of Monsanto's patented GM Roundup Ready
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canola on his farm in Saskatchewan.
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In other words, this type of GM canola had been engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup
^®
herbicide, which could be sprayed on the field and would kill every other plant or weed, except for Roundup Ready canola plants. Monsanto vigorously protects its patent by making farmers who buy the seed agree not to save seeds for replanting, thereby ensuring that the farmers purchase new Monsanto seed year after year, as well as the Roundup herbicide, with which its canola has been engineered to work.

Schmeiser, however, claimed he did not buy seed from Monsanto but rather engaged in the traditional practice of saving some of the seed from the previous year to plant again in the spring. He argued that genetically modified canola from other fields must have contaminated his seed pool over the years. If he had Monsanto's patented canola growing in his field, he never planted any knowingly. He also did not use Roundup herbicide on his canola and therefore didn't benefit from this genetic technology that had crept onto his land.

Five of Schmeiser's farming neighbors grew Roundup Ready
canola. Seed can blow off of trucks during transport or be carried by the wind or even birds. It seems that Monsanto didn't care how its seed got onto Schmeiser's land. The company was determined to make an example of him.

Monsanto took Schmeiser to court in Canada over patent infringement. The ensuing legal battles lasted seven years and went all the way to Canada's Supreme Court, which found that Schmeiser was guilty of growing Roundup Ready canola—albeit unintentionally—without paying the licensing fee. Monsanto used this case to put a chill into the heart of every small farmer who had resisted its aggressive sales tactics, because whether or not you wanted to grow its canola, some might end up in your field anyway. Bending to the bully tactics of Monsanto was really the path of least resistance. These last few stubborn holdouts who didn't buy patented, genetically modified seeds were apparently a thorn in the paw of Monsanto. Outliers, they made clear, would not be tolerated.
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