Farming with nature

ReBoot Food is a movement launched with fanfare at COP15. It wants to “spare land” for conservation by replacing all livestock products with bacterial fermentation.

The proposal is based on three dangerous fantasies and one huge blind spot.

Fantasy 1: Farming is always in conflict with nature

Land-sparing is the first dangerous fantasy. This idea of the conservation movement is to expel all people from protected areas. It originated in The Green Revolution. The founder, Norman Borlaug, hoped that increased productivity of just one crop — rice or potatoes or wheat — would “spare” land for places imagined to be wild. It turned out badly for people and the planet.

Grain monocultures removed crops such as lentils, which had provided dietary protein, from fields, where they had returned nitrogen to the soil. People became hungrier and chemicals to replace lost nitrogen poisoned soils and waters. Chemical industries became the pivot of an intensive livestock complex, which required soy and maize monocultures for feed industries. These spread into self-organizing ecosystems. Policies support monocultures at the expense of circular farms that use animals for manure. They are recent and can be changed.

This livestock complex led to diets both meat-heavy and unequal. Byproducts of maize and soy for animal feeds became key ingredients of ultra-processed foods. The poor have little choice but to buy ultra-processed foods with long lists of chemical additives whose subsidized prices and long shelf life make them affordable. Diet-related diseases were declared a global epidemic by the World Health Organization 20 years ago. Although vegan diets reduce meat consumption, bacterial fermentation and cellular meat risk shifting power from one lab-based corporate sector to another, at the expense of farming with natural systems, which integrate plants and (fewer) animals.

Fantasy 2: Corporate power can be controlled

Big corporations are investing in novel food startups. Exxon is researching bacterial fermentation for biofuels. The idea that anti-monopoly or intellectual property rules can limit power is another fantasy. Corporations controlling the food system are as powerful as fossil fuel industries and deeply linked to them. The technical fix that ReBoot proposes shifts from chemical to genetic technologies, from industrial fertilizers and pesticides to cellular meat and fermented bacteria. It changes only which giant industries control food if “alternative meat” or “novel food” industries succeed in displacing livestock.

Fantasy 3: Rewilding without farming

The idea that rewilding, the practice that involves reintroduction of native plants and large animals, excludes farming. It ignores the thousands of years of good farming that preceded the mere decades of industrial and subsidized monocultures. It mismeasures productivity of monocultures compared to mixed, closed-loop farming without chemicals. It ignores ecological sciences and farmer initiatives, such as agroforestry and on-farm rewilding, which improve variety and health of human foods and vitality of diverse cultures and ecosystems. Farmers have been rewilding long before George Monbiot came across the idea.

Blind spot: Missing connections

Obsession with agriculture ignores that all extractive industries invade forests, wetlands, grasslands and oceans. Mining, fossil and timber industries shouldn’t be simply compared to “agricultural sprawl,” but combined with it. Destruction of places that seem wild are stewarded by Indigenous Peoples. They are the land and water defenders who should be supported to revitalize natural places.

This blind spot is part of a deeper one. Some scientists are recognizing that to prevent species death requires combining formal science with other ways of knowing. For instance, scientist Alexandra Morton put well-documented research about the destruction of Pacific wild salmon from diseases spread by intensive fish farm operations at the service of an alliance of environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples.

She learned that Indigenous Peoples had long shaped salmon spawning, and so supported forests fertilized by remains left by bears and wolves. She concluded, “No scientist can spend 10,000 years becoming finely tuned to a place, but the constant counting, measuring and weighing (and) the analyzing of data to reveal the trends of life can bring scientists into alignment with Indigenous viewpoints… Saving our planet and acting in accordance with Indigenous tradition are one and the same.”

In the Amazon, archeologists are finally abandoning colonial assumptions that prevented the discovery of large, complex cities buried beneath the forest. They hadn’t thought to look as long as they assumed inhabitants were only dispersed foragers. Forests regrew over cities abandoned by Indigenous Peoples decimated by violence, enslavement and diseases. Regrowth was so large over a century, that its captured carbon entered the geological record.

Indigenous Peoples are demanding recognition of their stewardship of natural systems in international negotiations on biodiversity. Scientists who choose to look finally see that Indigenous Peoples are not only shaped by but also shape all bioregions, including forests, wetlands, and grasslands.

Cultures that created the astounding and enduring agricultural terraces in Asia, the Andes, and even parts of the Mediterranean, were also stewards of biological diversity. Many of these efforts have been abandoned under assault by industrial food and agriculture, even though they integrated natural waters and forests, and many plants and animals, both domestic and wild. We ignore this knowledge of how to live and eat well in each specific place at our peril.

Harriet Friedmann, a professor emerita at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, is a food system analyst and writer.