Is Sustainable Agriculture Sustainable?

[S.Annadana]

August 19, 2008, 7:55 pm
Filed under: agriculture, government, science/tech


Ronald Bailey has a post on the question, in which he praises Nina Federoff for defending genetically modified foods and criticizing the push for organic farming. I don’t have much to say about the first issue, except that the kind of genetic modification that happens in a lab is obviously different in a bunch of ways than the kind that is “the basis of all evolution” - but whatever, that’s not really one of my hobby-horses.

But the second issue at least sort of is, though it’s not one that I’ve researched with anywhere near enough care to speak to it with much real authority. The present case is especially tough, since while - as I’ve indicated before - I’m hugely inclined to buy into Kevin Carson’s wonderfully contrarian take on this matter, I also tend as a rule to defer to Bailey on just about everything scientific. So what I’m going to do here is just raise a few questions about what he says (or happily quotes Federoff as saying).

Here’s the claim that really jumped out at me (he is quoting Federoff):

If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.

I’d love to see the support for this, since it strikes me as the same sort of hyperbole that leads people to say that the result of global warming is guaranteed to be nothing short of another Great Flood. (Surely Ron Bailey of all people knows what I’m talking about.) And from what I actually do know of the literature, it’s a huge overstatement: for example, the 2002 Mäder et al paper ($) that I mentioned in my TAC piece puts the difference between organic and conventional yields at 20%, and a while a quick look at a few of the great many papers that cite Mäder et al suggests a good deal of variation than that (I see figures of anywhere from 10-40%), I know of no sound evidence for a claim as strong as the one that Federoff is making here. As I said, though, I’m no expert.

Secondly, though, the notion that we should carry on this discussion by asking what would happen if everybody (by which I take it Federoff means every current farmer) took up organic farming is simply a red herring. It is entirely possible for organic farming to be a good thing even if it is not the right thing for everyone, and there is nobody out there with any real influence who is agitating for anything on the latter sort of scale. Indeed, what we have right now is a system that quite obviously rewards large, industrialized growers rather than small-scale and organic ones, and so the best case for organic farming is the one that demands simply that the subsidies be withdrawn and the playing field leveled: it is only in this way that the market, as opposed to the government, can decide which sort of farming is the best sort.

Finally and relatedly, what’s the big deal? I know that Bailey’s always got his eye out for junk science, and no doubt some of what gets drawn on by organic foodists is just that. But big agriculture has its biases, too, and it strikes me as weird to see a libertarian like Bailey getting sarcastically excited about the fact that there’s “someone in the Bush administration [Federoff advises Secretary of State Rice] defending science” when the scientific consensus that’s being (hyperbolically) defended is one that’s got the force of billions of dollars of corporate interests and decades of government subsidies, regulations, and official rhetoric behind it. Whatever happened to freedom?

Ack, I feel like I’m just rambling here. But that’s what blogs are for, after all. Any input from the peanut gallery?

[ADDENDUM: Two more points:

There are presently over 150 million acres [EDIT: That's not even close to right, dammit - that's the total number of acres in the US growing corn and, um, soybeans. Right now I can't find the numbers I'm looking for, but in writing my TAC piece I somehow calculated the relevant acreage as in the "millions". In any case I take it that the point I'm driving at is clear enough.] of US cropland devoted to ethanol production. Surely switching some of that over to the growth of edible goods would offset some of the reduced yields that would come with even a very widespread move to organic farming. [UPDATE: In the comments, we're circling in on a number in the vicinity of 15 million acres.]
Organic farming methods use far less energy than “conventional” ones, and do not rely at all on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. (The Mäder et al paper puts energy input at 47-66%, and pesticide usage at 3%.) Especially as oil becomes harder to come by, these differences are obviously significant, too.

[hmpo]

Genetic pollution is probably more riskier and harder to control than chemical or other forms of pollution. Once cross-pollination occurs, it is irreversible. Like Europe, India should avoid GM crops, and encourage crop diversity.