Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Michigan State University have confirmed what many people have assumed: monocropping increases pesticide use. What that means is that as agricultural land becomes biologically simplified, pest species increase. With the increase in pests, more pesticides are used to control them.
In an unrelated pesticide research project, scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service estimated the escape of pesticides into the atmosphere. Ordinarily, we think of pesticides sprayed on crops and soil where rain and irrigation carry the chemicals to surface and ground water. What these researchers looked at was how pesticides evaporate into the air and are carried to wherever the winds blow. It turns out that the amount is far greater than previously thought: 25 times greater than the amount in runoff.
As I’m sure you know, those pesticides end up somewhere. One place is in human bodies, including fetuses. A recent study of pesticides used in association with genetically engineered food crops examined the concentration of pesticides and their metabolites in the blood of pregnant women, their fetuses, and women who were not pregnant. The good news and the bad news is that only some of these toxins were found in the women and fetuses.
What happens then? As just an example, the obesity and diabetes epidemics aren’t just the result of bad food and lack of exercise. Most pesticides are endocrine disruptors that wreak developmental havoc on the organs of energy metabolism in fetuses and children. Exposed children are more likely than not to grow up with one or both of these chronic diseases.
Although this is all quite insane, I want to draw your attention to its causes. Yes, powerful economic interests are involved. Yes, bad science is involved. Yes, alienation from the natural world is involved. And yes, failure of political institutions is involved. But what I really want to draw your attention to is how we got here.
Two hundred years ago, most people produced the food they ate. But the national drive to industrialize and become a great nation required the creation of a concentrated workforce, drawing people from abroad and from the country to live in cities and work in factories. Cities grew. Workers needed to be fed. Enterprising men figured out how to do that.
Two hundred years ago, the food web for most people didn’t reach far—maybe 10 miles. One hundred years ago, the food web for most people stretched hundreds of miles. For most people today, the food web stretches thousands of miles and spans continents.
Solving the problem of feeding an industrial proletariat concentrated in cities required solving the problem of delivering huge amounts of food over great distances. Producing that huge amount of food invited the concentration and consolidation that is the inevitable outcome of capitalist enterprises. Food was no longer produced by virtually everyone, but by a rapidly shrinking number of people. Two hundred years ago, people who grew surplus food sold it, bartered it, or gave it away as part of the glue that bound people together into communities. This is when the food web was part of the social web.
But to solve the problem of feeding an industrial proletariat detached from the land and concentrated in cities, food was transformed into a commodity. It was subject to the same forces as other production processes: maximize the return on investment by increasing productivity of labor and using what is now politely referred to as “environmental services” as much as possible—these, of course, being free. I’m not only speaking of air, water, and land as disposal sites for waste but also the elements necessary for life itself: carbon dioxide in the air for plants, oxygen for animals (there’s a free production process, you know, called breathing), water as a nutrient, and the living thing we call soil that converts animal and plant waste to nutrients—all for free. As part of a pre-industrial food web, these common property resources comprised some of the glue that maintained the social web.
Solving the problems presented by industrialization created its own kind of social glue and with it its own ethics, glorifying the exploitation of common property resources and making possible the heedless reduction of food and the land on which it is grown to a thing that exists only to be sold. One thing leads to another: food as a commodity to monoculture to pesticides to their downstream effects, all now essential to the production of food.
Here’s where you’ll say that the whole thing falls apart. We don’t need ever-increasing monoculture to produce food efficiently. And you would be right—in the abstract. But each day, we face the problem of how to feed ourselves so we can make it to the factory gate and earn the wage with which we buy our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Those meals are served by clever entrepreneurs devoted to two things: selling food and a return on investment. And here you might think that, since clever entrepreneurs are ultimately in it for the money, if consumers demand a better, pesticide-free agriculture, it will be delivered. But you would be wrong. This is not a problem that will be solved by educating we buyers of food or educating the sellers of food or educating the government regulators of food.
The problem will only be solved when the interests of consumers and producers, of eaters and growers of food are the same, when the food web is once again an essential glue for our social web. It’s not unimaginable, just not what we’re used to.
