Earth & Sky

_“Miguel Altieri”:http://espm.berkeley.edu/directory/fac/altieri_m.html is a Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke to Earth & Sky’s Abby Frank about this new discipline and its potential impact on the global food supply._

Frank: What is agroecology?

Altieri: The science of agroecology is based on the science of ecology, but also the science of anthropology and sociology and the basic agronomic sciences. That allows us to study agricultural systems in a holistic way – that is trying to understand agriculture as the result of the interaction between humans and nature and also to design systems that are going to be are going to be sustainable. That is that they are going to be socially just, economically viable, environmentally safe, and culturally diverse.

Frank: What might sustainable food production look like? How is it different from current agricultural models?

Altieri: A sustainable agricultural system basically is a system that will provide food security. It will conserve the natural resource base that is water and soils and biodiversity, and at the same time be an economically viable activity. It is different from the conventional systems of today in the sense that it is much more biodiverse, that is it’s more diverse, more diversity of animals and plants and microorganisms and crops. It is also emphasizing local food security, so there is more emphasis on local production. There is more emphasis on small scale and medium-sized farms instead of large scale farms. It emphasizes more community based and family based agricultural systems and creates a closer link between rural and urban populations – that is consumers and producers are much more linked. So it’s a totally different paradigm that emphasizes, as I said before, a socially just, economically viable, and environmentally safe agriculture.

Frank: How did this paradigm of agroecology come into being?

Altieri: The origins of agroecology come mainly from Latin America, where NGOs, or “non-governmental organizations” in the 1980s started filling a gap left behind by the governments. The governments had withdrawn from social programs in many areas. So the NGOs started helping small farmers to recover the ecological integrity of their production systems to emphasize subsistence agriculture for food security. Agroecology had its origins there.

But then agroecologists started having a larger influence beyond NGOs and started influencing universities and government programs. Now you have countries like Brazil and Cuba and Venezuela where actually there are policies that are fomenting agroecology as the flag of rural development, as the basis of rural development.

In the United States, agroecology, basically, is a science that is helping organic farmers to become much more diverse. In this country and in most developed countries, organic farming usually follows a monoculture pattern. They still use monocultures, and they use an approach called “input substitution,” which means that instead of using chemicals they use other products that are allowed in the organic certification.

So what agroecology does is provide the guidance for these farmers to become independent of inputs, whether they are organic or chemical. Agroecology helps in designing farms that are biodiverse.

Frank: Is it possible to feed the world while using the principles of sustainable production, in which food is produced locally and on small scales?

Altieri: Yes. First of all, hunger doesn’t have anything to do with production. It’s important to understand that people are starving not because there is not enough food in the world, but because there’s poverty and lack of access to land. The best lands are being devoted, in the developing world, to exports and not to producing food that is needed by the people. And, as a matter of fact, in this country there are about two million people who are food insecure. So in the midst of affluence you also have hunger, which doesn’t have anything to do with production.

On the other hand, if you look at the statistics throughout the world and from different countries, small farms are much more productive than large scale farms. When you look at the total output, which is everything that the small farmer produces – usually not just corn but also vegetables and grains and fruits and animals – if you look at that total output, the total output of small farms is 100 times higher than large farms. So if you have 20 large farms in a region producing only corn or producing only soy beans, which they all usually specialize in for export, as opposed to 2,000 small farms producing food, which would help more in feeding the world? Obviously, the small farms. So it’s a matter of policies about what kind of agriculture we want that would definitely influence whether we have hunger or not. Hunger could be solved tomorrow if there was enough political will to take the measures that would be necessary.

Frank: What keeps sustainable agriculture from becoming the norm? Is it just the lack of political will?

Altieri: There is lack of political will, but also there is lack of research and extension. One percent of the land grant university money in this country goes to organic farming research. Most of the money goes to biotechnology, conventional agriculture, green revolution type of approaches. So if we devoted millions of dollars of research money to organic farming, we would be in a very different situation. Also, the globalized economy is forcing countries to become specialized in agro-export crops rather than in crops that feed the people. So policies have a lot too, which is connected to political will.

As an example of how political will can change things . . . in southern Brazil, because of the decentralization of the government, the municipalities have a lot of power. And many regions are creating what is called “institutional markets.” That means that all the food that is produced in the region by small organic farmers is devoted to the school lunches or hospitals or jails. That’s creating an alternative market. Countries and governments, including this country, spend a lot of money buying institutional food. But they buy it from the grain merchants, from the big guys. If there was political will, and let’s say that, for example, the City of Berkeley here would say all the food that is going to be fed to the schools should come from small farmers, the economic viability for small farmers would be enormous. The opportunities would be enormous. So that’s one example of how we can shift around things with political will.

Frank: Organic food is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. Is this a good sign? How similar is organic farming to the sustainable model of agriculture that you propose?

Altieri: Well, it is a good sign. But unfortunately only a certain elite is enjoying this. I have done this exercise with my students where I send them to the different places including farmer’s markets as well as some of the more specialized stores of natural foods. If you go to any of the places where they sell organic foods, you’ll see it’s only an elite that’s buying there. You don’t see minorities consuming this food.

Or look at the trend in Latin America. There is a lot of organic agriculture being promoted, but it’s all for exports. So what is the benefit for food security of the local populations? Very little. When you think of coffee, who’s enjoying the organic coffee? Europe and the United States, not the local people in Latin America.

So I think there needs to be changes in policies and in the economic system so that organic agriculture becomes the dominant way of production and everybody enjoys the benefits of eating organic food. We need to change the economic incentives so that organic agriculture becomes scaled up at levels that there is enough supply so that the prices go down and reach not only high class or the middle class but also the minorities.

Frank: So sustainable agriculture is organic agriculture that’s accessible to everyone?

Altieri: Accessible to everyone and produced by small farmers. What’s happening, for example, in California is that 2% of the organic farmers control 65% of the revenues of the industry. So it’s becoming, again, consolidated and specialized in the hands of a few large corporations or farmers and the small farmers are being displaced.

We need to do is to close the systems of production and consumption on the local level. That means small scale agriculture for local production with consumers supporting that type of agriculture.

What consumers need to understand is that eating is an ecological act as well as a political act. When you eat from McDonald’s, you are supporting a a particular model of production which is destroying the environment in Central America and promoting deforestation because of cattle ranching expansion. If you are eating food from local farmers, organic, small scale farmers, you are helping the viability of small farms around your community. And those small farms around your community not only are producing good food, they have multifunctional benefits. They also help promoting biodiversity because they contaminate less. They promote water quality because there is less nitrogen and pesticides in the water, etc. So people need to understand that when they eat they are making a decision about what kind of agricultural model they are supporting.

Frank: Can you tell us how you perceive the relationship between humans and the environment in the 21st century?

Altieri: Well there’s a huge disconnection, unfortunately, in the western societies. For example, if you asked a child here in the United States, from an urban area, to classify how many plants they know, they probably maybe know one or two plants. They probably will not know even where corn comes from. They think it comes from a can. For us if you go to some of the remaining indigenous populations in Latin America, you will ask a child how many plants they know and they could know anywhere from between 50 and 100 plants.

So there’s a huge disconnection, and this disconnection is increasing. People are forgetting a very basic, basic message, that actually economists depend on ecology and not the other way around. By destroying the resource base, we’re destroying the possibilities of an economic model. So when I see young people attracted to a model of consumption, I wonder if they will realize that they, or their children, or the children of their children are not going to be able to enjoy that because they basically disregarded that the life systems that their consumption patterns depend on are being undermined by their consumption patterns.

Frank: What will it take for humans to survive in the future?

Altieri: Well, we have to have a huge economic revolution in which, actually, the globalized model of development has to be subverted towards a much more local system where the production and consumption cycles are local and closed, and where we emphasize much more of an eco-regional approach of development rather than this globalized model. At the same time, we need to find alternatives to petroleum, which should be solar or wind based or hydrogen based, and we need to have a total shift of the way we live. I mean this country has only 8% of the world’s population and consumes 40% of the world’s resources. That’s totally unsustainable and it’s totally unethical.

So I think that we need to make the change quite quickly because the ecological impacts could be irreversible, such as climate change for example. People say it is the way that we consume, but we need to understand that the per capita contribution is very important. I mean the north is much more responsible for climate change and ecological damage to the world than the people in the south because one person in the United States consumes 20 times more than a person in the developing world. So there is a responsibility here on the part of the populations in the western societies, especially Europe and the United States that they need to lead.

But I don’t see the signals that they will lead. The signals are totally to the contrary. People want to consume more, more SUVs, more material things at the expense of the Earth’s natural resource base.

Frank: Dr. Altieri, thank you for speaking with us today.

Our thanks to:
Miguel Altieri
Department of Agroecology
University of California, Berkeley