Where does breakfast come from?

Ecology Matters by Duke Vasey

For decades, Americans believed that we had the world’s healthiest and safest diet. We worried little about this diet’s effect on the environment or on the lives of the animals it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure--that is, its sustainability.

And we’ve come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.

The United Nations' food agency issued an alert warning that a drought was threatening the wheat crop in China--the world's largest wheat producer. The drought is also causing drinking water shortages for people and livestock.

According to the UN, the drought has hurt 12.75 million acres of China's 35 million acres of wheat fields. And 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock are facing drinking water shortages.

If China starts importing wheat, prices will soar. China's grain situation is critical to the rest of the world--if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population; it could send huge shockwaves through the world's grain markets.

In addition, droughts in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Europe, paired with bad weather in the U.S., Canada and Australia are killing global grain inventories. The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects the world supply of crops will fall 2.2% this year. Corn and wheat prices have nearly doubled in the past year. Rice is at its highest price since the 2008 food crisis. We can expect shortages and higher prices.

Rather than build up our soils organically, we have opted instead to prop up falling fertility with finite chemical fertilizers. By ignoring the history of how food systems rise and fall, we could possibly be setting ourselves up to have an unsustainable agricultural system.

If our current system doesn't change, then one day it will collapse, an almost inevitable part of a cycle of growth and devastation that humanity has been experiencing since the agricultural revolution. Because the land must be farmed more intensively, soil begins to erode--a problem that’s addressed through expansion or technological advancement, but which is never really solved.

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Comments » 1

eddiefiler writes:

Thanks for a thought provoking essay. I agree that changes must take place in the production of healthful food.
