Bob Sheak reports on Monthly Review’s latest issue on the Crisis in Agriculture at the Local Food Systems website.

Bob Sheak:

“The focus of the issue is captured in its title: “The Crisis in Agriculture & Food: Conflict, Resistance, & Renewal.” The first articles document the terrible damage and disastrous trends associated with the corporate-dominated and neo-liberal government and trade policies on small farmers/peasants around the world. The second set of articles examine concepts like “food sovereignty” and “redistributive land reform” and other concepts and developments related to sustainable agriculture.

There are indeed noteworthy developments around the world of “developing nations,” though not yet sufficient to reverse corporate-based trends.

In one of the articles, by Peter Rosset, “Fixing Our Global Food System,” the author refers to a regional example of exemplary farming practices. He writes:

“The Amish and Mennonite farm communities found the eastern United States provide a strong contrast to the virtual devastation described by Goldschmidt in corporate farm communities. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, which is dominated by small farmers who eschew much modern technology and often even bank credit, is the most productive farm county east of the Mississippi River. It has annual gross sales of agricultural products of $700 million, and receives an additional $250 million from tourists who appreciate the beauty of traditional small farm landscapes.”

Near the end of his article, Rosset notes:

“The benefits of small farm economies extend beyond the economic sphere. Whereas large, industrial-style farms impose a scorched-earth mentality on resource management – no trees, no wildlife, endless monocultures – small farmers can be very effective stewards of natural resources and the soil. To begin with, small farmers utilize a broad array of resources and have vested interest in their sustainability. At the same time, their farming systems are diverse, incorporating and preserving significant functional biodiversity within the farm. By preserving biodiversity, open space and trees, and be reducing land degradation, small farms provide valuable ecosystem services to the larger society.

“In the US, small farmers devote 17 percent of their area to woodlands, compared to only 5 percent on large farms. Small farms maintain nearly twice as much of their land in ‘soil improving uses,’ including cover crops and green manures. In the third world, peasant farmers show a tremendous ability to prevent and even reverse land degradation, including soil erosion. The can and/or do provide important services to society at-large. These include sustainable management of critical watersheds – thus preserving hydrological resources – and the in situ conservation, dynamic development and management of the crop and livestock genetic resources upon which the future food security of humanity depends.”

“…The forested areas from which wild foods, and leaf litter are extracted, the wood lot, the farm itself with intercropping, agroforestry, and large and small livestock, the fish pond, and the backyard garden, all allow for the preservation of hundreds if not thousands of wild and cultivated species. Simultaneously, the commitment of family members to maintaining the soil fertility on the family farm means an active interest in long-term sustainability not found on large farms owned by absentee investors. If we are truly concerned about rural ecosystems, then the preservation and promotion of small, family farm agriculture is a crucial step that we must take.”

Another article, “From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements” written by Eric Holt-Gimenez, discusses the growth of farmer-to-farmer organizations and farm advocacy groups.

Here’s one paragraph:

“Via Campesina has also been among the most vocal critics of institutional responses to the global food crisis. At the High Level Task force meeting on the food crisis in Madrid, Spain, Via Campensina released a declaration demanding that solutions to the food crisis be completely independent of the institutions responsible for creating the crisis in the first place (i.e., the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and CGIAR). The declaration reaffirmed the call for food sovereignty, demanded an end to land grabs for industrial agrofuel and foreign food production, and called on the international community to reject the Green Revolution and instead support the findings of the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). This seminal assessment, sponsored by five UN agencies and the World Bank, and authored by over four hundred scientists and development experts from more than eighty countries, concluded that there is an urgent need to increase and strengthen further research and adoption of locally appropriate and democratically controlled agroecological methods of production, relying on local expertise, local germplasm, and farmer-managed, local seed systems.”

Holt-Gimenez concludes his essay as follows:

“Ultimately, to end world hunger, the monopolistic industrial agriculture-food complex will have to be replaced with agroecological and redistributive food systems. It is too early to tell whether or not the fledgling trend of a convergence signals a new stage of integration between the main currents of peasant advocacy and smallholder agroecological practice. Nonetheless, the seeds of convergence have been sown. Successfully cultivating this trend may well determine the outcome of both the global food crisis and the international showdown over the world’s food system.”

Other articles refer to interesting developments in Cuba, Venezuela, the largest poor-people’s/peasant movement in the world, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil. There are also many points scattered in the articles on the specific benefits of organic farming. And more…. “