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There are two distinct futures of food and farming. One leads to the regeneration of our planet, our soils, our biodiversity, our water, our rural economies and farmers’ livelihoods, our health, our democracy. The second leads to collapse of the planet’s ecosystems and of socioeconomic systems that sustain rural communities and society, with the speculative, unstable financial system controlling the future of food and farming.
The future of diverse species, our common human future and our daily bread depends on which road we take. The regeneration path reverses the degradation of the earth, our food and our freedom. It paves the way for a habitable future, building on the multiple diverse, ecological paths through which food and agriculture systems have evolved over the past 10,000 years. This is farming in nature’s way as co-creators and co-producers, with diversity, respecting nature’s ecological cycles and people’s rights. It is based on recognising that the web of life is a food web, and maintaining that is the first objective of agriculture.
Care for the earth and community is the most important investment in the regeneration of our degraded land, food and democracy. Food is the most basic need, and the right to food is a fundamental right. Food sovereignty is our birthright.
Food produced ecologically and distributed democratically ensures that good food contributes to the health of the planet and people. It also ensures that no one goes hungry, and no one is condemned to eating poisoned bread. It is based on diversity of knowledge systems, including the knowledge within living systems and local economies. It is based on diversity of food economies, from the local to the regional to the planetary. It is based on democracy.
Diversity and democracy create resilience. In food systems, the resilience created through diversity is multidimensional. Bio-diverse organic farming slows the impacts of climate change and instead contributes to climate resilience. Biodiversity creates health resilience—from healthy soils to healthy plants and healthy people. Small diverse farms create ecological resilience. When combined with local circular and cyclical economies, small ecological farms create socially and economically resilient communities.
The second road is a dead end road of industrial agriculture and industrial food systems based on a war against the earth. It leads to ecological collapse of ecosystems and ecological processes that sustain life, economic collapse of rural economies and destruction of livelihoods of farmers who care for the earth and provide food.
The paradigm that has led us down this road is the violent and obsolete paradigm of the mechanistic, militarised, monoculture mind that sees itself at war with the earth, with biodiversity and farmers. It defines human progress as removing care and responsibility from the economic system and food system. It defines efficiency and productivity in terms of replacing farmers who grow real food with care, by chemicals and machines, without assessing their impact on nature and society, and without taking any responsibility for the impact.
The dead end road is industrial and was paved by the Poison Cartel, which was born during the war to create chemicals that can kill people. After the wars they redeployed war chemicals as agrichemicals—pesticides and fertilisers. We were told we can’t have food without poisons. Explosives that were made by burning fossil fuels at high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen were later used to make chemical fertilisers. The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make “Bread from Air.”
There was the exaggerated claim that artificial fertilisers would increase food production and remove all ecological limits that land puts on agriculture. Today the evidence is growing that artificial fertilisers have reduced soil fertility and food production—and contributed to desertification, water scarcity and climate change.
Contrary to the myth that small farmers should be wiped out because they are unproductive, small farmers are providing 50 percent of global food using just 30 percent of the resources that go into agriculture. Industrial agriculture is using 70 percent of the resources to create 50 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions while providing only 20 percent of our food.
We do not need to go faster and further down the road that has destroyed the planet, our biodiversity, our farmers and rural economies. There are other paths, which farmers of India and across the world have walked for 10,000 years that have been rejuvenated through diverse agro-ecological systems, and show the direction to the future.
For the earth, for farmers, for all humans, a transition from an industrial, corporate driven food and agriculture system to an ecologically sustainable, socially and economically just, politically participative, healthy food and agriculture system has become an imperative. Such a transition is being shaped by thousands of food communities across the world, in the north and the south. They are taking the road to the future, and abandoning the dead end road.
