It is easy to mock the various conferences, emergency meetings and seemingly endless policy documents that have tried to mitigate the threat but so far have achieved little. In fairness, though, responding effectively will be extraordinarily difficult. Despite what some conspiracy-minded critics have alleged, the crisis has a number of drivers, each one of which would be challenging enough on its own, but which taken together seem to call for a radical restructuring that is hard to imagine in the current political climate.
These drivers include the diversion of grains in North America and Western Europe to biofuel production; higher energy costs, which translate into more expensive chemical fertilizers; and since 2000, financial speculation over staple crops, which causes price fluctuations.
From an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune by David Rieff, who is writing a book about the global food crisis. Well worth reading in its entirety, and although he doesn’t judge between the competing metanarratives — technofix vs agroecology — he is optimistic that there will indeed be a solution. On that, I’m not so sure.
Jeremy: I, too, am not sure that there will be a solution if the manufactured polarity of technofix versus agroecology continues. Agroecology has in the past decade adopted a socio-economic-political stance far removed from its origins in the “application of ecological principles to agriculture”. Which ecological principle dictate that `diversity begets productivity and stability’? How do supposed ecological principles explain the existence of stable monodominant stands – not least among crop wild relatives? How do agroecologists explain why `introduced crops do better’ against the intuitive belief that local crop varieties are always `locally adapted’? Why should climax forest be put forward as models for field crop production (a fault in the definitions of the IAASTD report)?
If we can wind the clock back about 20 years, agroecology might have a place in agronomy and crop science, but not with its current monopolization by a few vocal opponents of modern agriculture. I can use my `ecological principles’ to explain the global success of introduced annual crops grown in monocultures: currently agroecology gets nowhere close to ecologically-based analysis of any use in feeding people.