by Hal Hamilton
— May 1, 2002 —
Why do people consistently believe what isn’t true? I’m reading a stream of news about the farm bill just passed by Congress: one more attempt to export and subsidize the farm economy to prosperity after decades of evidence that these dollars flow right on through farmers’ pockets.
I’m also reading data from a survey of midwestern farmers about global climate change: 63% said that the issue is imaginary or overblown.
It feels as if we are like Lemmings marching to a seaside cliff, convincing ourselves all the while that we’re on flat land with no edge.
There’s no shortage of evidence, and worldwide scientific consensus, that human-created climate change is melting the polar ice caps, raising sea levels, and causing increasingly volatile storm patterns. This past March was the hottest March in historical records. Fourteen of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the past 20 years.
There’s also clear evidence that net income from commodity production trends toward zero despite a long history of different farm bills and presidents. Shouldn’t we fix the problem instead of buying ever more Band-Aids?
Is our dilemma that we don’t know how to fix these big problems, so we just put our heads down and hope they’ll go away? That would explain passive resignation.
Some of us try and find someone to blame. Who’s the bad guy here? We could blame the big energy companies for carbon emissions, but what about all of us who drive gas-guzzlers or fly airplanes to meetings? We could blame agribusiness corporations for squeezing the profits out of the food chain, but what about farmers whose response to low income is to buyout their neighbors? Blame doesn’t explain a whole lot because we’re all caught up in a SYSTEM that is unsustainable.
I’m not denying the huge impact of greed. Every system that gives power to a small group of people enables those people to grab ever more wealth and power and keep others from competing fairly. The Enron debacle is clear warning that we need lots of checks-and-balances on power.
But there’s more than power and greed here. If we made everyone behave like Boy Scouts, we’d still have a system that doesn’t meet all our goals.
If we faced problems squarely, we would solve them. We could say, “Yes, our push for economic growth has over-reached limits. The North Pole is now an open sea in summer. We’d better shift from a fossil fuel economy to a carbohydrate, solar and wind economy. Let’s do it for our grandchildren.” We would figure this out. We would redesign the tax system and fiscal policy so that the market would reward clean technologies.
The farm economy has solutions just like the problem of climate change. Farmers could cooperate to bargain with companies for fairer prices, and we could create a system that keeps our production more closely aligned with demand. But farmers are stuck on a yield-chasing technology treadmill, pedaling ever faster to keep up. In our process of natural selection, the top competitors survive.
When farmers breed cows, we get what we select for. If we want to improve a cow’s feet and legs, we pick a bull with especially strong feet and legs. As a society, if we select for economic efficiency and nothing else, we’ll get lots of economic efficiency. And that’s good. But how about ALSO selecting for long-term survival and having a good time while we’re at it?
Denial is really powerful. We don’t want to believe that the weather is changing, so we don’t. Or maybe we just think it’s inevitable, or that economic forces are so powerful we can’t do anything about them.
Hope is the antidote. Farmers all want to be good stewards, increase the organic matter in their soils, and have more neighbors rather than fewer. Lots of farmers are getting off the growth treadmill and going for specialty or local markets. Even the farm bill has new programs to pay farmers for wildlife, land and water quality. There are new grants available for renewable energy generation as well as for adding value and creating more equity in the food chain.
A big change in agriculture, and our economy, is brewing all over the place. People are experimenting with new markets and ways of producing that don’t heat the planet. Maybe, despite farm bills, we’ll prove to be smart after all.
© Sustainability Institute
