It's agrarian versus industrial - Opinion

Windsor is a graduate in landscape architecture from the University of Guelph who is now travelling across Canada working with innovative graziers.

I was quite taken aback by the recently published article, “Debate on method a costly distraction” (Opinion, Aug. 13.)

The article began by arguing, with what I think was limited success, that organic food was no more nutritional than conventionally produced food.

The writers concluded with remarks about how conventional agriculture can feed the world. How the two are related is beyond me.

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First, it should go without saying that if an independent review is sourced, the funders of that review should be mentioned as their input can sway results heavily. It would be interesting to know what 162 scientific papers were used in this review as well as how nutritional was both qualified and quantified.

Which foods from which farms were tested? What were the criteria used for selecting the scientific papers, some of which are now 50 years old?

Who funded the research behind these papers? Without these details, the argument is moot.

Whether organic is nutritionally superior to conventional is trivial, and is truly only a distraction.

I am by no means a blind supporter of organic as it can be produced at an industrial scale similar to conventional.

The true differences between organic and conventional are sustainability and scale. And for that matter, what has been labelled organic should really be understood as agrarian and conventional as industrial.

The back-to-the-land movement, which gave birth to the modern organic movement, started more than 40 years ago and was driven by people who were looking for smaller scale alternatives to the highly industrialized food systems that were, and are, destroying the quality of their rural landscapes.

Forty years ago, a group of conscious and intelligent citizens acknowledged the destruction industrial agriculture was wreaking on soil, air and water quality.

Forty years later, these issues continue to plague our countryside. Industrial food production relies heavily on inputs and gives nothing back to the soil.

Industrialized methods are leaning far too seriously on oil at all levels of their production.

The production of synthetic inputs, epic 800 horsepower combines and the transportation of goods all over the world, all of which are crucial steps in the industrial food system, all depend an enormous amount on an inevitably dwindling oil supply.

Intelligent consumers are looking for sustainable food produced at a human scale, not something merely labelled organic.

As for the absurd remarks about being able to feed the world, I would ask who exactly is feeding the world? And what is qualified as the world?

If conventional was feeding the world, why is there overwhelming starvation? Why are there so many children dying of malnutrition?

I cannot understand why we need to produce six billion tons of food if we are only really sharing it with the rest of developed world, which according to the United Nations is only 1.2 billion out of the 6.7 billion people who make up the world’s population.

The surplus we are left with is poured into select foreign communities at artificially low prices, which is destroying small localized economies.

Is it right that as a result of our industrial production methods, citizens in foreign countries are unable to sustainably exchange goods while the soils of our land are irreversibly embezzled of nutrients and eroded into our waterways?

I am compelled to say no.

Moreover, the issue of feeding the world is much greater than simply producing enough food to feed it. Corrupt politicians and a legacy of colonial ties has crippled much of our world.

I find it hard to believe that pillaging our soils of nutrition to produce obscene surpluses, which have not, are not and will not be redistributed evenly throughout the world’s population, will feed anyone but wealthy North Americans.

I am of the option that the debate is not, and has never been, simply between organic and conventional.

It is between agrarian and industrial.

The core issue of this whole debate is that of scale. To quote long-time agrarian author Wendell Berry, “I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures and our world.”

He goes on the write, “Industrialism begins with technological invention. But agrarianism begins with givens: land, plants, animals, weather, hunger, and the birthright knowledge of agriculture.

Industrialists are always ready to ignore, sell, or destroy the past in order to gain the entirely unprecedented wealth, comfort, and happiness supposedly to be found in the future.

“Agrarian farmers know that their very identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly, and hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past.

Agrarians understand themselves as the users and caretakers of some things they did not make, and of some things that they cannot make.”

Bickering about the nutritional differences between production systems is truly a petty distraction from the actual global and local issue of food security.

Until there is a paradigm shift within the psyche of both producers and consumers, we will continue to pillage our soil and starve our people indefinitely until there is nothing left of either.