Food Sovereignty: New Approach to Farming Could Help Solve Climate, Economic Crises

Discussions of climate change keep running head-long into a barrier: China, India, Brazil and the other countries of the global South need to develop.

No leader of an underdeveloped country will ever agree to a climate change proposal that will take away that country’s right to develop. This isn’t so odd. Try explaining to the Chinese government that because the United States and Western Europe flooded the atmosphere with CO2 by burning readily accessible cheap fossil fuel for 150 years, their citizens will have to live without a decent standard of living, while we imperiously assert that we won’t divert more than a smidgen of our government budget to clean energy development and will keep occupying the country’s freeways and streets with gas-guzzlers. It won’t work.

Meanwhile, first-world leaders, mired in economic crisis, can’t make the long-run infrastructural investments that would enable them to take the technological lead in a low-carbon transformation — let alone make the technology transfers or capital grants that are a moral and political imperative.

But there’s a partial way out of the crisis, or what the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has christened the “triple crunch,” the intertwined crisis of climate crisis, systemic economic malaise, and oil depletion.

The NEF argues that we need a new Green New Deal, culminating in a “great transition” to a new way of structuring production and consumption so as to re-create an ecology in homeostasis — a sustainable economy, one that doesn’t draw down impossible-to-renew natural resources. Food and agriculture will be central to such a transition:

"With peak oil imminent and climate change already upon us, the Great Transition will involve a major shift away from the energy-intensive production processes involved in getting food on to our plates," NEF writes.

This means re-localizing food systems in industrialized, developed countries, and strengthening subsistence sectors in developing countries. This won’t condemn them to low-tech, labor-intensive, under-developed purgatory. Indeed, it can represent a convergence of living standards between the first and third world. The NEF advocates for people in industrialized countries to spend more time in agricultural activities, pointing out that new urban planning patterns and less time spent working will free up time for other things: “People will have more time to grow their own food with the reduced working week and less time spent traveling to and from work.”

Most think tanks, NGOs, and governmental organization are not quite where the NEF is. At least not yet. But they are increasingly recognizing the centrality of agriculture to the “triple crunch” and incorporating it in sensible ways into their development reports.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 2009/2010 Trade and Environment Review is the latest evidence of this trend, with its focus on “the crucial nexus between trade, development and climate change.”

One focus of the report is a transition to a different sort of food production system. As Urs Niggli, a Swedish researcher, writes, the climate crisis is the “ideal platform for fostering a shift towards more sustainable agricultural production.” The focus would be on local cycling of nutrients, and pest-control methods mimicking natural ones.

Furthermore, these agricultural systems would use native seeds and would be bio-diverse—in juxtaposition to pest-prone monocultures. Bio-diverse organic farms are more resilient than farms filled with fields planted with single crops, which are vulnerable to precisely the sort of pest and pathogen outbreaks that will proliferate as the world’s climate warms.