Consumed

Food for a Finite Planet

Sarah Elton

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781443406680
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443406697
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Sociology

What happens on this planet over the next four decades has the potential to fundamentally alter life as we know it. By 2050, the world's population is expected to reach 9 billion people—that's 9 billion hungry humans—while climate change increasingly interferes with the way we produce our food. At the same time, few of us know where that food comes from, let alone how to grow it, and we are at the mercy of multinationals that control the food chain and have little insight into the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. This puts our future at risk.

But if food is the problem, it is also the solution. In Consumed, award-winning writer Sarah Elton visits fields and farms on three continents to tell us about the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. From the mountains of southern France to the highlands of China, from the crowded streets of Aurangabad, India, to the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, we meet people from all walks of life who are creating alternatives to the industrial food we have grown accustomed to piling into our shopping carts. These fascinating stories bring us hope and help us believe in a future where we can all sit at the table.

PART ONE

TARGET 2020:
SOIL

CHAPTER ONE

Table for One Billion: To See Our Future, Visit Sunny India

The road can tell you so much about where you are, especially in India. Certainly the twenty-kilometre stretch of road that connects the city of Aurangabad to Bidkin, a farming village in the traditionally agricultural state of Maharashtra, says a lot about the massive change that is under way there. On a trip from the city one morning, I passed the usual cows nosing around garbage heaps looking for food alongside wild pigs roaming free. There were the dudhwalas, young men with aluminum milk cans strapped to the back of their motorbikes returning to the farm from their morning deliveries; women and children balancing metal water jugs on their heads; and two boys, smartly dressed in their navy blue school uniforms, hair slicked with almond oil, walking arm in arm down the road from a vegetable seller, his wares spread on a blanket. A man soaked in a tub in front of a little shack. Another got a shave with a straight razor in a tiny roadside barbershop, lit by a single bulb hanging from a wire. A blacksmith worked a piece of metal with his hammer over an open flame. And at a cluster of stalls selling snacks and bright-coloured packs of supari (areca nut and betel leaf to chew), a group gathered for a breakfast of hot chai and a dish called pava.

Then there were the signs of the twenty-first century creeping out of the city towards the rural areas, along the road that is like a wick, drawing change to the villages and farms. Aurangabad was founded in 1610, and at least for the past fifty years, the city has been a sleepy town in an arid agricultural area where farmers grew grains such as sorghum and millet and, more recently, cash-crop cotton. That’s now changing. Today Aurangabad is one of India’s fastest-growing cities, in large part because manufacturing industries have moved here. In 2007, the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development listed the city as one of the top 100 fastest-growing large urban areas in the world, and according to the Indian census, between 2001 and 2011, Aurangabad’s population jumped from 2.8 to 3.6 million. About 65 percent of those people are under thirty-five years old.

When I visited, the city’s first traffic lights had recently been erected in an attempt to control the growing number of motorbikes, rickshaws, trucks, and cars. Before the installation of the stoplight, a policeman wearing white gloves had directed traffic at the intersection where the road to Bidkin forks off. He now looked hopelessly at the mess of vehicles that continued past the red signal. A nearby billboard advertised a new flavour of artisanal ice cream, an appeal to a growing middle class. Then, farther along the Bidkin road, towards the outskirts of the city, fallow fields were interspersed with new housing developments of concrete multi-storey buildings. Farther still, there were signs for future construction projects. One sign, for the Sai Labh Enclave, promised “The Touch of Luxury and Comfort Living” in its bungalows, row houses, and flats. And even farther down the road to Bidkin, a man and a boy led a herd of goats through a roadside field to graze under yet another billboard offering building plots for sale. In the previous four years, the price of real estate had increased fivefold here. This is what some people call India Shining.

After that, the factories began: the steel mill with a tall chimney exuding a constant stream of black smoke, the paper mill, a plastics plant, and the Videocon campus, one of India’s largest manufacturers of fridges, air conditioners, and televisions. And all along the road near the Videocon factory were little white shacks cobbled together from the Styrofoam packaging in which the electronics components likely arrived before the products were assembled in Aurangabad. Then finally: Bidkin. A bustling place, with its own collection of roadside stalls near the central bus station. This is the town where farmers come from the vicinity every Wednesday to weigh and then sell, depending on the season, their cotton or their sugarcane at the state-run wholesale market or visit the Bidkin bazaar to buy food and supplies.

But I was heading beyond Bidkin to visit a smaller village, Dhangaon. I was on my way to visit a woman named Chandrakala Bobade, an organic farmer whom I had met a few days before at a meeting in Bidkin of women farmers. Chandrakalabai—the “bai” appended as a term of respect—is a leader in her community, in a region where more than a thousand other small farmers have managed to build a resilient local food system that doesn’t rely on expensive inputs. In so doing, they have improved their livelihoods and changed lives, particularly the lives of village women. And quite inadvertently, these farmers are proving that small-scale organic farming can feed a country the size of India. They are showing that their way of producing and selling food is an important part of a new sustainable food system that can feed us into the future.

The day Chandrakalabai greeted me in her home, she had pulled her long grey hair back into a braid and draped the tail of her sari over her head like a loose scarf. She wore a nose ring, a blue stone set in a gold star, and on each wrist, about a dozen matching mint-green bangles. In between her eyebrows, she had a vermilion bindi, and on her feet were chappals, handmade leather sandals that she wore while working in the fields. Chandrakalabai is one of the most successful farmers in the area. She is a pioneer who set an example in her village and whose work has been emulated by others. Still, she’s a quiet woman who prefers to wait to speak until asked. At the meeting of extension workers hired by the Bidkin-based Institute for Integrated Rural Development, where we first met, she didn’t volunteer to talk but was called upon by the others to tell her story first. When she did, she spoke matter-of-factly about what she had achieved—though her life has been far from easy. She had dealt with domestic violence. She had lived in poverty, in villages where basics such as electricity and water are an occasional luxury. And most poignantly, of the three sons she had given birth to, only one survived past babyhood.

I liked Chandrakalabai right away. I liked her thoughtfulness and how she smiled with her eyes. We got to know each other over several days, though we were unable to talk directly with each other. Chandrakalabai speaks Marathi, which I don’t understand, and she didn’t speak any English. We could communicate only through a translator. Despite the cultural gulf that existed between us, there were nevertheless certain details of her life she shared with me that I could relate to: the love a mother feels towards a child; the desire to work hard and to make a comfortable home for the family. She told me of her need to get away to a quiet place to do her work—she enjoys walking the few kilometres to the small shelter made from branches and straw at the edge of her fields and sit in its shade, surrounded by her crops and the sounds of birds, to do her paperwork.

The morning I arrived in her village of Dhangaon, Chandrakalabai had called a group of women to gather at her small house. It was an old stone house with a carved wooden door painted bubble-gum pink. The house was well kept. Inside were a four-poster bed, two plastic lawn chairs, a television, a machine to crush chilies into powder, and, taking up about a third of the small space, a heap of her recently harvested cotton crop that she was storing to sell as soon as the wholesale price went up. On the wall were two hand-painted murals of Hindu gods as well as old family photos. There was no kitchen in the house. Chandrakalabai had done so well as an organic farmer over the last decade that she had been able to buy another plot of land across the street to build a kitchen house, with running water and a stove. The toilet, another sign of prosperity, was outside, attached to the living quarters.

The group of us squeezed onto the bed, the chairs, and the heap of cotton—it felt soft and cozy, just as you’d imagine a pile of freshly picked cotton would—and the women began to tell me about their farms. There was Kavita, a young, smiling kindergarten teacher and cotton farmer, who soon had to excuse herself to go to class; there was Smita, who grew cotton and the yellow pigeon peas—toor dal—that are a staple, and a woman named Duarka, who grew cotton and chilies. Over the next half-hour, more women arrived, pressing into the small room to tell me of their farms and of how their lives had improved since switching to organic methods. “It’s profitable because it is less cost,” explained Nanda, who grew cabbage, sugar cane, bananas, and sweet lime, a delicious citrus fruit as big as a baseball with green skin and orange pulp and the taste of a mild orange.

All their stories were similar to Chandrakalabai’s. About twenty years ago, she was a typical subsistence farmer, growing millet, sorghum, vegetables, and cotton using the tools of modern agriculture such as hybrid seeds, chemical pesticides, and fertilizers derived from fossil fuels—when she could afford them. She struggled. Then, in the early 1990s, Chandrakalabai heard about a way of farming that didn’t rely on any of these external inputs. A non-governmental organization working in the region—the Institute for Integrated Rural Development, where she is now employed part-time as an extension worker—taught her about organic farming. Over a few years, she changed the way she farmed.

Chandrakalabai’s story shows us that small farmers in the developing world can lessen their input costs and grow organically, which increases their yields. If they can then embed themselves in a local food system with a minimum of intermediaries between them and the consumer, they can earn more money and secure a better future. It’s a simple story that has big implications for the rest of the world looking for an answer to how we can feed our growing population, sustainably, by 2050.

But it’s hard to be optimistic about India’s future when we consider climate and population. The forecasts are bleak. Demographics, environmental change, and human decisions are together creating challenges we’ve not yet had to face. To start, the population is spiking. Today there are more than one billion people in India; it is forecasted that by the 2020s India will surpass China as the world’s most populous country. These numbers, along with a growing economy and agricultural sector, are straining the country’s natural resources. India is already running out of water. People are draining the river systems and groundwater aquifers primarily to irrigate their fields. In 1950 in India, the amount of water available per person was 5400 cubic metres; by 2000, the number had dropped by more than half.¹ According to a report by the International Water Management Institute, people in India are taking two times more water from aquifers than can be replenished. As the aquifers diminish, lakes and rivers dry up, compounding the problem. And it is agriculture that uses 90 percent of the water, with domestic and industrial uses accounting for a mere 5 percent each. In fact, there is so little water to go around that in the city of Aurangabad, the municipality turns on the civic water supply in some wards for one to two hours a day, and in other parts of the city there is running water only one hour every other day. Farmers in the countryside don’t even have that luxury. There isn’t running water in most villages, and those that do have it find it in their pipes only for a few hours a day, only some days of the week. Most small farms don’t have the irrigation that crops need to thrive.

At the same time, the amount of available farmland is shrinking. Not only must existing farms be divided between more and more people as the population rises, but vast swaths of agricultural land are being turned into industrial areas for manufacturing. Between 1955 and 2001, around 2.3 million hectares in India have been taken over by growing cities.² Around the capital, Delhi, 17 percent of the farmland disappeared to urbanization between 1992 and 2004.³ Land for growing food is also lost when soil is contaminated by agrochemicals, sewage sludge, and municipal garbage, and when mining and other resource-extracting industries take it over. Poor land management, such as allowing livestock to overgraze, leaves the soil vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain.

Agriculture employs about half of the Indian labour force—down from two-thirds in the last decade—and the majority of Indians still live in rural areas. Yet the Indian farmer is struggling. After independence from Britain, India had a hard time feeding itself, and agriculture in the country was plagued by low productivity. The green revolution, which imported new growing technology such as pesticides and artificial fertilizers from the West, did change things, but these new tools came at a high price. Many small farmers in India spiralled into debt because they couldn’t afford to pay for seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. Chandrakalabai lives in the state of Maharashtra, known for its cotton-growing but also for its farmer suicides. Between 1997 and 2005, in Maharashtra alone, nearly twenty-nine thousand farmers killed themselves in despair, often by drinking the pesticides that had helped put them in debt. The problem isn’t going away. According to a report published in the newsmagazine India Today during my visit, a farmer commits suicide in the country every thirty seconds.

Now add climate change to the mix. Climate modelling demonstrates that India is one of a handful of countries where agriculture will fare the worst. Because of the country’s latitude near the hottest part of the earth, temperatures are predicted to rise to the point where plants such as wheat can no longer yield as much food. By 2020, according to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, crop yields are expected to begin decreasing because of rising temperatures, though only marginally; the real drop it predicts will be felt about sixty years later. But the institute says that as soon as the 2020s, the warming conditions will affect livestock. It estimates that about 1.5 million tons of milk will be lost from the dairy industry that decade.⁴ By 2080, climate change will be so severe that India may experience crop losses of between 30 and 40 percent of today’s yields.⁵

This is all happening at the same time that agricultural productivity is slipping while the country’s demand for food is rising. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute predicts that by the 2020s, people there will require more food than the country currently produces. That decade, economists and agricultural analysts predict that demand for domestic cereals will exceed what the country’s farmers can produce by more than 20 million tons.⁶ To put this number in perspective, in 2012, the wheat crop on the Canadian Prairies was around 26 million tons. To feed India in the 2020s using today’s methods of industrial agriculture, the country would need to increase its agricultural land by almost the equivalent of a Prairies’ worth of wheat. Either that or boost yields on the land people are already farming (when this is done sustainably it is called ecological intensification). With competing interests vying for that land, a growing population, and climate pressures, what’s happening in the country has implications for the rest of the world. The challenges we face as a species are India’s writ large.

The debate about the future of food, between industrial and sustainable agriculture, is taking place within circumstances that cannot be altered by anyone on either side of the divide. Any solution must take into account the environmental realities of this century. We cannot create more farmland; there is no room to expand. Instead, we need to figure out how to produce food for the future on what agricultural land we have now. Already, you can’t grow food on most of the earth’s surface because 70 percent of it is covered by water or ice. About 11 percent of the earth’s total land area is used for crops, but we have already expanded our farms into most potentially fertile areas. The vast grasslands of North America—the breadbasket of the world—were once mixed-grass prairie ecosystems until Europeans settled in the eighteenth century. A good portion of the West African tropics was turned into farms after the 1950s. And since the 1960s and ‘70s, most of the world’s original forests, including the breathtakingly biodiverse rainforests of South America and Indonesia, have been levelled for pulp and paper, for livestock grazing, and to grow cash crops and plants for biofuels such as soybeans in Brazil and oil palm in Indonesia. We clear more land in biodiverse places such as the Amazon at our peril. These vast forests are the lungs of our planet and help to sustain life.

A plan for feeding the future must also take water into consideration. It’s not just India that’s running out of the stuff. All around the world we are drawing on the earth’s freshwater aquifers faster than they can replenish. Globally, too, it is farming that uses the most water, outstripping manufacturing and industry. Of the total amount of water that we draw from rivers around the world, 70 percent goes to agriculture. According to the US Geological Survey, groundwater levels have dropped significantly as a result of overuse across the country, including in Massachusetts, New York, and Florida as well as in Oregon and Washington, where irrigation, the public water supply, and industry have together dropped water levels by as much as 100 feet.⁷ (In Canada, there hasn’t been the same problem because surface water is generally used rather than groundwater.) Climate change will further limit the amount of water that will be available to grow our food. Spring runoff from mountain glaciers supplies water for irrigation in many areas, but now that the hotter global median temperature is melting these glaciers, the water source is increasingly limited. Further, melting glaciers are no longer able to capture spring precipitation, and water will run out to sea before farmers can use it.

If industrial food remains the status quo, we will continue to lose farmland, we will continue to drain freshwater aquifers and emit tonnes and tonnes of greenhouse gases. This will not serve us in the long term. To meet the grave challenges of the future without compromising the integrity of human life on planet Earth, we must immediately begin to support the kinds of farming systems that preserve rather than consume resources, and that benefit both the world’s poorest farmers as well as the rich.

As Chandrakalabai’s story shows us, the transition is possible.

CHAPTER TWO

Faster, Bigger, Richer, Weaker: The Trouble with the Green Revolution

Chandrakalabai was born in 1960, thirteen years after India’s independence from Britain and the partition of the country. It was a time of nation building, when political leaders were feeling optimistic about the future. Guided by the vision of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the state invested in the economy and in infrastructure such as roads and dams. Chandrakalabai was born where most Indians lived at the time, in a small village. Her parents were farmers, growing pigeon peas, sorghum, millet, and matki—moth beans—on arid land. When Chandrakalabai was about ten years old, her family lost this land. Their village happened to be within the thirty-five thousand hectares that would be submerged when the new Jayakwadi Dam reservoir began to fill. They were paid 800 rupees for each of their seven hectares—that’s about fourteen dollars a hectare in today’s currency—and were told to move elsewhere. With that money they bought two hectares in another village. “It didn’t feel right,” Chandrakalabai remembered. “We didn’t settle into a new village easily.” While her family tried to adapt to their new home, Chandrakalabai went to live with her uncle.

She went to school in her uncle’s town and helped to care for her young cousin. But she was bored in class and left school in grade seven. When she was fifteen, her parents arranged her marriage to a twenty-four-year-old.

That was when she arrived in Dhangaon. If it is a sleepy village today, with only a small school, a big old tree in the main square, and a few sun-beaten streets lined with small houses, back in 1975 it was even sleepier. There wasn’t much to do, so Chandrakalabai went to work as a paid day-labourer in the cotton fields that were more than an hour’s walk away. Her husband left to study for his bachelor of arts, and it was her mother-in-law who taught her how to farm. “I hadn’t worked before, so I wasn’t used to it. And it wasn’t easy work,” she said. A year after she was married, her first son was born. When this son was a year old, she had another boy, who later died of measles. A third son passed away when he was only seven days old. Chandrakalabai ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: Countdown to the Future of Food
• Part One: Target 2020: Soil
• Part Two: Target 2030: Seeds
• Part Three: Target 2040: Culture
• Conclusion Target 2050: The Future
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher