Global food security can release the world from much of the terrorism that we now endure.
The desire to fight for more falls when the bellies of the combatants are full, both physically and spiritually. Usually the first needs to come before the second can be maintained.
Yet, as prosperous societies, we find ourselves caught up in the small-scale worries that large farms are contributing to the death of agriculture and rural life as we knew it. Improvements in technologies for both the food we produce and the inputs and tools we are using to deliver them are somehow part of this and to blame.
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Small is not wrong. Neither is large (nearly all larger farms are family organizations with many participants anyway). Organic is not wrong. Neither is scalable, traditional commercial production that is rich in technology. These are simply labels we use to describe our farming methods and personal philosophies.
Labels should help us quickly define in our minds the contents of the jars behind them. In reality, these are used to add non-contents ingredients, some of them fictional and mostly sensational: GMOs, corporate farms, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, precision agriculture, organic, natural, antibiotic free, humanely raised, sustainable.
For each of us, these labels paint an instant picture. It’s a deeply flawed picture, but one that many members of our society are willing to make both personal and political choices around.
These are choices that restrict farmers from optimizing their land, food companies from improving the nutrition density of their products and governments from supporting sustainable practices that will help stabilize the human side of our globe.
There is a war going in food, and it needs to end if we want some of these non-metaphorical blood-letting battles to cease. The collateral damage for farming is productivity and choice.
Farmers need to make their livings, and food must be produced at a price our societies can afford. Poor farmers can’t optimize every acre, whether they are poor in a developing-world sense of the term or in the western.
Legislation can be crippling, and the hammer that is international trade can drive the coffin nails of the poor and let our own blood leak into the streets.