Overhauling the world’s agricultural system through a radical, but just transition
By George Naylor
With continued complacency and irresponsible political responses to the threat of global climate change, we can expect a lot more disasters for society, which brings more opportunities for disaster capitalism, an idea popularized by Canadian author Naomi Klein. Responsible policy should start with the foundation of any society, its agriculture, and the foundation of that policy should be a parity-supply management system. If ever there was a time to bring parity into mainstream discussion of addressing social and environmental problems and combating global climate change, this is it. The Green New Deal aims to change society’s disastrous trajectory determined by its rules of consumption and production directed at reducing or eliminating the emissions of greenhouse gasses while levelling the playing field for labor. In other words, like the original New Deal, it aims to change the economic relationships of farmers, labor, and the environment through institutional principles that should apply to all times, not, as is often heard among mainstream economists and journalists, just to claw our way back out of a depression.
Besides the science associated with greenhouse gasses and climate change, a historical perspective is needed to understand why and how we need to alter our economic course. We shouldn’t forget that it was the laisses faire policies of presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover along with casino-type and dishonest practices of big banks and Wall Street that drove the delusional Roaring Twenties into the all too real, heart breaking, Great Depression. It was also the “logical” market reaction of farmers responding to sky rocketing demand and prices for wheat during World War I that led them to plow up grasslands to supply that wheat. So besides the Great Depression and its debilitating and impoverishing effects on our society, the free market led us to the Dust Bowl and its permanent damage to society’s most precious natural resource, top soil.
The scientific knowledge and historic perspective we have today must awaken our citizens to reject the intellectually lazy laisses faire complacency and high risk and irresponsible economic behavior promoted by the fossil fuel industry, giant agribusiness’ “farmer led” front groups, and the military-industrial complex.
The laisse faire keystone of today’s disastrous status quo is referred to as the bipartisan Washington Consensus—the sometimes heralded but often obscured worship of free markets. The imposition of the Washington Consensus on sovereign nations and the global economy resulted from creation of the World Trade Organization and various free trade agreements. We ignore this imposition, i.e. ignore this 900 pound gorilla in the room, at the risk of deluding ourselves that solutions for climate change and income inequality can be enacted domestically without restoring food, environmental, and labor sovereignty internationally. In fact, I believe new international trade agreements must be based on the opposite intentions of the WTO. They need to assure the possibility of parity-supply management and just labor laws in every country, and in fact global coordination of resource and labor budgets so as not to discount their values by assuming that “excess” supplies of energy, labor, and land should lead to low energy and commodity prices and low wages.
After all, can any society, really global society, ignore the fact that creating an agroecological agricultural system must be the top priority if it is to respect our relationship to Mother Nature and assure an enjoyable life for generations to come? This new system must sequester carbon in the soil, lessen fossil fuel to power farm machinery, eliminate the energy intensive production of nitrogen fertilizer and farm chemicals, and replace the burgeoning factory farms with diversified family farms if we are to lessen greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere and support other efforts to combat climate change. At the same time we can rectify nitrate and farm chemical water pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and the loss of rural communities—to focus only on greenhouse gas emissions ignores how our disrespect for Mother Nature ties these all together.
Today’s agricultural system can be characterized by its unlimited production of annual crops like corn and soybeans that fuels intensive, corporate controlled, livestock and biofuel production. How can agribusiness and their commodity front group answer this question: When companies like DuPont and Monsanto deliver their technology like herbicide resistant crops along with their herbicides and pesticides to South America and other continents to chew up rainforest, savannah, and grassland increasing the global supply of corn and soybeans, why should any country stand by and let its farmers go broke from the resulting low “world price” benchmarked at the Chicago Board of Trade? Obviously they shouldn’t but international trade rules force multiple problems on every country and every farmer around the world.
What’s so alarming is that today’s global agricultural system will inevitably create more ecological problems which agribusiness and its obedient governments will say can only to be addressed by more pesticides and fertilizer. If that’s not disaster capitalism, what is? So it should be obvious that the status quo and the policy that supports it must be REVERSED to a parity-supply management system if climate change and other dead end results are to be combatted.
A parity-supply management can seriously decrease the cultivation of annual crops and transition our agricultural system to create diversified family farms that grow livestock responsibly and humanely rather than in giant feedlots and confinements. The building blocks of the new system such as parity price supports, production quotas, and a food security reserve were all proven to work in the original New Deal with transparency and relatively little bureaucracy. The higher parity prices for corn and soybeans will make factory livestock production uneconomical. Livestock products raised on family farms will be priced significantly higher, which will answer the often heard demand that people eat less meat. Since farmers can profitably produce less corn and soybeans aiming only to produce their equitable quotas, the remaining land can be used for hay, pasture, and wildlife habitat restoration. When a farmer has a fair quota of annual crops to sell, the new incentive will be to produce that quota with the least amount of fertilizer and chemicals and the most amount of conservation. In fact, by incorporating hay and pasture with perennial plants like nitrogen fixing legumes into the crop rotations along with recycling nutrients from livestock manure we can virtually eliminate the need for artificial nitrogen fertilizer. This is a big deal because producing nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas as a feedstock, uses much energy to produce, needs to be transported (often around the globe), and it results in the emission of particularly atmospheric damaging nitrous oxide. Hay and pasture in rotation also means weed control will also be much easier, eliminating the need for herbicides, and the new ideal diversified family farm can evolve agroecological practices to become organic.
Research has shown that maintaining the fencerow-to-fencerow production of annual crops has no chance of sequestering a substantial amount of carbon in the soil. Even with no-till, soil erosion rates are unsustainable on highly erodible land and no more carbon is sequestered than in conventional tillage farms; the carbon is only located more in the top layer of soil. Research shows that perennials, like alfalfa, clover, and native grasses that send roots deep into the soil are the only farm crops that can actually keep the carbon from becoming carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. (Research: Can no-tillage stimulate carbon sequestration in agricultural soil? Luo, Wang, Sun in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment)
While I’ve preached parity as the answer to economic injustice to farmers for over 40 years, and that it is, we must be clear that parity prices are not just addressing farmer’s inadequate standard of living. Unfortunately, the standard of living argument resulted in fake farm program features that use government payments to supplement farmers’ incomes while ignoring the wasteful production and use of these underpriced commodities. Parity with supply management addresses how we use our soil and water to produce our food responsibly without depleting the soil in the process. When we establish a parity price floor, which will be much higher than today’s free market price, we are saying that we are doing this to avoid what economists call a misallocation of resources. Cheap grain prices do not include all the costs of production like pollution, resource depletion, and the loss of family farms and their rural communities. These costs must be included in the price of the commodities, which will mean that these commodities will no longer be used in irresponsible ways like feeding livestock in agribusiness feedlots and confinements. Also, a supply management system must make sure that the smaller quantities be produced in keeping with sustainable land use.
A key feature of parity is that price floors will be adjusted for inflation. Why is this so important? I believe looking at this question from the point of view of a living wage will be helpful. If we set a living minimum wage at say $15, and 5 years later the economy has created 10% inflation, it’s obvious that $15 is no longer a living wage. Likewise, if $15 per bushel were the parity price floor, and the economy creates 10% inflation, farmer’s would have to increase yields and change their patterns of using the land to produce more corn or experience a cut in their standard of living. That is a recipe for returning to unsustainable land use—more production of a soil depleting annual crop with cheaper grain resulting in cheaper livestock products.
As I said before, if ever there was a time to address the many ills of modern industrialized agriculture by bringing parity into mainstream discussion of social and environmental problems and so very importantly combating global climate change, this is it. It must be NOW, because we don’t have time and resources to waste.