Columbia Missouri
Tribune Online News Story
Story ran on March 30, 1999
A revolution, row by row
By JOHN IKERD
Sustainability was once referred to as "a quiet revolution
sweeping across American agriculture." The revolution continues,
but the time for quietness has passed.
The current crisis in American agriculture, like the revolution,
has been a quiet one. Thousands of farm families are being forced
off the land, an inevitable consequence, we are told, of
technological progress. Farmers are offered the options of
getting bigger, giving in to corporate control or getting out.
The crisis is a chronic symptom of the type of agriculture we
have been promoting in this country for the past 50 years,
magnified by the brazen attempts of giant corporations to wrest
control from family farms and complete the industrialization of
agriculture. But industrialization is neither inevitable nor
progressive.
There's a better way to farm, a better way to produce food and
fiber and a better way to live. We are entering a new era in
American agriculture an era in which we learn to support people
through agriculture rather than sacrifice their well being to
support the industry of agriculture. It's time to proclaim a new
agricultural revolution.
Sustainable agriculture and industrial agriculture are two
fundamentally different philosophies diametrically and
irreconcilably opposed. There is no common ground on which to
compromise.
Our task is made more difficult by institutions that see
industrialization as the only viable option for the future. The
government subsidizes our industrial competitors with everything
from tax concessions to direct farm program payments. We are
excluded from traditional markets and prevented from marketing
direct to customers by a maze of complex government regulations.
We are denied equal access to the research and educational
resources of public institutions.
Others believe agriculture is mostly about products and profits
not people. To them, if food is cheaper or more convenient, it
doesn't really matter who produces it or how it is produced. But
people do matter.
About a year ago, when I was recovering from open-heart surgery,
I read a book: "The Life and Major Works of Thomas Paine." Paine,
a writer during the American Revolution, was credited with
articulating the ideas of the Revolution in terms that could be
understood by the "common man." He signed his early writings with
the pen name "Common Sense."
Today, Paine's work provides valuable insights into how to keep a
revolution from failing at least when the cause makes common
sense. Sustainable agriculture, like freedom and democracy, is a
cause that makes common sense.
Paine gave no quarter to the enemies of freedom and democracy.
Nothing in his writings could be mistaken for impartial
objectivity. His papers always extolled the great benefits that
would be realized by the colonies once they had shed the yoke of
British rule. And he never doubted that the American colonists
eventually would win their war for independence.
We must adopt Thomas Paine's approach to revolutionize American
agriculture not gradual, incremental changes in farming
practices but a fundamentally different philosophy of farming.
The divergence between industrial agriculture and sustainable
agriculture is as great as that between monarchy and democracy.
This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.
They need to know the truth about what is happening to American
agriculture and why.
We need to tell them about our new kind of agriculture that will
sustain people, not just the industry of agriculture. And we need
to give them common-sense reasons why the old system cannot be
sustained and why sustainable agriculture is not a luxury but an
absolute necessity.
The current economic system rewards the exploitation of natural
resources and people, and the visible, tangible epitome of that
system is the large, publicly owned corporation. The corporation
is the ultimate "economic man" motivated always and only by its
own short-term self-interest, driven solely by an insatiable need
for profit and growth. This enemy should be given no quarter.
An industrial agriculture might be able to meet our food and
fiber needs of today and maybe for another 50 years, but it is
degrading and destroying the very resources soil, water and
energy upon which it depends. An industrial agriculture is said
to be efficient, but not when one counts the enormous costs it
imposes on the environment and on people in rural communities.
Environmentally sound and socially responsible farming operations
already exist many of them as economically efficient as their
industrial counterparts. We need to tell the general public that
sustainability is not only possible but also logical and,
ultimately, essential.
The industrial agricultural system might have been logical in the
past, but it no longer makes sense. America's version of
industrial agriculture is very similar to the agriculture that
failed miserably in the old Soviet Union bringing down the
country in the process. Some claim that our system relies on free
markets. But we are turning agriculture over to multinational
corporations that control everything from genetic seed stocks to
supermarket shelves, eliminating all the free markets in between.
Instead of free markets, we have something more like central
planning little different in principle from the old Soviet
industrial agriculture. And the outcome will be the same:
failure.
Farmers themselves are the architects of the new sustainable
agriculture. They are the explorers, the colonists and the
revolutionaries. Like the revolutionaries who created a
democracy, they will confront hardship, frustration and failure.
Ultimately, they will succeed.
Never doubt the cause is just. Industrial corporate agriculture
is not good for people and thus is not sustainable. It's just
common sense. Agriculture ultimately must sustain a desirable
quality of life for people on farms, in rural communities and
in the cities. It's just common sense. Human civilization cannot
be sustained without a sustainable agriculture.
It's time for a new revolution in American agriculture. It's just
plain common sense.
John Ikerd is a professor of agricultural economics at MU. This
paper was presented in the opening session of the March 24
"Sustaining People Through Agriculture" conference in Columbia.
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