From knowingly unhealthy products to deadly working conditions, capitalism’s focus on profit poisons our food, our planet, and our class.

So, this article seems like uncontroversial fluff, until you get to this part:

The Myth of “Feeding the World”

But the capitalists and their politicians cry, “We need factory farming and industrialized agriculture to “feed the world”!

But this, too, is a capitalist lie. Far from solving hunger, the industrial monoculture model at the heart of factory farming actively exacerbates it. As Vandana Shiva has noted, “industrial agriculture accounts for only 28% of the world’s food production, [but] it is using up 75% of the world’s resources.” Capitalists constantly frame the system as more “efficient,” but here too we see a system of staggering inefficiency. Industrial agriculture’s reliance on vast single crops like corn and soy — a large portion of the global harvest dedicated to livestock feed — causes varying levels of environmental destruction. Industrial agriculture under capitalism “pollutes the environment by increasing the use of inputs, accelerating soil erosion, polluting water resources, raising carbon level in the atmosphere, and decreasing biodiversity.” This model then often drives deforestation to clear land for more monocultures or cattle, further damaging biodiversity and fueling climate change.

I’m on board with the latter section, I think that’s clearly true, but is it really the case that industrial agriculture is less than 1/3 of global food supply? Anyone have any idea how that’s measured? And where’s the line, is it just mechanized farming/mass raising of livestock? It seems like if this stat has any basis in reality it’s mostly because of feeding animals for livestock, not because large mechanized farms don’t work (though as discussed they have major flaws and downsides)

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    17 days ago

    if you want to try and dig up stats, you’re probably going to have to dig into UNFAO publications and research materials. or even more like their digests. i think there was a “small farms” based one from the UNCTAD/UN Council on Trade and Develooment maybe in 2010ish? the phrase “small farms are the future” comes to mind, but its not that phrasing exactly.

    im not at computer now, but the G20 academic field of agriculture is filled with colonialist take-enjoyers that will normalize everything the atlantacist capital formations do at home and abroad for profits. the UNFAO has some standardization of definitions at least and makes distinctions about technology transfer, land tenure/ownership, farm size, familial/communal land management, export vs community subsistence, etc.

    frankly, the UN is demographically dominated by victims of neocolonialism and its little ignored committees of research scientists will frequently put out scathing reports of how full of shit the highly developed colonizers are at lying to their citizens and their victims.

    something that the west glosses over is that community-oriented farms which feed their own communities of workers and families do not show up as GDP or as economic activity, generally. so they’re invisible on uncritical reports.

    colonialism, capitalism and even states looking for revenues see this type of land use as unproductive, generally, hence the history of the enclosure system and accumulation through disposession. kick the people off the land they work and send them to the factory or make them raise corn/sheep/whatever for export as wage workers. now its productive! look at all this currency! now this land has “value”.

    the true efficiency in terms of input/energy consumption and production of consumable nutrition per unit area of small diversified farms remains, as ever, the critical embarassment of industrial agriculture and its export plantation systems. if you can find weight per area production charts for vegetables, you might see the trend of smaller farm scale producing more per unit area than larger ones, because you can compare average farm size between two developed countries with census info like the US vs. Japan, but that’s really only comparing system sizes and not the entire suite of inputs. and its a pain in the ass to find though, or was when i was doing a report on it for a class. its one of those areas where the US is a joke, so finding shit in english can be tough.

    so the propaganda focuses on how many bushels of whatever inedible raw material they can grow and how few people it requires to do so in these faraway, imagined places and hope nobody questions the working conditions, suicide rates, or what’s going on with their streams, rivers and lakes. or what that land and community there looked like 100 years ago and what ecosystem services it provided back then besides provisioning soybeans or beef for export markets.

  • fort_burp@feddit.nlEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    Anyone have any idea how that’s measured?

    I don’t but I’ve been confused by this too. There must be an academic or professional definition of industrial agriculture that I’m not aware of because I’ve read something along the lines of 70% of food is produced by small farms but then you check what the small farms are doing and it’s just tilling, monoculture, and chemically produced nitrogen fertilizer, which is MY definition of industrial farming.