Rain Forest in Your Kitchen

The Hidden Connection Between Extinction And Your Supermarket

Martin Teitel

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781559631532
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610913058
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The biodiversity crisis -- the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals -- is not just a faraway problem for scientists to solve. Instead, the crisis is as close as our backyards, our gardens, and our refrigerator shelves. This engaging, practical guide inspires average Americans to wield their consumer power in favor of protecting the world's plant and animal species.

Environmentalist activist Martin Teitel offers compelling evidence that by slightly modifying how we shop, eat, and garden, we can collectively influence the operating decisions of today's corporate agribusiness and help preserve our precious genetic resources. Teitel offers strategies so simple that they require no significant lifestyle change or expense.

A LINK OF STEELY STRENGTH

Agriculture is big business in this country. We not only feed our own quarter-billion citizens, but ship corn, wheat, and soybeans to the feed lots and cook pots of many nations around the world. Over the last century, the standard model in American agriculture switched from locally oriented family businesses to a huge industrial process in a conversion that, not incidentally, makes foreign marketing more achievable. One aspect of this evolution in agriculture is a trend toward monoculture—the growing of vast quantities of exactly the same thing.

The potato is a good example of this trend. In the United States, twelve varieties of one species of potato account for 85 percent of those marketed. But one variety, the Russet Burbank, garners the greatest acreage—about 40 percent in 1982. Why? The Russet Burbank is the “McDonald’s potato,” the fast-food company’s pick for its french fries. McDonald’s demand is farmers’ command in the United States. And as the company grows internationally, it spreads its dependence on the Russet Burbank to acreage overseas.¹¹

While monoculture farming of inbred and hybrid plants and animals represents the fundamental element of the amalgamated link between diet and the loss of biological diversity, it is the meld of elements in the link that gives it its durable strength. Inbred and hybrid varieties require the use of pesticides and fertilizers, facilitate corporate control of farms and seeds, and provide a market for the techniques and products of biotechnology.

Why Poison Ourselves?

One of the sobering realities of the movement toward monoculture is the concomitant overuse of farm chemicals. The genetically uniform plants that are favored in modern agriculture are quite frail. While some of these plants show high yields, at least on paper, their successes depend on extensive outside help. The promise of miracle production from hybrid plants is fulfilled only if the plants are nurtured with fertilizers and protected by pesticides and herbicides. For example, since the introduction of hybrid corn in this country, farm use of fertilizer has increased tenfold.¹² Hybrid and inbred plants are like athletes who can accomplish prodigious feats of strength and endurance—but only as long as they have access to steroids, pain killers, supplements, and other ultimately nonsustainable, self-destructive crutches.

Pesticide Tolerance

Some 600 chemicals used to formulate 50,000 pesticides are now marketed in the United States. The majority of these chemicals were registered for farm use before comprehensive safety testing and standards were initiated. Only 125 of the chemicals have undergone the now-prescribed health and safety testing necessary to establish a tolerance level—the level of application permitted on crops.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—the agency responsible for setting tolerance levels and for requalifying inadequately tested chemicals—ranks pesticide residues as the nation’s number-three cancer risk. Pesticides are outranked by workplace chemicals and indoor radon gas. But the EPA’s highly simplified calculations may obscure the full dangers of exposure of pesticides. The EPA assumes that just one chemical is applied to a crop, even though it is typical that several are applied. There are, for example, more than 100 pesticides registered for apples. And the agency overlooks cumulative or additive effects, despite warnings from scientists that the application of one pesticide atop another can multiply or alter the effects of both.

The following shows the human risk from dietary exposure to certain legal pesticide chemicals, in cancer cases per million people, as estimated by the National Academy of Sciences. These current estimates often exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s “acceptable” rate of one case per million; the EPA’s tolerances, or maximum allowable residues, haven’t been revised for these chemicals.

Source: Sonia L. Nazario, “EPA Under Fire for Pesticide Standards,” Wall Street journal, February 17,1989.

Since our agricultural system has accustomed itself to high-yielding, frail plants, it has become inured to the various props these crops need for survival. Their chemical dependency was first revealed to the world through the tragedy of the Green Revolution, when newly developed, high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice were dispatched to India, Mexico, the Philippines, and many other hungry nations across the world. The new varieties produced well—when given enough nitrogen fertilizer. But when the energy crisis of the 1970S took effect, the cost increases in fertilizer put the newly dependent small farmers out of business. In India, the cost of fertilizer imports rose more than 600 percent between the late 1960s and 1980. At the same time, imports of pesticides rose, and energy-dependent irrigation wells (suddenly mandatory for farming) were drilled around the country. As Doyle points out, “Ironically, in displacing traditional agriculture, the Green Revolution also displaced the very genetic variability that once worked to resist crop disease and insect infestation. Without pesticides, the early Green Revolution crop varieties—al—though high-yielding under favorable conditions—were often vulnerable to considerable insect damage.”¹³

The Green Revolution will one day be seen for what it really was: not so much a new system of agriculture as much as a global tool for redistribution of control of agriculture—a a kind of retrograde land reform.

In addition to chemical coddling, many modernized plants also require huge amounts of water. They produce watery-tasting, heavier crops (their water weight is a commercial advantage at the cost of nutritive value), put unnatural pressure on water resources in farming areas, and increase the energy demands of farming because of the need for pumped irrigation. Further, the fertilizers and pesticides used in the fields ensure that farm runoff is polluted. Through agricultural runoff, the chemicals that have been spread over fields and crops move into the nonfarm environment—into wildlife habitats and human water supplies.

The chemicals needed to compensate for the plants’ weaknesses include huge aggregates of pesticides, fertilizers, and cosmetic/marketing enhancers such as Alar, the apple color-brightening chemical. The pesticide family of chemicals includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, nematicides, and rodenticides. Of these, herbicides are the most copiously applied: approximately 625 million pounds of herbicides were used in the United States in 1981, and the amount is growing exponentially.¹⁴

Agrichemicals add directly to the costs of farming and to the costs of produce. Worse, agrichemicals are often poisonous to other plants and creatures in the environment, including people; their indirect costs in damage to human health have not yet been fully calculated.

It is possible, of course, that not all agrichemicals are harmful in the quantities now used, but few have been tested adequately enough to allow conclusions on their potential toxicity. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “At least fifteen products that researchers previously believed had the properties of chemically breaking down rapidly and of being nonpersistent have been detected recently in surface-and groundwater across the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has placed several herbicides under special toxicology reviews, after experiments on laboratory animals showed them capable of inducing birth defects and cancer.”¹⁵

So while environmental groups and chemical companies battle each other in costly, time-consuming litigation for proof of chemical safety, millions of pounds of compounds with unknown effects are being spewed onto our food crops. The fact that future research or regulation may cause withdrawal of some of today’s popular farm chemicals cannot ameliorate the damage that may already have been done to human and other natural resources.

Are there alternatives that protect biodiversity? Certainly. Sustainable organic agriculture is viable, profitable, and represents an alternative that has kept humanity going for millennia. Even the National Academy of Sciences, in its recent Alternative Agriculture report, says that it works. And plants that perform well without resource-depleting props are hardy by virtue of their genetic diversity. Unlike hybrids, the plants typically used in sustainable farming are traditionals that maintain the breadth of genetic resources to resist a variety of pressures—from disease to pestilence to erratic weather conditions. A switch to sustainable agriculture would greatly broaden food-crop genetic resources because farmers would select the plants best adapted to their local conditions, taking into account soil characteristics, water supply, length of growing season, average and extreme temperatures, and number of daylight hours.¹⁶ In this way, sustainable agriculture practices directly fortify the planet’s genetic resources.

He Who Pays the Piper

The ownership of farms and agriculture-related businesses has been greatly consolidated in the United States and the world in recent decades. Although there were 2.4 million farms operating in the United States in 1985, just 7 percent of them controlled 56 percent of the nation’s agricultural production, while fifteen agribusiness corporations sold 60 percent of all farm supplies, and about sixty companies performed 70 percent of the nation’s food processing.¹⁷

Consolidation somewhat illustrates the connection between corporate control of agriculture and a narrowing of the genetic base. More eloquent still is the roster of major seed companies: the top ten seed-selling companies in the world in 1986 were the corporations Cargill, Ciba-Geigy, Dekalb-Pfizer, Lubrizol, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sandoz, Suiker Unie, Upjohn, and Volvo. All are multinational; the majority are chemical companies. Only Suiker Unie and Cargill are agribusiness firms; only Pioneer Hi-Bred is solely a seed company. Surprised to find such heavyweights involved in selling seeds? Tiny seeds are big business: the world market for crop seed is $45 billion annually; the U.S. market is $4 billion. ¹⁸

Exports and Acreage

There is a noteworthy ripple effect to the seeds planted in American soil, as agricultural historian James Wessel in Trading the Future (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1983, p. 54, 159) reveals:

“In one decade, the top three export crops—corn, wheat, and soybeans—grew from one half to cover two thirds of our harvested cropland. Not only have export markets tended to narrow farmers’ crop options, they have encouraged farmers to accelerate a shift from mixed livestock and crop production toward specialization in corn and soybeans, especially in the North Central states.

“According to agricultural economist Philip M. Raup, we are ‘creating a pattern of one-crop, export-based agricultural activity in the corn, soybean, wheat, and sorghum regions that is very similar to the type of monocultural dependence formerly associated with colonialism. In an important and sobering sense, the grain belt of America is acquiring the characteristic of a colony.’ Nothing more characterizes the economy of a colony than the boom and bust linked to fluctuating world market prices for primary exports. Also, in a colonized economy the rewards of production are captured primarily by the largest producers, as well as by the commercial interests off the farm.

“When farmers produce a variety of crops, or both livestock and crops, they have some built-in protection against losses when prices decline. If feed grains hit a price slump, farmers can always feed part of the crop to their livestock. And when farmers produce a variety of crops, they are somewhat protected if prices fall for one. With greater crop specialization, such back-up protection is lost.

“. . . . It has been no coincidence that the countries experiencing the greatest growth in U.S. food processing and retailing subsidiaries are the same countries that received the bulk of U.S. farm exports in the two decades prior to the export boom of the 1970S.

“U.S. marketing and promotional strategies were transplanted abroad as well, helping to create new consumer demand for a ‘global supermarket’ on the American model—one that emphasized a highly processed grain and meat-centered diet, for those who could afford it.”

The result of multinational ownership of seed supplies is restriction of the types of seed available worldwide. Consider that:

• More than 48 percent of all nonhybrid seeds are available from only one source.
• A single corporation controls 66 percent of the world’s banana germplasm.
• Two companies control 43 percent of all barley seed types.
• Four companies control 79 percent of all bean varieties.
• Six companies control 66 percent of all lettuce types.

With such control, these corporations can afford to play the market the way that suits them best—through uniformity. Corporations thrive on it. Economy of scale is a basic tenet of the modern industrial system. Diversity in a product line is costly—in terms of planning, processing, packaging, advertising, and so forth. The now-leading multinational seed vendors established themselves by buying out family-owned seed companies and replacing what were multiple, regionally adapted seed collections with collections of a few (more profitable) hybrids and patented varieties. Why should they go to the expense and bother of selling five kinds of peas (specialized producers for various climates around the country) if, by their market dominance, they can offer just one patented variety that will produce “well enough” in all regions?

Vertical integration into agriculture is another card these companies play to strengthen their stance in the marketplace. Such integration enables them to entrench their primary products in a marketing system that reaches farmers with everything from seeds to plastic pipe and from herbicides to machinery. Since they produce farm chemicals, they have a powerful incentive to develop and promote agricultural practices that involve intensive use of the products from which they profit so greatly. They are powerful proponents of the monoculture crops that require chemical nurturing.

Designer Genes

Biotechnology, the new science that permits laboratory manipulation a...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• GENES, HYBRIDS, AND THE LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY
• A LINK OF STEELY STRENGTH
• EVERYONE SHOPS, EVERYONE EATS
• TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON
• EXPANDING THE MARKET
• GROWING YOUR OWN
• FAST FOOD: PERVASIVE FOE OF DIVERSITY
• STEPPING OVER THE THRESHOLD
• NOTES
• About the Author
• About the C. S. Fund