6 The Future of Food

The farm crisis

The year 2024 started with massive farmers’ agitations across Europe, as well as in India. In Europe, the protests spread across the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, France, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Britain, Bulgaria, Belgium, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Wales and Norway.

In India, just over two years after their thirteen-month-long protest forced a roll-back of controversial laws aimed at ‘modernising’ the agricultural sector—relaxing the rules around the sale, pricing and storage of farm produce that had protected farmers from an unfettered free market for decades—farmers from the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh hit the streets to demand, among other things, a higher Minimum Support Price (MSP) for their crops, a debt waiver and withdrawal from WTO agreements.

Farmers everywhere are fighting for survival; they are resisting extinction. In 2001, six years after the WTO rules came into effect, I wrote a report entitled Yoked to Death.1 The very industrial agriculture system that contributes to emissions and drives climate change has also defined farmers as a dispensable part of the food system. In the context of US agriculture, the American economist Kenneth Boulding observed, ‘In this country we have moved from 90 percent of the population in agriculture to 8 percent in 200 years.’ (It is less than two percent now.) He added,

The only way I know to get toothpaste out of a tube is to squeeze the tube, and the only way to get people out of agriculture is likewise to squeeze agriculture. It just has to be made less profitable than other occupations.2

Farmers are being squeezed out of agriculture on account of multiple pressures. Industrial agriculture forces farmers to rely on costly inputs. They are transformed from being producers of food to becoming consumers of expensive chemicals and industrial seeds with a false calculus of productivity, which I call pseudo productivity. Productivity is output per unit. But all outputs should be measured, not just the monoculture commodity that the market wants to extract.

Small farms are critical to reducing external energy use, which agronomist and entomologist David Pimentel, along with researcher and academic Mario Giampietro, call exosomatic energy. Differentiating between endosomatic and exosomatic energies, they explain,

Endosomatic energy is generated through the metabolic transformation of food energy into muscle energy in the human body. Exosomatic energy is generated by transforming energy outside of the human body [by mechanical means], such as by burning oil in a tractor.

Pimentel and Giampietro found that it takes 10 kilocalories of exosomatic energy to produce one kilocalorie of food in the US. The remaining nine kilocalories go towards creating waste and pollution and increasing entropy. Part of this wasted energy is released into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.3

Industrial agriculture in the US uses 380 times more energy per hectare to produce rice than a traditional farm in the Philippines; energy use per kilo of rice is 80 times greater in the US than in the Philippines. Corn production in the US requires 176 times more energy per hectare than on a traditional farm in Mexico, and 33 times more per kilo. One cow maintained and marketed in the industrial system requires 6 barrels of oil. And while 450 grams of breakfast cereal provides only 1,000 kilocalories of food energy, it uses 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing.4

Physicist Amory Lovins uses the term ‘energy slaves’ to denote the hidden energy used in inefficient industrial systems and industrial societies. Energy slaves consume resources and energy, but cannot offer care to the earth. Way back in 1975, Lovins had stated that an average American had 250 times more energy slaves than a Nigerian.5 With a population of over 7.7 billion people living under forced industrialisation and energy intensive digitalisation, the population of energy slaves today is more than 3.35 trillion.

Every step towards displacing real people and substituting them with 250 energy slaves is driving the climate crisis, the destruction of forests and biodiversity, the destitution of farmers and an unemployment crisis. Pseudo efficiency hides the full ecological footprint of a production system. It hides true costs through externalities and subsidies. It cherry-picks one tiny technology fragment from an entire system and presents it as more ‘efficient’, even though the system as a whole is crude, violent, inefficient and destructive.

What does all this mean in terms of feeding the world? It is clear that by substituting people with energy slaves, machines and chemicals, industrial agriculture is virtually eliminating small farms and small farmers’ capacity to produce diverse outputs of nutritious crops which are critical to global food security. While using 75 percent of the land, industrial agriculture only produces 30 percent of the food we eat—small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide the rest, 70 percent. If the share of industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet were to increase to 45 percent, we would end up with a dead planet. No life. No food. Both from the point of view of food productivity and food entitlements, industrial agriculture is deficient. Protecting small farms which conserve biodiversity is thus a food security imperative.

How does the decline in output get translated into an increase? There are a number of strategies which allow this inversion to take place and an illusion of growth to be created. First, a monoculture paradigm looks only at one element of a system and treats an increase in one part as an increase in the whole system. For instance, by focussing only on yield increases of individual cereals like rice or wheat, the reduction in straw availability for fodder is externalised and not accounted for. The biodiversity of crops that disappear when diversity is displaced by monocultures is never part of the calculation. A second strategy is to exclude the higher inputs from the resource equation. Consequently, resource waste is not taken into account so that low resource-use productivity is converted into high-commodity productivity.

On the input side, a systems assessment should include fossil energy input, capital input, chemical input and water input. However, a pseudo productivity measure conceals the costly external inputs while only calculating labour input. In this pseudo productivity calculus, farmers have been reduced to being referred to as ‘the denominator’. There is rich talk about reducing the number of farmers in order to increase productivity and growth—but farmers are not an input; they are members of society. A society that values the health of the planet and of its people ensures that the producers of food, our most basic need, the basis of our health and the basis of our freedom are treated with respect, fairness and justice. Farmers are at the heart of the food sovereignty of communities and countries.

The corporate hijack of the food system

In the eight years following the establishment of the WTO, Indian farmers lost US$26 billion annually due to falling prices.6 Farming incomes have been steadily collapsing everywhere, which is why, time and again, farmers have risen against WTO rules and are demanding that food and agriculture be withdrawn from the WTO. In India, the issue of fair and liveable incomes has been articulated through demanding a legally binding MSP for produce. In Europe, too, farmers’ protests centre on justice and fair incomes in the context of globalisation and corporate control over food and farming. According to Welsh farmer Ioan Humphreys, ‘We as farmers are the heart of this country, but at this moment in time we’re treated like the appendix.’ Yorkshire farmer Anna Longthorp says,

The unfairness in the supply chain has been allowed to continue for far too long, with all the risk and cost pressures dumped on farmers and no control over the pricey recipe. All the time corporate middlemen and supermarkets make huge returns whilst farmers subsidise profits. It is only a matter of time before the top heavy food system buckles and farmers decide enough is enough—that’s where we are now.7

The extremely high ecological, economic and social externalities of industrial farming along with the globalised corporate food system have been borne by the earth through climate change and species extinction. They are also being borne by farmers worldwide as they, too, slowly become threatened by extinction. Declining farm incomes have already crossed the survival threshold. This is the subsidy corporations are extracting from farmers, who are paying with their very lives.

The globalised industrial food system is an extractive economy that leaches the last bit of fertility from the soil, the last drop of water from the earth, the last seed from farmers, and self-organisation and health from the planet and people. Concentration and centralisation, distancing and separation of food producers from consumers and data from knowledge, are creating an inverted pyramid of unstable power which can topple as a result of small perturbations.8

The globalised industrial food system is indifferent to the instabilities and vulnerabilities it creates for the planet and people.

(Source: Navdanya International)

An extractive economy erodes the ecological and social foundations of food in nature and society.

(Source: Navdanya, https://www.navdanya.org/living-food/colonialism,-globalisation-are-at-the-roots-of-ecological-emergency,-farmers-distress)

Digital agriculture

Industrial agriculture envisions the future of farming with spyware and with surveillance drones collecting data, removing food even further from the ecological web of life.

Digital agriculture, based on Big Data and supported by the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, or AIM4C, is being promoted aggressively to spread the false notion that farming without farmers, without nature’s and farmers’ intelligence, is the only climate-positive way forward. Launched in 2021, this joint initiative by the UAE and USA focuses on boosting ‘data-driven technologies’ and ‘science-based decision-making’ in farming. So far, 45 countries, including India, have come on board to support ‘precision agriculture’ and ‘dramatically [ramp up] investment in and support for climate-smart agriculture and food systems’.9

But digital agriculture is simply the next phase of centralised, corporate-controlled industrial agriculture. It will aggravate the climate crisis, not solve it, because it entrenches the use of external inputs created by the very corporations that have contributed to climate change in the first place. For instance, spraying harmful pesticides from high-tech drones will not reduce the pesticide burden; rather, it will be spread over a wider area, even to farms that want to remain pesticide-free. Digitalisation will also increase energy use for computational processes.10

We are being told that Big Data, not farmers, will feed us. The reality is that Big Data is nothing but data mined from farmers, processed through algorithms and then sold back to them as additional external input. In 2013, Monsanto acquired the world’s largest climate data corporation, the Climate Corporation, for US$1 billion. In 2014, it bought the world’s largest soil data corporation, Solum Inc., ‘to provide farmers insights and data of their fields based on historical crop, field, and weather data’.11

Earlier, the Poison Cartel forced farmers to buy external chemical inputs like GMO seeds and synthetic fertilisers; now they are forcing them to buy knowledge. Data is the new oil, the new fossil fuel, that is making agriculture non-renewable by reducing food and knowledge to scarce resources that must be procured at a high cost. But data is not knowledge; it is merely a commodity that makes farmers less connected with the earth by outsourcing their traditional knowledge base to Big Agribusiness. Liam Condon, member of the board of management of Bayer AG and president of the company’s Crop Science Division, made the following claim in a piece in POLITICO:

We know that innovation is the key to farming’s future, and we are already seeing how new technologies—including digital farming, precision agriculture and plant breeding tools—are lessening agriculture’s ecological footprint.… And today more farmers are using the latest in digital analytics to help them prevent problems before they start, so that they can grow more food while using less land, energy and water.12

In a bid to expand digital agriculture in farming, a new legislation has been introduced in the US: the Linking Access to Spur Technology for Agriculture Connectivity in Rural Environments Act of 2023, or LAST ACRE Act, will create a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development Grant programme to deliver broadband Internet to farms ‘to advance precision agriculture connectivity nationwide’.

The Poison Cartel, which became the biotech industry, is converging with Big Tech like Microsoft and Facebook as well as Big Fintech, including asset management companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, to forge a digital, genetic and chemical dictatorship over food. Bill Gates is working closely with Bayer and the Poison Cartel to create one centralised, industrial, toxic, energy intensive digital agriculture monoculture for the entire world through his dystopic vision of Gates Ag One,13 whose purpose is not to provide fresh food to local communities but to produce raw material for lab food. I call this food totalitarianism.

The corporate control of our food systems is leading to new levels of concentration of economic power, both through mergers within each sector and through technological integration across sectors, with biotechnology, information and digital and financial technologies becoming a single technological continuum. It is further distancing and separating food from its sources in seed, soil and water, and in the creative contributions of small farmers who invest in care for the earth. It is distancing ‘data’ from reality and displacing real knowledge rooted in experience, practice, care and diverse intelligences which allows for choices that guide evolution and contribute to resilience. Separated from ecological and social systems, food becomes non-food, anti-food and fake food.

Diversity and decentred self-organising are the characteristics of living systems and their resilience, including living seed, living soil, living food, living knowledges, living economies and living democracies. External inputs, external control, uniformity, monocultures, centralisation and concentration create vulnerability and unstable, non-sustainable systems prone to break down. We need to grow the economy of care and shrink the economy of greed.

The future of food

Rejuvenating and regenerating the planet through ecological processes is a survival imperative for the human species and all living beings. Working with the earth and her systems and processes, with her plants and biodiversity, we create negative entropy and reduce pollution and waste to zero.

Agriculture is the science and art of cultivating the earth, including the harvesting of crops and the rearing and management of livestock. It is the culture of the land, in accordance with the ecological principles of nature: 1) self-organisation and autopoiesis; 2) diversity, not monocultures and uniformity; 3) symbiosis; 4) the law of return; and 5) sharing the earth’s gifts in the commons. These principles have created food systems that have lasted for centuries because they walk the path of life as laid down by nature, respecting nature’s circular economies on which all life depends. Practiced by diverse schools of ecological agriculture—organic farming, permaculture, biodynamic farming, natural farming—these principles are referred to as agroecology.

The two fundamental ecological cycles are nutrient and water. The living carbon cycle is a food cycle, a nutrient cycle. Maximising biodiversity and biomass density not only produces more nutrition per acre through increased photosynthesis, thereby addressing food insecurity, but also increases the living carbon in the soil; boosts nutrients, including nitrogen, magnesium, zinc and iron; and enhances the density of beneficial organisms. This is farming with integrity.

Biodiversity regeneration and intensification allow us to grow diverse, healthy food. The more density we introduce in the ecological circular nutrient economy in partnership with nature’s recycling, the more fertile our soils will become. Greater organic matter available to return to the soil will reverse desertification, which is among the primary reasons for the displacement and uprooting of people. Additionally, the more plants we have, the more they will recycle and fix atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, reducing both harmful emissions and the stock of pollutants in the air.

The symbiotic flow of nutrients between the biosphere and atmosphere heals broken climate cycles; the flow of biodiversity and its nourishment from the soil to our gut microbiome heals our broken health.14 Thus, regenerating the biodiversity of plants, and of the soil, is the real solution to climate change.

Climate action is de-addiction from fossil fuels, fossil chemicals and an industrial infrastructure. The first step towards this is to change our way of thinking from a dead earth paradigm to a living planet paradigm. In the process, we derive the power to act, to co-create and co-produce with the earth; we move from paradigms and economic systems that create scarcity and sickness to paradigms and economic systems that create abundance and well-being for all humans and all species.

Living systems have negative feedback loops which keep the conditions of the planet within boundaries that are favourable to life. Climate change is a result of the rupturing of these boundaries. Transitioning to organic agriculture has the potential to remove 100 percent GHGs from the atmosphere while also regenerating the soil-food web which is the source of recycling nutrients, including the nutrient cycles that connect soils and plants to the atmosphere.

What governments and policymakers need to do is to stop promoting the oil-based paradigm and advocate, instead, an earth-centred, soil-based way of thinking; they need to end subsidies to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture and support communities in a transition to local, ecological, biodiverse, poison-free and fossil fuel-free food and farming systems.

Agriculture can shift from being a major emitter of GHGs to becoming the most significant mitigator of emissions by following nature’s processes of biodiversity and photosynthesis intensification. André Leu of Regeneration International explains, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the system of photosynthesis maximisation and of returning carbon to the soil

could sequester 34.74 Gt [gigatonnes] of CO2 per year. This is more than the current anthropogenic emissions of 26.88 Gt of CO2 eq per year and would achieve negative emissions.… Scaling up 10 % of various… regenerative agriculture systems… can significantly contribute to achieving the negative emissions needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels.15

Marine biologist and environmental informatics professor Dr Jacqueline McGlade affirms that

using better farming techniques to store 1% more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year…[which is] not far off the 32 gigatonnes gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.16

Organic soils are rich in mycorrhizal fungi which are nutrients for plants, while plants deliver carbohydrates as food. The symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi is the basis of our food system. Global plant communities contribute 13.12 Gt of CO2 to diverse species of mycorrhizal fungi, which is approximately 36 percent of current CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.17

The filaments of the fungi are microscopic, yet they hold 36 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels.18 Research conducted by Navdanya shows that fungi in organic soils increase 36-fold, while in chemical soils they decline by up to 49.7 percent.19 Bacteria increase sixfold. So, organically-farmed soils host substantially greater microbial biomass, microbial activity and diversity than conventionally-farmed soils. Specifically, the microbial biomass of carbon and nitrogen is 41 percent and 51 percent higher, respectively, on organic plots, which also has 32 percent to 74 percent more microbial enzyme activity. Most studies reviewed reveal significant differences in the composition of the soil community, with organic farming practices increasing the abundance and activity of soil life.20

Status of fungal population under different crops and input in organic and chemical farms.

(Source: https://medcraveonline.com/HIJ/a-comparison-on-soil-biological-health-on-continuous-organic-and-inorganic-farming.html)

Biodiversity provides multiple ecological functions that enable farming without life-destroying synthetic chemicals and fossil fuels. It can reduce emissions by 20 percent while also protecting forests, the earth’s lungs. At the same time, shifting from globalisation to localisation of food systems can reduce emissions from ‘food miles’; shifting from industrial to artisanal processing, and from ultra-processed to fresh foods, can also reduce emissions. Consumption of fresh food can reduce plastic and aluminium packaging, and together, these changes can reduce another 20 percent emissions.21

Carbon is captured by plants through photosynthesis. Some of this carbon then goes into the networks of mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi also release some of it as CO2 and as compounds into the soil.

(Source: Adam Frew/Author provided using BioRender)

Apart from lowering emissions, ecological food systems also contribute to negative emissions. They help draw down the excess CO2 through photosynthesis and locate carbon where it belongs—as living carbon, the molecule of life, in plants and as humus in soil. We need to remind ourselves that living carbon gives life and that dead fossil carbon disrupts living processes.

Dead carbon must be left underground—this is an ethical obligation and an ecological imperative. This is why ‘decarbonisation’ without qualification and a distinction between living and dead carbon is scientifically and ecologically inappropriate. If we decarbonised the economy, we would have no plants and therefore no life on earth which creates, and is sustained by, living carbon. A decarbonised planet is a dead planet. What we need to do is to recarbonise the world with living carbon, and decarbonise it of dead carbon; we need to see new potential in an economy of care for the soil.

Healthy soils, healthy people

The transition for climate action is a transition from oil-based thinking and living to soil-based thinking and living. Healthy soils are dense with biodiversity. One gram of organic soil contains 30,000 protozoa, 50,000 algae, 400,000 fungi. One teaspoon of living soil contains one billion bacteria, which translates to one tonne per acre. One square cubic metre of soil contains 1,000 earthworms, 50,000 insects, 12 trillion roundworms. Living soils are the biggest reservoir of both water and nourishment; soils rich in humus can hold 90 percent of their weight in water.

Nutrition comparison between chemical farming vs. organic farming in continuously farmed soils in Navdanya farms in Uttarakhand over twenty years. The comparative study was published in 2018.22

(Source: Navdanya)

On the Navdanya farm in Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas, organic matter has increased by up to 99 percent; zinc has increased 14 percent; and magnesium by 14 percent. We did not add these externally; they have been produced by the billions of soil microorganisms that are found in living soils.

When we add urea to soil, this rich biodiversity of soil microorganisms that creates the diversity of soil nutrients is destroyed. Similarly, when we eat poisons, our gut microbiome begins to get ‘desertified’. With ‘humus’ and ‘human’ having the same etymology, is it any wonder that when soils are sick and desertified, societies become sick, too? Since we are more bacteria than human, when the poisons used in industrial agriculture (such as pesticides and herbicides) reach our gut through food, they can kill beneficial bacteria essential to good health.

There is an intimate connection between the soil, plants, our gut and our brain. Emeran Mayer observes in The Mind-Gut Connection:

For decades, the mechanistic, militaristic disease model set the agenda for medical research: As long as you could fix the affected machine part, we thought, the problem would be solved; there was no need to understand its ultimate cause.…We are just beginning to realise that the gut, the microbes living in it—the gut microbiota—and the signaling molecules that they produce from their vast number of genes—the microbiome—constitute one of the major components of these regulatory systems.23

The gut has its own nervous system, often referred to as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, with 50–100 million nerve cells. The trillions of bacteria in the gut emanate their own intelligence. American biologist James Shapiro says,

Bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities.… [Studies] show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of ‘higher’ plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.24

It is because bacteria are sentient that they develop resistance to antibiotics. Monsanto says its herbicide, Roundup, which is used as a weed killer, is safe for humans because humans do not have the shikimate pathway through which some plants and protozoa, bacteria, fungi and algae biosynthesise folates and aromatic amino acids. But the bacteria in our gut do have the shikimate pathway, and they are being killed by herbicides like Roundup, leading to serious disease epidemics, from increasing intestinal disorders to neurological problems. The bacteria in our gut produce three aromatic amino acids: tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine, all through the shikimate pathway. Since our cells do not have this pathway, they themselves are unable to make these nutrients, so we depend on gut bacteria. These essential amino acids are precursors to the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, melatonin and adrenaline, as well as thyroid hormone, folate and vitamin E. The destruction of gut bacteria can lead to deficiencies in these important biological molecules, impairing neurological functions. Specific molecules and phytochemicals found in herbs and spices activate specific taste receptors and trigger particular metabolic processes. Mayer writes,

The gut’s elaborate sensory systems are the National Security Agency of the human body, gathering information from all areas of the digestive system, including the esophagus, stomach, and intestine, ignoring the great majority of signals, but triggering alarm when something looks suspicious or goes wrong. As it turns out, it’s one of the most complex sensory organs of the body.25

Eating, then, is a conversation between the soil, plants, the cells in our gut and the cells in our food, and between gut and brain. Eating is an intelligent act at the deepest cellular and microbial levels. Cellular communication is the basis of health and well-being, and also the root of disease. We may be ignorant about the links between food and health, but our cells know them well. Since food carries in it the memory of the biodiversity in the soil and plants, how food is grown is a major determinant of health.

We are 90 percent other beings, primarily our fellow microbes that keep us healthy. The human microbiome consists of all the microbes—bacteria, fungi and viruses—that live within us or on us, including the skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract and gastrointestinal tract. It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses that inhabit us, a community collectively known as the human virome. Our gut is a microbiome which contains trillions of bacteria. There are 100,000 times more microbes in our gut than people on the planet. To function in a healthy way, the gut microbiome needs a diverse diet, and a diverse diet needs diversity in our fields and gardens.

The notion of ‘one health’ calls for an integrated, ecological approach, not a militarised, mechanistic, reductionist approach of declaring species that are part of our body and part of the earth as enemies to be exterminated with biocides, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. One health recognises our entanglement with other beings. We are interbeings, multispecies organisms, an ecological community, members of a complex, self-organised, self-regulated ecosystem.

We are facing an existential crisis with multiple emergencies—the health pandemic; the hunger pandemic; the poverty pandemic; the pandemic of fear and hopelessness, of inequality and disposability; the climate emergency; the biodiversity and extinction emergency. These emergencies are interconnected and have common roots in a mechanistic ontology and in an epistemology of separation.

The time for climate change denial and its disastrous consequences is long over. What we eat, how we grow the food we eat, how we distribute it, will determine whether humanity survives or pushes itself and other species to extinction. In the end, artificial, synthetic foods dismantle our connection with nature, and in so doing, they completely disregard the role of natural processes and the laws of ecology that are at the heart of real food production. Contrary to the claims of the agro-industry and food tech companies, food cannot be reduced to a commodity to be put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is the currency of life, and it holds the contribution of all beings involved at all stages of production.

The world is witnessing a resurgence and reaffirmation of chemical-free, biodiverse and ecological agriculture, as practiced by small farmers. More and more people are adopting agroecology either in public lots or in private gardens. Jim Thomas, in his article ‘George and the Food System Dragon’, quotes the US Department of Agriculture (‘not known for its romantic food sovereignty bias’) as stating,

Around 15% of the world’s food is now grown in urban areas. City and suburban agriculture take the form of backyard, roof-top and balcony gardening, community gardening in vacant lots and parks, roadside urban fringe agriculture and livestock grazing in open space.26

This is how food democracy and food sovereignty are being re-established, reclaimed from corporate control; this food system, free of poisons and plastics and based on locality, is nurturing both for our planet and for its denizens.

Animals, humans and nature have always lived in interconnected, symbiotic relationships which, in turn, regenerate all systems that support life. This synergy is vital to the renewal of soil fertility, the creation of habitat for biodiversity and the rejuvenation of the earth’s water, carbon and nutrient cycles. The real solution does not lie in creating substitutes for food; it lies in understanding the needs of the ecosystems we are embedded in.

Earth care is action for climate justice, action for food justice, action for health justice and for social and economic justice for producers as well as consumers. With every seed we sow, every plant we grow, every morsel we eat, we make a choice between degeneration and regeneration.

 

  1. 1  Vandana Shiva, Yoked to Death: Globalisation and Corporate Control of Agriculture (New Delhi: Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, 2001).

  2. 2  Kenneth Boulding, ‘Agricultural Organizations and Policies: A Personal Evaluation’, in Earl O. Heady et al., Farm Goals in Conflict: Family Farm, Income, Freedom, Security (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1963), 157.

  3. 3  David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy (Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network, 1994). In 1994, Pimentel and Giampietro estimated the output/input ratio of agriculture to be around 1.4. For 0.7 kcal of fossil energy consumed, US agriculture produced 1 kcal of food; see ‘How Much Oil Does US Agriculture Use?’, Physics Forum, June 29, 2010, https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/agricultural-petroleum-use.413197.

  4. 4  Agostinho Moniz and Gyaw Shine Oo, ‘Analysis of Energy Use in Rice Production, Post-Production and Cooking, Laguna Philippines’, IOSR Journal of Agriculture and Veterinary Science 16, no. 7 (July 2023): 4–12; David Pimentel, ‘Energy Inputs in Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations’, Energies 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–24.

  5. 5  Amory B. Lovins, World Energy Strategies: Facts, Issues, and Options (London: Friends of the Earth Ltd., 1975).

  6. 6  Vandana Shiva, Afsar H. Jafri, and Kunwar Jalees, The Mirage of Market Access: How Globalisation is Destroying Farmers’ Lives and Livelihoods (New Delhi: Navdanya/RFSTE, 2003).

  7. 7  No Farmers, No Food is a protest campaign launched by farmers in the UK. For more, see https://twitter.com/NoFarmsNoFoods.

  8. 8  Vandana Shiva and Kartikey Shiva, with Neha Raj Singh, The Future of Our Daily Bread: Regeneration or Collapse? (New Delhi: Navdanya International/RFSTE, 2018), https://seedfreedom.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/The-Future-of-Our-Daily-Bread-_-LowRes-_-19-11-2018-REVISED.pdf.

  9. 9  ‘AIM for Climate Summit 2023 Opens With New Agriculture Initiatives’, Bio.News, May 9, 2023, https://bio.news/climate-change/aim-for-climate-summit-2023-opens-with-new-agriculture-initiatives.

  10. 10  Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, ‘The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud’, MIT Press Reader, February 14, 2022, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud.

  11. 11  Wikipedia, s.v. ‘The Climate Corporation’, last modified May 5, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Climate_Corporation. It’s been a decade since Monsanto (now Bayer) bought out the Climate Corporation and Solum Inc. There is no further information on the impact of these acquisitions.

  12. 12  Liam Condon, ‘Farming’s Future Belongs to All of Us’, POLITICO, September 26, 2019, https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/farmings-future-belongs-to-all-of-us.

  13. 13  Navdanya, ‘Gates Ag One: The Recolonisation of Agriculture’, Independent Science News for Food and Agriculture, November 16, 2020, https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/gates-ag-one-the-recolonisation-of-agriculture.

  14. 14  Fiona Harvey, ‘Improving Soil Could Keep World Within 1.5C Heating Target, Research Suggests’, The Guardian, July 4, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improving-farming-soil-carbon-store-global-heating-target; André Leu, ‘Maximizing Photosynthesis and Root Exudates through Regenerative Agriculture to Increase Soil Organic Carbon to Mitigate Climate Change’, SCIREA Journal of Agriculture 8, no. 1 (February 2023), https://article.scirea.org/pdf/210317.pdf.

  15. 15  Leu, op. cit.

  16. 16  Findings of research by McGlade, quoted in Harvey, op. cit.

  17. 17  Brian Owens, ‘Underground Fungi Absorb Up to a Third of Our Fossil Fuel Emissions’, New Scientist, June 5, 2023, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2376827-underground-fungi-absorb-up-to-a-third-of-our-fossil-fuel-emissions/; Heidi-Jayne Hawkins et al., ‘Mycorrhizal Mycelium as a Global Carbon Pool’, Current Biology 33, no. 11 (June 2023): R560–R573, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.027; Jeff Powell et al., ‘Hidden Carbon: Fungi and Their “Necromass” Absorb One-Third of the Carbon Emitted by Burning Fossil Fuels Every Year’, The Conversation, Yahoo! News, June 5, 2023, https://au.news.yahoo.com/hidden-carbon-fungi-necromass-absorb-200327075.html.

  18. 18  Liz Kimbrough, ‘Mycorrhizal Fungi Hold CO2 Equivalent to a Third of Global Fossil Fuel Emissions’, Mongabay, June 13, 2023, https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/mycorrhizal-fungi-hold-co2-equivalent-to-a-third-of-global-fossil-fuel-emissions.

  19. 19  I. Rathore, V. Shiva, E. Thomas et al., ‘A Comparison on Soil Biological Health on Continuous Organic and Inorganic Farming’, Horticulture International Journal 2, no. 5 (2018): 256–62, https://medcraveonline.com/HIJ/a-comparison-on-soil-biological-health-on-continuous-organic-and-inorganic-farming.html.

  20. 20  David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, ‘Soil Health and Nutrient Density: Beyond Organic vs. Conventional Farming’, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 5 (November 2021), https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.699147/full#B74; M. Lori et al., ‘Organic Farming Enhances Soil Microbial Abundance and Activity—A Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression’, PLoS ONE 12, no. 7 (2017): e0180442, https://www.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180442.

  21. 21  ‘Food and Climate Change: The Forgotten Link’, GRAIN, September 28, 2011, https://grain.org/en/article/4357-food-and-climate-change-the-forgotten-link. These inferences are based on removing the contributions of the fossil fuel and fossil chemical farming system mentioned in the GRAIN article, with about more than 50 percent emissions emanating from the fossil food system.

  22. 22  Rathore et al., op. cit.

  23. 23  Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health (New York: Harper Wave, 2016), 6, 4.

  24. 24  James A. Shapiro, ‘Bacteria are Small but Not Stupid: Cognition, Natural Genetic Engineering, and Socio-bacteriology’, Stud in Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 38, no. 4 (December 2007): 807–19, https://www.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2007.09.010.

  25. 25  Mayer, op. cit., 63.

  26. 26  Jim Thomas, ‘George and the Food System Dragon’, Scan The Horizon, October 26, 2023, https://www.scanthehorizon.org/p/george-and-the-foodsystem-dragon.