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TechnoratiA Message for Climate Change Negotiators: Small Farmers Key to Combating Climate Change
As world leaders meet in Poznan, Poland this week to work out a foundation for a new international climate change treaty, they would do well to seek the council of some unconventional advisors: peasant farmers. Agricultural policy has been virtually ignored in "official" discussions of climate change. One place it hasn't been ignored is by farmers themselves. In October hundreds of small farmers from all over the world met in Maputo, Mozambique for the fifth international conference of La Via Campesina, a global movement of peasant farmers. A sense of urgency around climate change featured prominently in their final declaration.
It's little wonder. The Via Campesina Declaration casts small farmers in the developing world as both global warming's victims and a potential solution. They are right! While industrial agriculture is one of the world's biggest climate culprits, small-scale farmers actually cool the planet.
Agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions - largely from synthetic fertilizers and large animal operations. GHG emissions-soil carbon loss, methane, and nitrous oxide-are largely results of large-scale agricultural operations in which soil carbon is depleted, methane from large animal feedlot operations is released unchecked, and synthetic fertilizers release nitrous oxide-a gas with 300 times the warming power of CO2.
The agricultural sector, including land use change for agriculture, has been estimated to make up anywhere from 28-33% of global emissions. Combined with the emissions created transporting food in our increasingly globalized food economy where the average bite to eat travels 1200 miles from field to fork, the industrial food system may be the largest single contributor to global warming.
In small-scale organic farming systems however, carbon is actually stored in the soil at a rate of about four tons per hectare. The Rodale Institute estimates that if the U.S. converted to organic agriculture on all its farmland, 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be saved.
Small-scale sustainable agriculture is also vastly more resilient to climate change. After Hurricane Mitch devastated much of the Central American countryside, a study of over 1800 conventional and sustainable farms showed that farmers using sustainable practices suffered less "damage" than their conventional neighbors. Diversified plots had 20% to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced fewer economic losses than their conventional farm neighbors. Not only can small-scale sustainable agriculture help cool the planet, it can provide a buffer against the worst effects of global warming.
The small farmers of La Via Campesina know this. They are calling for an international shift towards food sovereignty - the right of all people over the resources to produce and consume abundant, culturally appropriate food. Their vision is one of agroecologically balanced, sustainable, family farms supported by local markets. Not only will this vision confront the injustices of a world food system where one billion people will go hungry this year while another billion are obese-it could help stave off climate disasters.
Any "vision" that may emerge from negotiations in Poznan, Poland this week must include creating a food system that is more resilient, less polluting, and ultimately more just. Peasant farmers, who comprise more than half of all farmers worldwide, have much to offer a warming world. The fact that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture was on the agenda of farmers themselves before it is talked about on the world policy stage should send a strong message to Poznan: It is time we opened the climate debate to the ills of industrial agriculture, and the home-grown solutions that could save us.
12 Comments so far
Show AllFor the last sixty years the giant banks and governments have pushed land consolidation and excluded small farmers from assistance programs. Now young people in much of the world are discouraged from farming due to lack of access to land. Who is going to carefully nurture soil carbon on land rented from a bank? Nobody I know.
Fighting the forces of rather dim lighting wherever they may be found!!
It's the whole system. I sell at our local Farmers Market (Farthest North on the North American Continent and very successful too !) and customers literally spend hours there because it's such a great place to socialize. A way different vibe than getting your sterile food from a sterile supermarket . . .
And yes at our high latitude people do eat a lot of meat, it's still the most efficient way utilize land which can grow grass but not cereal crops, which are very iffy up here . . .
I love watching the PBS show All Creatures Great and Small because it opens a window into diversified small farmholding with an emphasis on animals, anyone who doesn't think these small farmers don't care for their animals is missing out.
Grow yer own!
if you don't grow it,
you don't get it...
: ) }-****p*e*a*c*e****
Green Gold: Why cellulosic ethanol is a threat to farmers and the planet
Annie Shattuck
Institute for Food and Development Policy
http://www.foodfirst.org/files/pdf/greengold_10-6-081.pdf
This analysis completely disregards the potential for organic, non-GM hemp agriculture to produce both a nutritionally essential food and an abundance of fuel from the same harvest.
Trying to solve the problems of our world, without the most nutritious, useful, potentially abundant, globally distributed agricultural resource, just doesn't make any sense.
How bad do things have to get before all compassionate solutions are considered?
Please see
Hemp Oil & Foods, with Augustine & Wirtshafter (Complete)
http://vodpod.com/watch/591763-hemp-oil-foods-with-augustine-wirtshafter-complete
for more information on the nutritional properties of hemp seed.
Until the freedom to farm "every herb bearing seed" is reclaimed in the U.S. -- and Cannabis prohibition ended -- global agriculture and regional economics will be crippled by soil demineralization, ag chemicals and fuel expenses.
Our most useful and nutritious crop is being suppressed through a counter-productive prohibition. Because of 'marijuana' prohibition, industrial hemp agriculture and the knowledge of hemp's unique and essential food value has been edited from the collective consciousness. That the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization doesn't actively promote global hemp agriculture to produce vegetable protein and essential fatty acids is the crime of two Centuries.
It's time for farmers to reclaim our right to farm Cannabis for food, fuel, and much more. Article One, freedom of religion, is currently in force to protect our right to farm Cannabis. January 16th is
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DAY
http://religiousfreedomday.com/
Please celebrate.
"Many of Jefferson's ideas about government, which are the philosophic underpinnings for our country, are based on the interrelationship between the land and the people. He clearly felt that the closer people were to the land, the freer they were to lead more "natural" lives and thus experience more directly the full possession of their natural unalienable rights. And in the process they might also feel closer to their God, the source of those rights."
from Thomas Jefferson: Agronomist
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2005_summer_fall/agronomist.htm
It is time to plant Thomas Jefferson's favorite crop once again. Every spring planting season that passes is an opportunity lost forever.
How bad do things have to get before all compassionate solutions are considered?
The test of President Obama's true character will be in his openness to "essential civilian demand" for hemp, as provided for in Executive Order 12919, and his practical support of religious freedom.
It was Big Oil back in the 1930s that did all the work behind the scenes on inventing the phoney culture war again marijuana to get Congress to overtax Cannabis which unfortunately included HEMP and then Nixon created the DEA to outlaw it until earlier this decade where the DEA gave up and allowed HEMP imports but still no growth or cultivation is allowed. Obama had better be heavily armed and prepared to overturn the ban on hemp. He's going to need all the support he can get.
Dennis Duncan's personal story is heartbreaking, and it is hard even to start to express sympathy, for those of us who will never know anything quite as terrible.
What is worse, it is the untold story of thousands upon thousands of small farmers, displaced by agribusiness and globalization. Tens of thousands have committed suicide in India and South Korea. Who knows how many broken souls and broken families there are around the world and in our own back yards?
We must stop this madness - support local organic agriculture and oppose agribusiness and GM products (even if , like ADM, they support PBS programming -- Boeing does, too, and there's no difference between ADM, DOW, Monsanto and Boeing).
Of the farmers that remain today, I notice that half of them are obese. Even weirder is that when you get invited to visit them at home, their fridges will be stacked with fast foods more than locally prepared produce, meat or veggie ! A lot of these farmers work for Big Agri and will make no bones about their blind support of conservatism. They're used to conveniently blaming environmentalists for losing to big agri but then again Rush Limbaugh and the like on the media will see to it that these poor conservatives show their blame and anger in the wrong direction every time. Weird, isn't it?
The massive global export/import model will eventually have to regionalize. It is ecocidal, genocidal, ethnocidal, of lesser nutritional value, blind to the human side of life, dysfunctional in just about every way.
Small farmers used to exist until Big Agri bulldozed them thanks to government subsidizing them and nowadays Big Brothering the small farmers. As far as climate change is concerned, don't blame the meat eaters. Blame the way food is produced. Did you know that a veggie burger, usually the one the comes from corporate factory farming, contributes to global warming far more than grass-fed, not corn-fed, hamburger? Today's meat and diary comes from corn-fed animals more than pasture raised ones. My father almost committed suicide when he had to give up his family farm and it was the most devastating moment when my family and I watched it getting demolished. Now a corporate factory farm is in its place and I cannot stand it when animals are caged, forced to eat their own wastes, are shoved petroleum manufactured corn shit down their throats, tortured with anti-biotics which did not even have to be there if only they were pasture raised, and well you get the idea. I was angry at Ronnie Musgrave for refusing to answer my letter of concern and I was angry at Obama for supporting corn subsidies. Why are the Democrats so dumb enough to support agri-business and big corn if they really care for the small farmers? When it comes to small farmers, neither party is useful !
"As far as climate change is concerned, don't blame the meat eaters. Blame the way food is produced. "
I am glad you make the distinction. It's beyond me how we should expect people in high lattitudes or altitudes to not get a good portion of their food values from animals.