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Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture (video)
The Long Now Foundation via FORA.tv
Summary
Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle.
“American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”
Speaker
Michael Pollan – Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a New York Times bestseller. His previous books include The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing 2004, Best American Essays 2003, and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.
(May 2009)
Related:
Michael Pollan on May 14 Democracy Now
Pollan takes Manhattan (Grist), showing Pollan on the Colbert Show:
The best part comes when Colbert gets Pollan’s mom, who’s in the audience, to admit that her son was fed formula, and not breast milk, as an infant. Good stuff!
Let them eat cash: Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?
Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s
… As the New York P4P press conference approached, I began to consider a question for Bill Gates. Why, despite our spending more money than had ever been spent to solve the problem of world hunger, and why, despite everybody’s best efforts to reconceptualize the problem—why were more and more people going hungry? Perhaps Gates would consider the paradox that our efforts might be exacerbating the problem, that all we were doing was wrong. Obviously, this was not the kind of thing I could vet beforehand with a publicist, or send over to [email protected] expecting a response. The nature of the question seemed to defy reason. Which was why I went to visit Amartya Sen.
As a nine-year-old boy, Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, the last Indian famine, which occurred only four years before the end of the Raj. Between 2 million and 3 million people died, and Sen watched them drop in the streets. This was the famine that occasioned Winston Churchill’s remark that the famine was of no great account because the Indians would simply “breed like rabbits.”
When Sen grew up he became a professor of economics and philosophy. His specialties included the economics of poverty and famine, and many of his 26 books and 375 articles deal with these subjects.
For much of his career, Sen focused on the fact that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, “ship after ship sailed down the Shannon, bound for England, laden with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter.” Similarly, during the Ethiopian famine of 1973, food moved out of the hardest-hit Wollo province and headed toward more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa. Such uncanny food “counter-movements” led Sen to the insight that if governments were to intervene in such situations, famines would not be so very difficult to prevent. “The rulers,” he wrote, “never starve.”
Sen had crunched the hunger numbers as no one else had done before, not just for Bengal in 1943 and Ireland in the 1840s but also for Ukraine in the 1930s, China in the 1950s and 1960s, Ethiopia in the 1970s, Bangla desh in 1974, Somalia and Sudan several times over. In 1982 he published a book called Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation that transformed the field. Other books followed, including Inequality Reexamined _ and _Rationality and Freedom. In 1998, Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
… after a few minutes he began to expound upon the relationship of market-based movements of food to demand and purchasing power, and to explain that none of these forces necessarily have anything to do with who gets enough to eat and who doesn’t. In fact, there was no fixed relation of any sort between food and famine. Some famines, like Bangladesh in 1974, occur in years of peak food availability.
In the midst of a severe hunger crisis, agricultural subsidies do not make much of a difference. And in the face of famine, a reliance on market economies is as ineffective as a reliance on loaves and fishes or manna from Heaven. Even so, said Sen, famines are not terribly difficult to avoid. Prevention requires the speedy implementation of emergency income-creation and employment programs, in combination with the broader social infrastructure of representative democracy and a free press, which happens to be the best early-warning system. Famine happens when rulers are alienated from those they rule, he explained, and a functioning democracy is a simple way to remove such alienation. Famine happens when there is no free press, because rulers tend to feel embarrassed when photographs of starving children appear on the front page.
New formulations of the hunger problem were not necessary. Sen had discovered the solution and he had gone over it many times, in abstruse tables for Econometrica, in articles for the Handbook of Mathematical Economics, and in features for Granta. He had explained the solution in his hundreds of essays and dozens of books in thousands of seminars and public addresses, yet his endlessly rehearsed points had not been enough. The world remained irrational, and people starved.
Of course, no other hunger narrative had ever succeeded either. Nor had any institution in the world been able to end world hunger. “No one organization alone can do it,” Sen said. “None of the organizations alone can.”
(June 2009 issue)
Long article, perhaps behind a paywall.
Ten Things You Can Do to Fight World Hunger
The Nation
Our planet produces enough food to feed its more than 960 million undernourished people. The basic cause of global hunger is not underproduction; it is a production and distribution system that treats food as a commodity rather than a human right. In developing countries huge agribusinesses, fat with government subsidies, sell their unsustainable (and sometimes genetically modified) products at a reduced rate, thus making it impossible for local farmers to compete. Farmers who can’t compete can’t feed their own families or work their own fields. Hunger becomes both the cause and effect of poverty.
Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, says sending food aid is not a sustainable way to end hunger. Rather, people must be empowered to raise their own food. She proposes Ten Things we can do to help solve the world’s growing hunger problem.
1 Write letters to the editor and op-ed articles in your local paper calling on the government to cut or end subsidies that encourage large agribusinesses to overproduce grains and dump their surpluses on the developing world at sub-market prices. This ultimately places poor communities at the mercy of volatile global commodity prices. Learn more at The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for more information.
2 Ask your representatives in Congress to demand that more foreign food aid be in the form of cash and training rather than food.
CONCEIVED by Walter Mosley with research by Rae Gomes
(13 May 2009)
The 21st Century’s Bleak Harvest
Asif Mehdi, Al Jazeera – English
As the world staggers from one economic crisis to another, it seems easy to forget the global food crisis that occupied centre stage in 2008.
World prices for essential grains more than doubled between 2006 and 2008.
Rice, the staple food of most of Asia, doubled in price in just seven months. And, despite their commitments to trade liberalisation, a few significant grain-exporting developing countries rushed to protect domestic grain stocks by banning exports.
The poor, who typically spend between 50 and 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, were most affected by the crisis.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the food crisis raised the number of undernourished people from 923 million to more than one billion by this year.
In late 2007 and 2008, the crisis caused food riots in at least 15 countries across the world, from Brazil to Bangladesh, and international media and forums spoke of little else.
Then, as suddenly as it struck, declining prices relegated the food crisis to collective global amnesia.
Causes not addressed
However, while prices for grains and foods have declined in 2009, they are still higher than pre-crisis levels and the fundamental causes of their volatility have not disappeared.
Asif Mehdi works in international development with an international intergovernmental organisation and has worked extensively in Asia and Africa during his 29-year career as a development practitioner.
(17 May 2009)
Also posted at Common Dreams.
