Nearly two years ago, candidate Obama said the following in a speech at the Iowa Farmer’s Union:

We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. It’s the Department of Agriculture. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.

Then, less than two weeks before the election, Obama told Joe Klein at TIME:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

Sure these comments didn’t go silently into the good night; Big Ag pitched a fit. But wow! Our president once used the word monoculture in a sentence. And he made the connection between health care and food. And threatened to take back the USDA. I belabor this point only because I would argue that Mr. Pollan’s piece has become required reading, even a blueprint, for the movement – and has set the bar ever higher for what food system thinkers have come to expect from President Obama. But whether or not these ideas are still in the president’s mind, with an economic crisis, the health care debate and two wars to distract him, we can’t be sure. At one point, though, we know he got it.

Perhaps as a result of the public conversation about food taking hold, Michelle Obama planted a garden on the White House lawn and used it as a jumping off point for a conversation about food choices with children. And because the movement showed up and made itself heard through the Secretary of Agriculture selection process, in which Tom Vilsack was nominated, when it came time to choose a Deputy Secretary of Agriculture this administration listened and selected Kathleen Merrigan, a Tufts University professor who’d previously helped develop the organic standards. Vilsack and Merrigan have together launched Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, an initiative designed to connect consumers to producers, a “start of a national conversation about the importance of understanding where your food comes from and how it gets to your plate.” In addition, the Justice Department is currently reviewing the consolidation of agribusiness for potential monopolies, which could result in a re-structuring of control over meat, seeds, processing, and grocery sales. This could mean the opening up of suffocated markets to competition, and more choices for consumers and farmers.

However, with an ever-increasing amount of meat recalls and hundreds of thousands of Americans sickened by food-borne illnesses every year, we still don’t have anyone running the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspections Service (FSIS) – the body that is responsible for the safety of our eggs, meat and dairy products. Back in March, the President launched the Food Safety Working Group, but the group has not had an affect on how food — and especially meat — is processed and regulated. Meanwhile, last month President Obama declared the swine flu a national emergency, and while bailouts totaling $150 million have been doled out to hog operations for their losses this year, those operations are still not required to test their pigs for the H1N1 virus. No one seems to be willing to discuss the obvious: that these pigs, living mostly in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are standing in their own potentially bacteria and virus-laden shit, and are being given eight times the antibiotics of the average human, scientifically proven to lead to resistance. This means more virulent sicknesses could be getting passed on to farm-workers, their families, and the public.

Some have argued that there is an empty seat at FSIS because the Obama administration had trouble finding a non-lobbyist for the position who simultaneously wouldn’t upset the meat lobby. Surprisingly, though, Obama recently nominated a pesticide lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, from CropLife America (the organization that wrote a letter chastising Michelle Obama for not using pesticides on the White House garden) to handle our agricultural trade interests abroad. He also nominated Roger Beachy, former director of Monsanto-funded research facility, the Danforth Plant Science Center, to head the newly branded research arm of the USDA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Beachy promised to give ever more money to public-private sector research collaborations (read: technology-focused), despite a broken funding system that already favors agribusiness while we actually need more research on how the current food system affects our health and the environment.

Indeed, our Blackberry-toting president is fond of technology, and he seems to believe that all of it is moving us in the right direction when it comes to food. In July, President Obama secured $25 billion in agricultural aid at the G8 in Italy, and has stated his interest in a second green revolution for Africa in an interview (the first one brought genetically modified seeds to India, and created chemical dependence and debt in its wake). If his team, led by Secretary of State Clinton, and including pro-biotechnology Nina Federoff and Rajiv Shah, is any indication, instead of focusing on localized education, markets and infrastructure in countries in need of food security, this money could be invested in shiny new technologies that are years from implementation, have yet to fulfill the promise of high yields, and that are overly dependent on irrigation (water) and chemical fertilizers (oil). He will most likely be speaking in Rome this month at the FAO Summit on Food Security, so there is still time to retool the focus.

Maybe candidate Obama spoke out on food issues with the greatest of intentions, but didn’t realize the scale of the task at hand. But there are issues ripe for the taking, that Big Ag just can’t credibly pitch a fit about. Like research – Without facilitating necessary research that looks at the results of years of chemical agriculture on the land, how can we expect our president to see just how our current food system is making us sick, and then acknowledge sustainable agriculture for what it is – human-scale operations, which build soil and focus on diversification? And school food – who could argue with increasing the rate spent per child by $1 in the upcoming Child Nutrition Act and building relationships between farms and schools without looking like a bully?

And though there may be backlash, we need a strong regulator at FSIS. The Fairbank Farm recall has already killed two people, so no matter what the industry wants, we need to protect eaters first.

Despite my harsh critique of Obama’s first year in food system reform, one takeaway is that no matter the business on the President’s preverbial plate, he can be engaged about the actual food on our collective plates. It might take a team of skilled community organizers to keep showing him the movement. But once convinced, President Obama and his team have proven they will act.

Norman Borlaug — best known for winning the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his role in the Green Revolution (the transformation of agriculture to an industrial, monocropped system, which increased the amount of food being produced in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere) — died this past weekend at age 95.

Borlaug’s life was dedicated to ending hunger through technology, and increasing yields was his single-minded aim. Though I do not doubt his sincerity in seeking to prevent famine, what he failed to recognize was that hunger did not persist because of a lack of food. That in fact, the root of hunger issues in the world have had more to do with a lack of equal food distribution. (As the BBC recently reported, elimination of food waste alone in the UK and the US could lift 1 billion people out of hunger if that food were instead better distributed.) Technology brings with it both bad and good; and in fact, climate change could be the worst end result of our dalliance with it. But in believing that somehow technology will only perfect us, we’ve stayed in denial about the potential for technology to also destroy us, whether quick (think atomic bomb) or more subtle — through the destruction over time of our soil.

Indeed, yields did increase early on through the Green Revolution’s efficiencies and the introduction of irrigation and imported nitrogen to the soil. These short-term gains were intoxicating. But in the long term, yields have leveled off and crops have fallen prey to nature’s barriers: superweeds, lowering water tables, availability of oil for transport, climate change, etc.

The truth is, we now know that the Green Revolution, like our own American industrial agriculture system, is unsustainable: it is entirely dependent on oil, reliant on excessive amounts of water, and requires the products of a handful of corporations. Sustainable agriculture is the only way forward that deals with these issues, and a ‘Sustainable Green Revolution’ will necessarily involve putting away silver bullet thinking and instead empowering smallholders in whatever ways work best for their particular region.

While the Obama administration considers forging another Green Revolution, this time in Africa — where USAID has been funding agricultural biotechnology since 1991 — I felt that it might be valuable to review some of the legacies of the Green Revolution point by point.

The Green Revolution has:

• Undermined biodiversity. Chemical-intensive agriculture has wreaked havoc on the life in the soil — killing off the earthworms and other organisms that play a vital role in agriculture. It has also marginalized species of animals by destroying their habitat and poisoning their food and water. Furthermore, in the quest for one species of plant at the expense of all others, diverse sources of food have also been eliminated from local diets.

• Created a less nutritious diet. Big Ag claims they seek to ‘feed the world,’ but what are they feeding the world, in fact? Destroying many of the varied plants we have historically eaten means local populations (like Americans do now, too) come to rely intensively on just a few grain crops for food. Western afflictions — diabetes, heart disease, obesity — are now also prevalent in these populations.

• Exacerbated climate change. Agriculture has the potential to store carbon in the soil in the roots of cover crops and managed grasslands. Yet industrial agriculture continues to undermine anything beyond the yearly planting cycle through invasive tilling, and when using ‘no-till’ methods, requires the pouring of chemicals over the land that exclude all other species. In addition, more energy is now burned up to produce much of the world’s food than is achieved by eating it.

• Increased inequity. The Green Revolution didn’t spread the wealth accrued through monocropping. In fact many corporations have profited from agricultural speculation in the billion of dollars — meaning they have specifically profited on the risks that exacerbated hunger.

• Functioned as a modern form of colonialism. Local, effective alternatives to the Green Revolution’s imposed technologies are being ignored in favor of corporate solutions that change the self-sufficiency and power structure in those countries.

The Green Revolution is not a long-term solution to the problem of hunger. The elephant in the room, of course, is population. Borlaug saw that we could not continue to feed a growing population — whether he recognized it as a resource availability issue or not.

The book, A Nation of Farmers by Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk had this to say about the Green Revolution:

There is, in truth, no way to be certain what we gained and what we lost in the Green Revolution. What is virtually certain is that its gains were overstated and that allocation of resources, whether from future generations or from poor to rich, were inequitable. When someone makes the statement that grain yields rose by so much, it looks impressive. But the practical realities of that are very different. We have to ask whether those yield increases actually made it from fields into the mouths of the hungry and whether it was possible to duplicate them through any other method.

The bottom line is that we often think of our wealth as a product of our ingenuity, education and technology, when it is more specifically the result of the exploitation of other countries labor and resources. Borlaug’s Green Revolution neglected these social aspects of the need to feed the hungry. The question is, will we ever re-evaluate the underlying principles we espouse for accruing wealth in order to create a truly equitable and just world? If not, we will never solve the problems those principles create.

In the next sentences, she gives a clue about what “tools” she might be referring to by praising the Green Revolution — without noting the depleted water table, reduced soil fertility, massive farmer debts and increased rates of farmer suicides left in the wake of the failed experiment in India.

The Green Revolution was a product of a biotechnological approach to feeding people, the thinking being that we could create ways of tricking nature in a lab: ridding ourselves of pests and weeds, increasing yields and efficiency. Unfortunately pests and weeds have become more virulent in these systems, as they evolve to withstand higher and higher doses of chemicals. These “monocultures” — field plantings of a single crop, usually corn, cotton or soy — have relied heavily on oil and resource inputs the third world can’t afford. Furthermore, these systems have yet to actually improve yields. Efficiency has been the greatest achievement of biotechnology; however, as Michael Pollan and others point out, redundancy, though counter-intuitive, is the only way to ensure food safety. But biotechnology companies like Monsanto have a huge lobbying presence in Washington, and corporate shills like Nina Federoff have the ear of Secretary Clinton. So its no surprise that in the name of philanthropy, the US has begun to adopt the “feeding the world” mantra of Big Ag.

The focus has been mostly on Africa, where a third of the population is malnourished, and where groups like the Gates Foundation are among the newcomers trying to renew the idea of creating a “Green Revolution for Africa,” using many of the same methods that have been so bad for India.

Meanwhile, here in the US, 36 million people are food insecure, and yet we are one of the biggest agricultural producers in the world. Given the fact that these commodity crops cannot be eaten until processed, it turns out that what Big Ag is feeding us is not nourishing us. So it seems that hunger is not just a function of yield, but involves distribution, concentrations of power, and policy.

At the end of the day, do we actually seek to feed these hungry people, or to feed our bottom line? Because in this instance, we can’t do both.

Raj Patel put it succinctly in a recent email exchange:

Everyone agrees that African farmers need support. But this story is like the vacuum cleaner salesman who dumps dirt on your floor to show you how his product can pick some of it up. In Africa’s case, the dirt was dumped in the 1980s, when US-led economic policy from the World Bank actively prevented African governments from investing in their farmers. The results were, the Bank now admits, a disaster. Into this disaster now steps biotechnology, offering to fix the problem. Actually, it’s a bad metaphor. This makes it sound as if GE crops can actually increase yields. The problem of hunger in Africa today has very little to do with seed quality, and a great deal to do with poverty, chronic underinvestment in agriculture, and an active stamping-out of the agroecological alternatives that have proved so successful in fighting hunger. Why are these alternatives being suppressed in US government policy? Because they’re not profitable for the US biotech industry, and the US government has, since Vice President Dan Quayle shepherded legislation in the US to support the industry, been an aggressive supporter of genetic engineering.

Patel is co-author, with Eric Holt-Giménez, of the forthcoming book, Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, which outlines the conditions which led to the global food crisis of 2008, and some of the many steps we can take to solve hunger. The book ties the issue of hunger to a growing dependence on our imports:

The profits and concentration of market power in the industrial North mirror the import dependence, food deficits and the loss of control over food systems in the global South. Fifty years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. Today, after decades of development and the global expansion of the industrial agrifoods complex, the Southern food deficit has ballooned to U.S.$11 billion/year (FAO 2004). The cereal import bill for Low Income Food Deficit Countries reaching over U.S.$ 38 billion in 2007/2008 (De Schutter 2008). The FAO predicts it will grow to $50 billion by 2030.

Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.

That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.

It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? There is plenty of fertile land in Africa, much of which is being snatched up in massive land grabs by the Chinese and other countries foreseeing their own imminent food insecurity. Perhaps its time to invest in agriculture for Africans, before it’s too late.

This was the recommendation of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science, and Technology for Development, or IAASTD, which was a joint project of the World Bank, FAO and UNDP that determined in 2008 that a complete overhaul of the food system was necessary. 61 countries signed onto the findings of the panel. Patel and Gimenez sum up the IAASTD thusly:

IAASTD’s four-year analytical exercise started with a collective framing of the core problems of hunger and environmental destruction. Scientists then identified and evaluated the most appropriate actions and solutions to these problems, locally, nationally and internationally.

The IAASTD team found that the limiting factors to production, equitable distribution and environmental sustainability were overwhelmingly social, rather than technological in nature. Further, many proven agroecological practices for sustainable production increases were already widespread across the global South, but unable to scale up because they lacked a supportive trade, policy, and institutional environment. This is why IAASTD recommends improving the conditions for sustainable agriculture, rather than just coming up with technological fixes.

Somehow this gets swept under the rug of policy in the US. But if we are committed to actually helping, it would behoove Secretary Clinton, and others in this administration, to read the findings of the IAASTD and consider it before making policy.

Again, from Patel and Giménez:

Who improves African agriculture, how, under what agreements and by what means, will determine whether the efforts to end hunger in Africa succeed or fail. Lack of attention to these issues runs the risk that the long-overdue support to African agriculture will be used as prop for a flawed global food system when what is needed is a thorough transformation of agriculture.

Will Africans be a cog in our capitalist machine, or will we follow through with our promises to end hunger?

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website.

Paula: Food prices are higher than ever, but farmers are struggling to survive, why don’t they see any of that money?

Raj: There are millions of farmers and billions of consumers, [and] there are really just a handful of corporations in the middle that have the power to shape the market. Some of these mega-farmers are seeing the benefit from these high prices, [but] it’s the middlemen, the corporations, that are trucking and bartering the goods. So while the consumers are paying more for food the people who benefit from this are not necessarily the people who grow it, but instead the people who distribute and invest in it.

Paula: Debt seems to be another issue keeping farmers impoverished. How do they get into debt?

Raj: It’s always a range of factors. But once they’re in that cycle of debt, they find it very hard indeed to get out. One of the stories I tell is about a farmer in India, he had a couple of acres, and he wanted to leave the land in a better condition for his kids. So he borrowed money from the local moneylender because that was the only person who would lend to him, and as a result the farmer found himself paying three-digit interest rates. And of course, he couldn’t afford to pay it back, particularly when his test for drilling irrigation failed, and he committed suicide. And in fact around the world, it’s a sort of silent epidemic of farmer suicides that began in the United States with the demise of family farms during the Reagan era. What this points to is that the state isn’t stepping in and supporting its farmers, its sort of cutting them off to the private sector. And the private sector is either these predatory lenders, or just regular banks like we see here in the United States, who are no less predatory for having shiny corporate headquarters. And as a result, more independent, sustainable family farms around the world are facing very similar circumstances with subsidies going to the mega-farms and unsustainable production being the sort of thing governments fund. Whereas good, healthy, clean food is almost being stamped out by government actions and inactions.

Paula: Subsidy programs had started originally as a form of credit. Do you think it is possible for the government to use programs like that to help these family farmers?

Raj: It has to happen. I think subsidies have a bad name, deservedly at the moment because, especially in the United States, we are being sold the idea that the Farm Bill is all about supporting the Little House on the Prarie. And that’s horseshit. If you look at who gets the subsidies, its millionaires. But there are plenty of reasons to think that a well-designed support program for food is a good idea. We fund things for the public good because society benefits from them, things like education, and elsewhere in the civilized world, healthcare. These are things that we recognize makes society better. So I think there is a role for government here, in fact government needs to be involved here, and at the moment the way government has been involved is to support of the wrong side of the sustainability equation.

Paula: The Green Revolution tried to make it technologically possible to eradicate hunger. Where do you think the Green Revolution failed, and what do you think we can do about it now?

Raj: It’s certainly true that there’s been a productivity bump as a result of the Green Revolution, but that’s come at a tremendous human, ecological and social cost. In terms of the environment, the Green Revolution is hugely carbon intensive and water intensive, because it takes a lot of energy to make the fertilizers that the Green Revolution needs. So that’s why you’re seeing in areas where the Green Revolution happened, particularly in Punjab in India for example, which is the grain basket of India, farmer suicide rates are through the roof. The second thing, its not really spoken about that much but one of the tacit reasons for the Green Revolution was to prevent redistribution of land. One of the best ways to increase productivity is through land reform, by giving land that belongs to large landowners to the workers that actually work that land. But the Green Revolution was designed to prevent that because that sort of redistribution looked pretty socialist, and the United States didn’t really approve. That deep inequality still persists to this day and is a human tragedy. Now we are at a stage where we do have these inequitable land holdings and we have technology that’s going nowhere that is actually dangerous to the environment and widely recognized as such. The IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development), that came out last year, headed by Robert Watson and a team of about 400 scientists [sought] to answer the question: how are we going to feed the world in 2050, when there are 9 billion of us? They looked at the options and they said Green Revolution technologies are not going to work. We don’t have enough water, we don’t have enough soil fertility to be able to support the Green Revolution. What they suggested was that we need to be moving to smaller scale, local, lower carbon footprint kinds of agriculture. Now this is very different from the monoculture that we have at the moment, growing one thing and destroying the ecosystem so that this one thing can flourish. And what they are pushing for is an agro-ecological approach where you use the ecosystem rather than destroy it, to be able to create great food in a way that builds soil fertility. I think [that it] holds a great deal of promise for the future. And that is the approach that is being tried, for example, at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden.

Paula: In your book you talk about the American predicament a lot. Do you see the U.S. as setting the food agenda for the world?

Raj: I do, in that the Unites States enjoyed, from the beginning of the 1990s to about now, a position as an unrivaled superpower, the U.S. has been very much responsible for setting the agenda around food and food policy. And I think the United States is home to the biggest contradictions in food in the world today. There’s the fact that America is the most obese country on Earth and yet there are [at least] 35.5 million families going hungry every year. This is the richest country on Earth, it produces the most food on Earth, and yet there are people here that go hungry. That for me is a telling contradiction of the food system. And that’s why I turn to the United States a lot because it shows what can happen when markets go wild, but its also the case for what happens when people get together and organize. There are some really inspiring things happening in the United States, people are fighting back. And that’s why I live here, because it is possible to fight back in some really creative ways.

Paula: Conglomerates control most of the processing, packing, selling and also have a lot of capital to lobby in Washington. Do you think that anti-trust laws are not being enforced in America?

Raj: Absolutely. One of the things that’s happened in Europe is that the anti-trust authorities there have been aggressively following up with supermarkets to find out why the price of milk, eggs, etc are so high. Those kinds of investigations have not been carried out in the United States. And in fact if you look at the IRS prosecutions of fraud since 2000 you’ll find that they’ve halved. That is not an indication to me that the companies are twice as well behaved now than they were in 2000. I think precisely anti-trust and regulatory authorities are being beaten down by an administration that is being run by large corporations.

Paula: How do we begin to dismantle this? What do we have as citizens take on this large corporate-mindedness?

Raj: Change has never happened because someone gave it to us, change has always happened because we took it. And I think that organizing around food is a great way of taking change. What that means concretely is sort of a food policy council, we have two food policy councils here in the bay area and more on the way, and basically those are local government spaces in which people can democratically demand of their local government, for example, that food come from within 100-200 miles of where ever your municipality is. And demanding that there be space for farmer’s markets, and demanding that there be space for victory gardens, and demanding that there be adequate support for low income people to be able to eat. There is a lot of really exciting local organizing happening. As the current food system heads deeper and deeper into crisis, it is those islands of sanity that will offer us a way out, and allow us to make bigger and bigger changes.

This is Part 1 of two parts. The second part will be posted next week. Raj Patel’s talk at Food for Thought is sold out. Please stay tuned for updates on the series.

Map image courtesy of Ecological Footprint @ Phtbb!!