Whether our American farmers should produce enough food to supply the growing international populations or whether their focus should be on growing good food for America is always a hotly debated topic at my family dinner table. We cannot have it both ways. In order for American farmers to be able to supply food to impoverished nations, like we do now, we have to farm monoculturally and industrially - using genetically modified seeds, massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides in order to get the yields from the land that we need. This has many negative impacts on the land, our water, the economies that we are giving all this free grain to and other health implications.
Another outcome of our nation paying American corn farmers subsidies and the North American Free Trade Agreement is that we put 1.5 million farmers in Mexico out of work. Mexican farmers can no longer compete with the influx of cheap U.S. corn and therefore began flooding across our borders looking for other jobs. This is not a singular occurrence. By feeding the world's impoverished and starving nations with our cheap grain we have put what few farmers there were in these areas out of business. This is great for American farmers because we now have a new market in which to sell all the excess grain that is produced but it is a horrible situation for everyone else involved. The more charitable thing to do would be to teach the impoverished nations how to farm their own land (the old adage "give a fish, teach a person to fish") but politicians are elected by their American constituents and it is good business to sell grain to other nations. There is no money to be made by teaching other nations to be self-sufficient.
Why would farmers choose to grow a diverse range of plants when they can sit in an air conditioned tractor, take vacations during the fall and winter months and are guaranteed a check no matter how good or bad the growing season? No one said being a traditional farmer was easy but there has to be a new breed of farmers that take a stand and choose to farm the more labor intense way - plant organically, without pesticides and fertilizers, not use GMO's, and grow regional specific diverse plants. There are financial and ecological incentives for a farmer to do this. We all know that buying organically is more expensive; it's more expensive because it is more labor intensive but an organic farmer will make more money per pound produced than does a non-organic farmer on the open market. Corn and soybeans are falsely cheap, six billion dollars a year are paid in subsidies to corn and soybean growers, which reduces the price of these products to consumers but you're still paying for it out of your tax money. Think about what we could do with six billion dollars in our national budget: repair our failing infrastructure, keep our space program going, invest in renewable energy, and a slough of other worthwhile endeavors. Without subsidies the farmers would be forced to go back to the more ecological and traditional ways of farming.
The ecological benefits of discontinuing our "feed the world" campaign are many. Over one billion tons of pesticides and 27.8 million tons of chemical fertilizer are used every year in the U.S by industrial farming practices. The excess chemicals run-off into our water supply and make their way down into our oceans. The amount of fertilizer and pesticides spilling from the Great Plains into the Mississippi river has created a 6,000-7,000 square mile dead-zone where nothing but algae (that feeds and multiplies exponentially on nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer) can live because algae depletes all the oxygen in the water. This has always been my main argument against the industrial farming advocates who say that we must feed the growing population of the world. I applaud their desire to make money off of the growing populations by supplying their basic need for food but without potable water we cannot sustain human life.
If we teach the other nations how to farm ecologically and stopped all farming subsidies for corn and soybeans we could make huge leaps towards having a cleaner, more sustainable environment. Farmers are governed by how much money they can make (as we all are) and if we as consumers buy organic products, the demand will rise and farmers will make the change toward better farming practices.
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