Our Hunger Games
Hunger and malnutrition are man-made. They are hardwired in the
design of the industrial, chemical model of agriculture. But just as
hunger is created by design, healthy and nutritious food for all can
also be designed, through food democracy.
We are repeatedly told that we will starve without chemical
fertilisers. However, chemical fertilisers, which are essentially
poison, undermine food security by destroying the fertility of soil by
killing the biodiversity of soil organisms, friendly insects that
control pests and pollinators like bees and butterflies necessary for
plant reproduction and food production.
Industrial production has led to a severe ecological and social
crisis. To ensure the supply of healthy food, we must move towards
agro-ecological and sustainable systems of food production that work
with nature and not against her. That is what movements that promote
biodiversity conservation, like our NGO Navdanya, are designing on the
ground.
Industrialisation of agriculture creates hunger and malnutrition, and
yet further industrialisation of food systems are offered as solution
to the crisis. In the Indian context, agriculture, food and nutrition
are seen independent of each other, even though what food is grown and
how it is grown determines its nutritional value. It also determines
distribution patterns and entitlements. If we grow millets and pulses,
we will have more nutrition per capita. If we grow food by using
chemicals, we are growing monocultures — this means that we will have
less nutrition per acre, per capita. If we grow food ecologically, with
internal inputs, more food will stay with the farming household and
there will be less malnutrition among rural children.
Our agriculture policy focuses on increasing yields of individual
crops and not on the output of the food system and its nutritional
value. The food security system — based on the public distribution
system — does not address issues of nutrition and quality of food, and
nutritional programmes are divorced from both agriculture and food
security.
Wherever chemicals and commercial seeds have spread, farmers are in debt.
The agrarian crisis, the food crisis and the nutrition and health
crisis are intimately connected. They need to be addressed together. The
objective of agriculture policy cannot be based on promoting industrial
processing of food. The chemicalisation of agriculture and food are
recipes for “denutrification”. They cannot solve the problem of hunger
and malnutrition. The solution to malnutrition begins with the soil.
Industrial agriculture, sold as the Green Revolution and the second
Green Revolution to Third World countries, is chemical-intensive,
capital-intensive and fossil fuel-intensive. It must, by its very
structure, push farmers into debt and indebted farmers off the land. In
poor countries, farmers trapped in debt for buying costly chemicals and
non-renewable seeds, sell the food they grow to pay back debt. That is
why hunger today is a rural phenomenon. Wherever chemicals and
commercial seeds have spread, farmers are in debt. They lose entitlement
to their own produce and hence get trapped in poverty and hunger.
Industrial chemical agriculture also creates hunger by displacing and
destroying the biodiversity, which provides nutrition. The Green
Revolution displaced pulses, an important source of proteins, as well as
oilseeds, thus reducing nutrition per acre. Monocultures do not produce
more food and nutrition. They take up more chemicals and fossil fuels,
and hence are profitable for agrochemical companies and oil companies.
They produce higher yields of individual commodities but a lower output
of food and nutrition.
Industrial chemical agriculture’s measures of productivity focus on
labour as the major input while externalising many energy and resource
inputs. This biased productivity pushes farmers off the land and
replaces them with chemicals and machines, which in turn contribute to
greenhouse gases and climate change. Further, industrial agriculture
focuses on producing a single crop that can be globally traded as a
commodity. The focus on “yield” of individual commodities creates what I
call a “monoculture of the mind”. The promotion of so-called high-yield
crops leads to the destruction of biodiversity.
Biodiverse systems have higher output than monocultures, that is why
organic farming is more beneficial for farmers and the earth than
chemical farming.
Industrial chemical agriculture also causes hunger and malnutrition
by robbing crops of nutrients. Industrially produced food is
nutritionally empty but 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 fertilisers, lead to depletion of vital micro-nutrients
and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, calcium, iron.
Biodiverse systems have higher output than
monocultures, that is why organic farming is more beneficial for farmers
and the earth than chemical farming.
The increase in yields does not translate into more nutrition. In
fact, it is leading to malnutrition. To get the required amount of
nutrition people need to eat much more food.
The most effective and low-cost strategy for addressing hunger and
malnutrition is through biodiverse organic farming. It enriches the soil
and nutrient-rich soils give us nutrient-rich food.
Earthworm castings, which can amount to four to 36 tons per acre per
year, contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus,
three times more exchangeable magnesium, 11 times more potash and
one-and-a-half times more calcium than soil. Their work on the soil
promotes the microbial activity essential to the fertility of most
soils. Soils rich in micro organisms and earthworms are soils rich in
nutrients. Their products, too, are rich in nutrients. On an average,
organic food has been found to have 21 per cent more iron, 14 per cent
more phosphorous, 78 per cent more chromium, 390 per cent more selenium,
63 per cent more calcium, 70 per cent more boron, 138 per cent more
magnesium, 27 per cent more vitamin C and 10-50 per cent more vitamin E
and beta-carotene. And the more biodiversity on our farms, the more is
the nutrition per acre, at little cost.
Plants, people and the soil are part of one food web, which is the
web of life. The test of good farming is how well it works to increase
the health and resilience of the food web.
© 2012 The Asian Age
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