The problem of hunger can be solved. The planet globally creates more than enough food to meet everyone’s needs. Food production actually exceeds food needs.But there are still about 925 million hungry people in the world, and nearly 180 million pre-school age children do not get vital nutrients. Incredulously, 80 percent of the global hungry live in rural areas and half are smallholders. All over the world the present economic system plunders and wastes the Earth's resources. All over the world capitalism pollutes the sea, the air, the soil, forests, rivers and lakes. All over the world it upsets natural balances and defies the laws of ecology. Clearly this destruction and waste cannot continue indefinitely, but it need not; it should not and must not.
250 billion pounds of fish, 588 billion pounds of meat, 2.2 trillion pounds of fruits and vegetables is what the world consumes on an annual basis, according to various sources such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Food Policy Research Institute. Projections for 2030, as a planet we'll be consuming more than 344 billion pounds of fish, 808 billion pounds of meat and 3.1 trillion pounds of fruits and vegetables.
While massive industrialization brought over-developed, polluted and traffic-congested cities, heavily industrialized farming brings soil depletion, produces pollution and a food chain tainted with, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and other toxins. We drug ourselves every time we take a bite of factory-farmed food.
It's no secret that factory farms use unconscionable amounts of antibiotics when fattening up animals for market. However, farmers also administer arsenic to chickens to turn their flesh just the right shade of pink that consumers find attractive. In June 2011, the FDA instructed Pfizer to discontinue selling Roxarsone, a proven carcinogen yet it is still showing up in our chickens. Other substances that the scientists found in the food chain include acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, Benadryl, an antihistamine, even Prozac, an antidepressant. Farms feed chickens these mood-altering drugs to reduce their anxiety. Chickens are anxious because they are bred on overcrowded and filthy factory farms. Stressed-out birds develop meat that is tough and unpalatable, so they need to be sedated. Yet, chickens on tranquilizers sleep all the time and do not eat enough. So they are given high doses of caffeine (which was also found in the feather meal) to keep them awake at night to feed and fatten up. So, here is the deal. We create hellish conditions for our livestock, then we drug them to keep them numb. Then we drug them again to wake them from their pharmaceutical stupor. Then we drug them to grow faster. Then we drug them so their flesh will look healthier. Then we drug them to withstand the disease epidemics that our overcrowding has created. Livestock which are bred to eat as much as possible, constantly stuffing themselves with high-fat and high-protein power feed, live in claustrophobically tight quarters, where they are practically guaranteed to get sick. For years, farmers have been trying correct this defect in the system with drugs.
As factory farming has grown, so have veterinary practices, sometimes to enormous proportions. Some "animal clinics" now have staffs of 20 to 30 people. In some cases, their in-house pharmacies have grown large enough to fill large storage room. "Some veterinarians' profit margins are bigger than those of cocaine dealers," says Nicki Schirm, who has been a veterinarian in the state of Hesse for more than 25 years. In large veterinary practices, profits from the sale of drugs can account for up to 80 percent of revenues. This is mainly due to the volume discounts offered by the pharmaceutical industry and the sweet privilege known as the right to dispense -- a special provision for the pharmaceutical monopoly. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Environment Minister Johannes Remmel ordered the testing of 182 flocks on commercial chicken farms. More than 90 percent of the animals had been treated with antibiotics, many multiple times, so that they were essentially being fed a constant diet of drugs. Others were given the medications for only one or two days, which isn't long enough and is in violation of the conditions for licensing the drugs. Such results raise suspicions that the drugs were being used to guarantee the success of the poultry fattening operation rather than to fight disease. What has the scientists particularly concerned is that more and more pathogens, especially in poultry meat, are immune to several antibiotics, including fluoroquinolones, which, as so-called reserve antibiotics, are supposed to be used sparingly. But pharmaceutical companies have been anything but sparing in recent years when it comes to the use of antibiotics. In 2010, drug maker Bayer earned €166 million, an 11 percent increase over the previous year, with sales of the animal antibiotic Baytril, which is often used with turkeys when all else fails. Annual sales of veterinary drugs in Germany have climbed to €730 million. Some 900 tons of antibiotics were fed to animals in Germany in 2010. This is 116 tons more than in 2005, and more than three times as much as the entire German population takes annually. The general effectiveness of antibiotics is on the line. There is only a limited number of agents and humans are dependant on them too. The more these drugs are used in livestock farming, the greater the risk that bacteria will develop new survival strategies, or greater resistance. Although, at present, many of these drug-resistant pathogens originate in hospitals, factory farming also contains a mounting risk of transmission. Modern mass-farming methods may well have run their course, and not before time many animal rights activists will say.
Fish, meat, fruits and vegetables are living organisms. That makes producing them far different from mining raw materials and shaping them into automobiles, highways, skyscrapers, household appliances and electronic gadgets. An assembly line can be shut down if a parameter drifts out of range. But crops and livestock have to be kept living, breathing, eating, growing and reproducing 24hrs a day, 7days a week, 365 days a year. In other words, farming is as knowledge-intensive as it gets. It's both complex and complicated, with lots of moving parts, with risk and uncertainty thrown in. The world's food supply is extremely vulnerable to sudden disruptions from war, disease, natural disasters or financial crises. Timing is everything, as are volume and variety. Take the avocado farmer, for example. When to pick is critical - you only get one shot. And you'd better have enough pickers lined up and ready to go. After you pick, shelf life is extremely short, compared to other fruits. To reduce guesswork, farmers need to draw from a vast array of data sources, some internally generated and others publicly available. They analyze and extrapolate, but rely mostly on good old-fashioned knowledge and intuition, building upon decades of hard work and trial and error. When they dare to innovate, it's carefully balanced against the risks associated with "one-shot-and-you're-done". What you've got is not so much a farm but something more closely resembling a knowledge enterprise. In India, for instance, there exists a program aimed at farmers which sends text messages to the mobiles of smallholders with crop advice and recipients also receive location-specific weather forecasts, local and international supply and demand information. In this way the demand needs can be communicated by local communities to the producers and communicated throughout the system from supplier to supplier.
Conventional agriculture is a big environmental threat that undercuts biodiversity and water resources, but it yields more crops. On the other hand, organic farming is quite healthy and environment-friendly but it yields less crops compared to the conventional and it takes up more land for cultivation. "By combining organic and conventional practices in a way that maximises food production and social good while minimising adverse environmental impact, we can create a truly sustainable food system," said Prof Jonathan Foley, researcher at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. Solutions to the threat of hunger will vary by region, sometimes even from one farm or village to the next. Not all ideas will succeed, but those that do, scaling up, as quickly as possible, will be essential.
Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote of not only abolishing capitalism but doing away with the distinction between town and countryside. We have the widespread development of urban city/neighbourhood farming increasing. Chicago’s has established its first entirely self-sustaining "vertical" farm and "industrial ecology"— a concept using other people’s waste as input. The most important thing is using the resources that we already have around us.
Common ownership would give all communities immediate access to land. In the short term, people in the areas of greatest need could concentrate their local efforts using the best means available. At the same time the regions most able to do so could assist with increased supplies. There can be no doubt that throughout the world, within a season or two, the plight of the seriously undernourished would be greatly improved. In the longer term, communities in socialism would be able to look beyond the immediate priorities of desperate need and begin to sort out the appalling state of world farming that is a consequence of the exploitation and destructive methods of capitalist agri-business. It not only exploits farm workers of all lands, it exploits anything in nature it can get its hands on. There is of course widespread concern, not just about starving people but also about the damage and loss of natural food assets across the world. This is the continuing despoliation of land and ocean resources, the excessive and inappropriate use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers together with the cruel treatment of animals. But concern is too often weakened by a sense of powerlessness. The FAO could achieve its potential as a key organisation for collaboration and co-ordination and at last achieve real results. Devolved agricultural committees could be set up in every country and these could be further de-centralised through regional and district committees. At every level throughout this structure, the FAO could provide skilled staffs able to draw on its store of world data and technical information to advise and assist the work. This network could be extended to local farms with an ability to adapt to every local condition. The information technology exists for implementation, only the will is currently lacking. The solution for a hungry world is simply a matter of connecting the dots. To end hunger we must end poverty and inequality. To end the capitalist system.
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1 comment:
Women in one of the poorest neighbourhoods no longer have to spend money on vegetables, because they have learned to grow their own, as urban gardening takes off in Brazil.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107646
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