The Small Farm Future Blog

Organic Farming: Science and Ideology (Again)

Posted on June 2, 2013 | No Comments

My latest article for the Wiley-Blackwell Statistics Views website is ‘Can organic farming feed the world?’, so my plan for this present post was merely to put up the link to that article.

However, as I argue in said article, part of the reason why it makes any kind of sense to ask that question in the first place is the ideological context within which debates about farming futures occur, and plenty of other things have reminded me of that recently. One of them was a brief discussion on Ford Denison’s ever-informative Darwinian Agriculture blog. Another is the proliferation of anti-organic websites like Biology Fortified and Skepteco which, as I recently argued here in the context of GM crops, try to promulgate a deeply mistaken contrast between ‘scientific’ biotech solutions and ‘ideological’ organic/agroecological soluctions.

Steve Savage’s latest post in his Applied Mythology blog provides another example. Savage’s argument is that GM crops represent scientific agriculture and opposition to them is unscientific and irrational, although he displaces this into a criticism of Europe’s dependence on agricultural imports. In doing so he has, I suspect quite unconsciously, authored an ideological justification for colonialism and neo-colonialism – which just goes to show that the real choice isn’t between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but just between different ideologies.

I started composing a response to Steve’s blog, and got this far:

“Steve, much as I find your blog thought-provoking and informative, though usually wrongheaded, the hypocrisy here is pretty astounding. If you’re genuinely concerned about the poorer people of the world then why no mention of the disastrous impact of directly and indirectly subsidised US food exports and trade barriers on the agricultures of the global south? If you’re genuinely interested in their concerns, why not engage with the multifaceted character of anti-GMO activism in the global south instead of patronisingly assuming that these people are too stupid to make their own minds up and have been hoodwinked by clever Europeans?

You’re right that the European food and farming system is pretty hypocritical and dysfunctional, and it always has been – which was one reason why a lot of Europeans headed to North America, violently dispossessed its native inhabitants and then recreated an even more dysfunctional European food and farming system in the US. You can crow about US export figures if you wish, but you really ought to include a bit of social context about the past and present human cost of those exports, and a bit of ecological context about the mined soil, water, fuel and phosphates funding them. Since your piece is basically an argument for GMOs, you’d be better off explaining in detail the evidence for their efficacy (eg. by listing all the ex post studies that have shown golden rice to be a superior intervention to community development, gardening and breastfeeding support programmes in tackling VAD) than trying to heap the blame for the ills of the global food system on Europe.”

And then I thought, is there any point actually posting this? Does anybody ever change their mind by reading blog posts? The anti-organic brigade write as if they’re a beleaguered minority whose simple solutions to the world’s problems are being sidelined by the powerful voice of their ideological opponents, and the organic brigade feel exactly the same. I don’t think organic or small-scale or agroecological farming gets everything spot on, I’ve learned useful things from blogs like Applied Mythology, and I feel it’s always worth trying to have dialogue. But I also feel as if the battle for a sensible, sustainable, human-scale agriculture has pretty much already been lost –perhaps it’s better to spend my time actually farming and trying to research and model the kind of agriculture that seems worthwhile to me rather than engaging in all this angry blogosphere chatter. On the other hand I also feel as if the disinformation of the ‘scientific agriculture’ brigade needs contesting. I’m not really sure which way to go, so I guess I’ll keep serving up a bit of both on this blog until I’ve made my mind up.

I do agree with Steve Savage on at least one thing, which is that the general public are quick to blame farmers for environmental ills. The truth is that societies generally get the farmers they deserve. Most of the problems in the agri-environmental-poverty nexus of global ills are not fundamentally the fault of farmers and not fundamentally difficult to solve, but if we want to do so we need to start by looking in the mirror. That said, there are radically different prescriptions on what the solutions are – which brings us back to the ideology.