[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Winds blowing through breathing trees, Strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Hello, Case Good listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz.
Even before the publication of Paul Ehrlich's population bomb in 1968, there were repeated warnings that humanity would be doomed to a future of famine, hunger and starvation unless science based agriculture were unleashed to grow food as efficiently as possible in every nook and cranny of the world's arable lands, all to feed the coming 10 billion.
But are famine, hunger and starvation really a threat?
After all, people are hungry and starving today, even though there is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone.
My guests today on Sustainability now have been studying and analyzing this issue, and I've concluded in a recent article that if there is a threat, it comes from elsewhere.
They are Dr. Adam Kallo, Assistant professor of environmental governance and Politics in the Geography, Planning and Environment Group at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Dr. Mewa Montenegro, Associate professor of Agroecology and Critical Technology Studies in the UCSC Environmental Studies Department.
Professors Adam Kahlo and Mewa Montenegro, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: That's great. Thank you.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Hi there.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: All right, why don't we begin by having each of you give our listeners a brief overview of who you are, what you do and study, and also say something about your colleagues on the article the Fantasy of Feeding the World.
Adam, why don't you go first?
Sure.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Well, I'm Adam Kahlo. I'm an assistant professor of Environmental Governance politics. I'm based in the Netherlands. And really, this is a collective work on a research group that MYWA has actually been really integral in founding, which is the Agroecology Research Action Collective. And so that's the group that really communicates about how to advance research into agroecology. And a couple of those members came together and decided to write this piece.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Yes. Hi, I'm Mayowa Montenegro. I'm an associate professor now in Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Back in 2017, colleagues and I who are invested in advancing the politics of a transformative agroecology came together and decided we wanted to organize ourselves to do some political education and some organizing around how we can best promote agroecology and food sovereignty, specifically in the Turtle Island North American context. And it is again, as Adam said, a small group of us who butted off and wrote this piece for Spectre magazine.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: So this is a some kind of study group or research group that you've organized?
[00:03:45] Speaker A: We're not a nonprofit. We have no 501c3 status, but we are a self organized group of scholars. There's about 80 of us on our listserv, about 40 more active members. But we, all of us, we do research everywhere from Malawi to Brazil to the Netherlands to local Santa Cruz Salinas Valley. But most of us are engaged in some form in either the Palo community practice donation within agroecology.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: So Maya, tell us, what is agroecology exactly?
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Well, I would say there's probably not an exact answer. One of the things I study are the politics of knowledge. So struggles between how different communities define things, including agroecology. So you might find folks who define it as the interactions of different the grasses and the plants in an agroecosystem, a very landscape and biophysically based definition. I found that on a nature paper recently.
Here at Santa Cruz we take a more transdisciplinary approach. So I'll share with you what we use at the center for Agroecology. And we define it as the integrative study of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic and social dimensions. And we embrace it as especially a participatory so meaning that the research is grounded in dialogue with farmers about what their needs and priorities are. That's how the research questions itself are decided upon and a politically engaged transformation of the food system. So we also importantly recognize that as scientists, agroecology is often the history is often brought back to like the 1980s to very famous and important, I would say protagonist of agroecology in the US but we want to recognize that we in fact are rediscovering in some ways what peasant social movements, and especially indigenous communities globally have used to nourish the land to reproduce the biological interactions that we are now characterizing through scientific techniques.
That is really what is at the heart of food sovereignty movements around the world today in promoting agroecology.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: What did you say in the article?
The enduring fantasy of feeding the world. And what exactly is that fantasy?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: I mean, I think the original motivation really comes from reading a series of opinion pieces in popular media that claim that intensive high yielding agriculture is actually the only feasible sustainable food system solution.
It's not uncommon to see defenses of kind of techno optimistic visions of food system change. But there appeared to be something new happening, which was a kind of hubristic assertion that we must accept the ills of industrial production, because any reduction in yields would lead to an increase in hunger and biodiversity loss. And so colleagues in this group, we started having conversations about this. And for me, I just wanted to kind of show how fatalistic this type of thinking is, because we know that the research proves time and time again that the food system is just too complex to reduce to a story of yields per acre. And it is unwise to equate the protagonists of sustainable food systems with the intensive production.
But other people in the group got involved, especially Maywa, and we talked about, well, what's the deeper question than just a debunking?
And the more interesting question is not why is this argument that intensive production is the best way to resolve both global hunger and environmental sustainability, but why is this argument persisting time and time again? Where did it really come from? And where does it maintain its legitimacy?
And so the fantasy of the feeding the world is an assumption in a very reductive way, that one can confidently link globalized commodity food production in one place with the resolution of global hunger in some abstract elsewhere. As Maywa always has told me, there is no global stomach. Hunger does not respond to the amount of global calories. That's in some easy to understand way. And so the idea of a fantasy here has this important double meaning where, number one, fantasy is not connected to reality.
According to the latest UN data, about 2.4 billion people, almost 30% of the global population, were moderately or severely food insecure. This is 2022, so we should at least be suspicious that we simply need to do more of the same.
And so that's kind of being unconnected to reality. But the fantasy is also powerful.
Stories and narratives, they compel people to act. And so this fantasy that says we need to boost productivity through highly extractive agriculture is kind of connecting that with one of our most commonly shared moral goods of feeding the hungry.
That's a powerful narrative that keeps people going.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: I mean, do you think that that's what the, the incentive is, the feeding the hungry? I'm sure that that some of the advocates of intensive agriculture feel that way, but there is a politics behind this, right? You know, I want to also talk about Malthus, Thomas Malthus. Maybe we should start there, because of course, these warnings basically have been going on for a long time.
I mentioned in the introduction the population bomb by Paul Ehrlich, which wasn't the first of these, these doom laden kinds of, of warnings. So you know, what's the background to all of this if, if I, we can get a little bit historical.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Malthus was an English political economist. His ideas have been incredibly influential, but especially since he, he wrote this essay on the principle of population in 1798.
In this essay he proposes that human population growth will expand exponentially over time, while food production only achieves linear growth. If you graph these two lines, exponential growth and linear growth, you'll see that the curve of exponential growth rapidly outstrips the food supply. The global population will starve and die.
This was somewhat of a mathematical extrapolation, but it was also something very real happening at the time in Georgian England. And he wasn't just talking in the abstract. So at this time in history, there were rapid enclosures of land in the British countryside.
There was the dawn of the Industrial revolution. Industrial capitalists seeking raw materials like wool for their coal powered textile mills. So the land was being enclosed to herd sheep.
New international trade rules that were enabling imports of cheap wheat from settler countries like the US and Australia.
So as a result, we were having waves of dispossessed peasants come from the countryside into the British cities. Those were the poor that Malthus was observing and talking about, disdainfully saying that the passion between the sexes leads the poor to produce more offspring than they can feed. So this is a very classist observation, obviously, and the implications here, excuse me, are important because while people had long ignored the poor way before Malthus, his calculations really helped establish as scientific fact that if you give the poor resources, they are simply going to end up right back in poverty.
To help the poor then is ironically to hurt the poor. And so we should craft state policy accordingly. He was of course wrong on many counts. And for folks who want to read a really good account of this, I can't do better than to suggest.
Our colleague in the Agroecology Research Action Collective, Michael Jahi Chapelle, has a book called Beginning to End Hunger. The introduction has just a fabulous concise history of Malthus. But one of the really funny things, if you think about it, that is on the theoretical front, there's a very weird idiosyncrasy. So among the groups that Malthus has been really influential with is not just demographers, but also evolutionary biology, many different biophysical sciences who have applied his theory to non human organisms. If we are to assume that as a general rule food increases linearly and population growth exponentially, as Chappelle puts it, should it not Also be true that the wealthy, who have ample food and resources at their disposal, should also respond by having more children such that they too would become poor. Would not their similarly uncontrollable passion lead to multiple descendants who constantly divide their antecedents wealth into ever dwindling piles? TRIALS Malthus theory has been applied to plants, bacteria and wildlife. But as Chappelle points out, what an odd quirk then, that of all living things on earth it should be rich humans. Only rich humans who do not obey the conditions of Malthus's theory.
That's a very odd, very funny thing. Only rich human beings will not outstrip the food supply. Now, since 1798, on the empirical front, very importantly, mountains and mountains of evidence show that that theory has also been wrong about population growth. As any good demographer will tell you, nation's population doesn't typically just continue to grow exponentially. We pass through things that are called the demographic transition, where birth rates, death rates decline as education and living standards rise. Things like maternal health, women's education, access to clean water and sanitation infrastructures. Those things matter a lot when it comes to birth rates. So these things aren't merely natural, they can be influenced through social policy, which Malthus was essentially bounding out of his analysis.
[00:13:54] Speaker C: Well, of course at the time I'm not sure that the poor laws were in effect yet, but as I recall, people were supposed to go back to where they came from, right. And they were supposed to be fed within their county or within their jurisdiction. There was a. The other thing I wanted to point out, of course, was that Malthus gave rise to Garrett Hardin's work and the tragedy of the commons, which is another one of those long standing myths which addresses again population, particularly in the global South.
One question though that arises from this is that if people who get, you know, who are better off as you just described them, are going to have less kids and I mean that's a parent. That's empirically been shown that that requires what was at least at one time called development.
And development hasn't worked so well.
But what are the mechanisms that will will improve people's conditions given our experience with failure, repeated failure in that area.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, it's a terrific question. There have been many different theories of development over the years and we find some of these frict.
I think we're currently seeing the 2025 manifestation of Go back centuries, if not longer. But I can kind of give a little insight as to where what I think the reaction that we had in this article Inspector was in a reaction to what we might call the ecomodern theory of development. But eco modernism is rooted in modernization theory. And that really comes out of a kind of a Cold war understanding that.
And there were many people at the time kicking this around. But one of the famous ones was this fellow named Rostow, Walter Rostow.
His essay was called the Stages of Economic Growth. And you can kind of tell what he was on about by the subtitle, which was a non Communist manifesto. So in this text he argues that states kind of ascend through a series of stages on their way to modernity and that the poor countries should roughly mirror the United States should go into mass consumption. A maturing middle class, suburbs sprawling around urban centers, a sedate and well behaved political democracy.
It was understood as a how to manual for avoiding communism.
And of course, in order to achieve this, the poor countries needed a course of Western injections. And our kind of. He's not an Agroecology Research Action Collective member, but a colleague of ours, Max Eil, writes about this in his book A People's Green New Deal.
So I'm kind of borrowing some of the language that he talks about Walt Rostow in. And he says they needed to have a how to manual to avoid communism and achieve development. The benighted societies of the south needed a course of injections. They needed Western technology.
They needed the book education to go along with it. A proper Protestant entrepreneurial spirit, a vibrant competitive urge, markets, innovation and foreign investment. So that is going to kind of magically catalyze and propel poor societies to achieve sustained economic growth in this framework of international trade. So it is very much the idea that the poor can achieve, can take off, right, and ascend the stages theory towards development.
It was also a fable, very, very silly, in fact, because Western countries, they could not simply replicate the model that Western countries had already trespassed. And other scholars, including folks like Samir Amin from Egypt and Walter Rodney in Guyana, they argued that in fact the only way that Europe was able to to have achieved the development that it had was through centuries of colonialism, primitive accumulation and the extraction of resources from the South.
So where was that resource base?
Where was the south from whom they were going to extract? Not everybody can just take off through these levels of development.
So they developed, or maybe develop is the wrong word there. They countered this fable of kind of the modernization theory with what we might call world systems theory, dependency theories, talking about how we live in a global economy, a world system in which the development of the north has been based on and predicated on the active underdevelopment of the global South. So there's no way that Bolivia is going to magically take off and modernize and catapult its way into a first world wealthy, privileged nation, followed by simply following what the British did because there was no backwater for Bolivia to exploit. And there has been many, many versions and iterations of this. But what we, what Max argues and what I think is very aligned with our claims in this article, in our essay, is that modernization has since undergone partly in reaction to these scholars who have said that doesn't make any sense. We live in a world system where there's colonialism and extraction from some places on the planet to others.
They've simply re upped their game. And they've responded to what is obviously environmental collapse, climate change, especially by cleaving off some very important narratives, especially around sustainability and justice. And we see a lot of that in what we call now the green version of it, which was what is eco modernism. And it includes some of the land sparing arguments that we need to save the planet and feed the world. But don't worry about that history of extraction and accumulation. And they don't really touch that. So I just want to extend, explain that kind of. The roots of this go way back into kind of countering communism and the politics of that development theory.
[00:20:32] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests today are Professors Adam Kahlo and Mya Montenegro, who along with a number of colleagues recently published an article about the enduring fantasy of feeding the world. And we have just been talking about, well, I guess it's 1950s, 1960s development theory, which has gone awry, but has since been replaced by modern versions, most of which assume that technology can reduce resource use and impact on the, on the environment.
And in so doing, we can continue to grow without destroying the planet.
Adam, you wanted to say add something to.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah, only just to say that whenever you see in many articles about the food system, the future of the food system, whenever they begin with, in order to feed a growing population by 2050, how are we going to feed the world? We need new technologies. It's really tapping into that story that Maywa has told either implicitly or not. And so I think that's kind of one of the key messages that we're talking about in this enduring fantasy of feeding the world is standing atop this legacy, this worldview.
[00:21:48] Speaker C: But you know, this, it's sort of interesting.
Scientists and, and a lot of this comes from scientists and economists and engineers. Right. You would imagine that they would be looking at the, the, the empirical data, and yet it doesn't seem as though they do. They just simply ignore it. So what really is motivate, what do you think is motivating this particular fantasy? Is it just simply ignoring the empirical material? Is it ideological? Or is it simply connected to the system in which we live in a way.
And that gives you an opportunity also to talk about industrial agriculture.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's two ways to go about this. One would be that there are kind of true believers of a kind of blinkered ecological theory that kind of limits the food system to a few variables. And if you do that, yields per acre, amount of land used for agriculture, number of people eating, total calories, then you can interpret those data and come to some kind of conclusion, particularly that we talk about, which is this land sparing hypothesis that if you're able to increase production intensity, then you can meet the global demand for food on less land, therefore you free up space somehow for carbon sequestering ecosystems elsewhere.
So, but you know, there's the conservation biology evidence even within the arguments of this kind of own theory, we kind of argue that this is very weak, or at least it shouldn't be the base of a unifying theory of how to organize the food system.
We know a lot about how global biodiversity does not exist only in vast tracts of pristine wilderness, but is dispersed across fragmented rural landscapes.
So ecological theory from island biogeography really show, and empirical evidence show that species need to travel across different landscapes and they travel across the agricultural matrix. And so that agricultural matrix needs to be diverse as well.
And so I think there's been two recent, just to give an example, long term multinational studies to test to see if land sparing works in practice, not just as a theory.
And there's in one study of 122 tropical nations over 15 years and another study of all global tropical dry forests over 20 years, they both found a strong association between increasing commodity production for export and forest area loss. So this is the exact opposite of the landsparing hypothesis. And the authors of this study conclude that these findings pose, pose a major challenge to leveraging land sparing under current trends in global agriculture and highlights the importance of considering market dynamics when designing policy interventions aimed at fostering sustainable outcomes from intensification. So to answer your question, Ronnie, this is one reason why this endures is that you're just looking at a very narrow lens of the conservation Biology. And for some reason that idea sticks to in your head that if we increase more, we can increase our intensity, then we'll be able to conserve land. That sounds like a good idea.
But the other kind of deeper claim would be that it's this kind of an unholy alliance between motivated conservation biologists and conservationists who really believe nature ought to be separated from humans, who see kind of this idea of production in one area of the world and wilderness in other. And I think that kind of creates an alliance for also agribusiness who likes this idea. And with these actors kind of aligning, they are able to try and reproduce the legitimacy for industrial production because that status quo benefits. A lot of different actors.
[00:25:49] Speaker C: Talk to us about industrial agriculture and, and what that entails and also the, the, the, the profit motives behind that. Okay, so I think it's helpful to give a, a broader context about what, you know, you're, you're critiquing and what underpins this fantasy.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: The term itself is quite interesting because I think most actors who are advocates for over practice industrial agriculture would not themselves use that term.
Already gotten kind of a bad rap. It's associated with fossil fuels and maybe you're polluting the planet.
You'll typically hear it used as conventional agriculture. So you see what's happening there with the narrative what is the convention is counterposed to organic, which should be seen as kind of strange and maybe quite impractical, just a utopian fantasy relative to the convention. Whereas if you look historically, what was conventional for most of human history, tens, thousands of years since domestication of plants was organic, that was the convention, but they've taken that term.
I often encourage my students to use the term industrial intentionally.
Importantly, I think industrial agriculture, it really encompasses systems based on logics of extraction, exploitation and control. It typically includes things like fossil fuels that enable the production of synthetic fertilizers and chemical inputs. So that's the things to provide nitrogenous inputs to the soil, things like herbicides and pesticides to keep weeds suppressed and to fend off the so called pests. Even pests is a word that we don't necessarily need to apply. These are simply insects who happen to like to eat the plants. We also like to eat techniques very importantly, like breeding plants that are designed to be well equipped for mechanical harvesting. One famous example is the tomatoes that were bred in California to be hopefully mechanically harvested. This was done in Davis. There's been a lot of work by the sociologist William Friedland on what we call the co production of Plant breeding and mechanization.
So that kind of, that the trinity of inputs, the fertilizers, the chemicals and the seeds have been really, really catalytic in not just changing the way that farmers are practicing on their farms, but you see in the political economy sense, rather than renewing all of those inputs through their production practices like we do in agroecology, where those would all be based on biological organisms and the inter interactions of biological life, to renew those processes, they have to purchase those things. So all of those, the fertilizer, the biological control and the seeds become commodities in the market. They start to approach these things in a capitalist market, which becomes then very, very important for another set of actors, which is the input industry.
Now we know them obviously by their, the big names, the Monsanto's, the Dow and dupont and John Deere, huge monopolistic corporations.
That, that's just on the input end, but all the way through the value chain.
Research by Philip Howard and others show that the value chain is concentrated into huge oligopolies. They're not monopolies, there's several of them, but they control value and then have a lot of power, exert power, including in policy. To your point about why don't things change in the entire food system, not just in the US but in, but globally.
[00:29:54] Speaker C: It's interesting to me that farmers by and large don't make money farming.
They're very dependent on the vagaries of the commodity markets and of course on the weather and other conditions. So they may have good years, they have bad years.
Many of them are in debt because they had to buy this equipment. They have all kinds of costs that they can't make up. And yet these big agribusinesses seem to do really well. So somewhere in the commodity chain, particularly on the production end, something is going on otherwise, right? Why be, why be in that particular business? What, what's happening there?
But on the other end, right on the output end somewhere these companies are making money.
And how does that happen?
[00:30:48] Speaker A: It didn't always happen when one, one really interesting part of our, our history in the not too recent past is in the 1930s as part of the original Farm Bill, the Agricultural Adjustment act under fdr, we actually had supply control, we had supply management and there were price floors and farmers were encouraged not to overproduce. So the supply was maintained. There were grain reserves and as a, as a result there was a guaranteed price for farmers. So they were not exceeding the costs of production.
So in a supply demand calculation, if you exceed the supply, the Price is going to go down. Beginning in the 50s and 60s, I believe Richard Nixon was instrumental here. They moved very much in the other direction.
A very famous quote from the Agricultural Department of Agriculture, Errol Butts, was fence row to fence row, we're going to blow the lid off of those supply constraints and instead produce as much as possible. There were a lot of reasons the US was doing this, including soft power where we can influence the planet geopolitically. And we might talk about the green revolution, but importantly, what that does to the price is it enables the price to collapse. So farmers are suddenly starting to see the farm gate prices get lower and lower. They have to keep producing more, driving them to either push down farm worker wages, adopt new technologies to stay ahead of falling prices, keep running on what's been called the technological treadmill just to afloat. But it was very attractive to these middlemen actors. I don't know if Jennifer talked to you about the grain traders like Cargill adm, That's Archer Daniels Midland, because they want to buy cheap, right? They want those farm prices coming off the farm, the crops, the soybeans, the wheat to be cheap because they then can make a big profit selling it on to the processors, the food manufacturers, the companies.
So each actor, those big companies can extract a profit in that long supply chain. By the time it gets to consumers, the price is very high. This is why we keep seeing the basket of foods go up. People are having a hard time feeding their families and farmers are still not staying afloat, working off farm jobs just to make a living. And it's because of the way that we've actually, through policy, through economic policy, forced structural overproduction to be normal in the US and the prices then are very low. And that's one of the key, I think, ways that we can see solutions too is intervening through economic policy and controlling the supply. It's very ironic, right, because Malthus is telling us we need to produce more and more to feed the world. We actually overproduce and have, have cheap food.
[00:33:57] Speaker C: I mean, there's also this irony, right, that, that big farmers, big industrial, industrial farms and the, and the companies, the, that you mentioned rely on exports, heavily on exports, right? And Trump's tariff policies have now more or less put a spike in that.
And so, you know, where, where they're going, what they're going to do with all of these surpluses is a interesting question. I wanted to mention before we take a break that I remember Earl Butts, I'm old enough to remember him. You're listening to Sustainability Now. My guests today are Professors Maywa Montenegro and Adam Callow, who do work on agroecology and the political economy of the global food system. And we've just been talking about the. Basically, I guess it's the profit motive in American large scale agriculture.
Why don't we turn now to the argument that you're making in your article about agroecology. And I guess it would be appropriately scaled, although appropriate is not a great word. Farming. I also want to sort of mention that one of the arguments about the feeding the billions is that there are too many smallholders in the world.
There are a lot of people who still depend on small plots to provide food for themselves and maybe something that they can sell.
So maybe you can develop your particular argument about a move to agroecology.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Well, I'll start with restating. One of the main arguments is that if you are going to try and design a food system around feeding hungry people, then the most important place to start is to declare who is that target of who is being fed, in which case through which production mechanisms.
When farmers no longer have these surpluses to sell, where is that production, that surplus going? Just because you're producing more doesn't mean you're feeding someone. It needs to be more context specific. You need to actually define the mechanisms. And I think I accept that there's an intuitive sense that that more is better. But we should also tap into another powerful political intuition that the reason people are hungry, the real reason, is not because there isn't enough. It's clear there's abundance all around us. And the distribution through politics and power is really definitive here. So that's really core to agroecology. And I think that kind of leads to an argument that, well, if we're not just maximizing our agricultural system around yields and land area under production, we can start to fulfill many other values that can be democratically decided.
Values of nourishment, of fulfilling cultural traditions, of ecological restoration, self sufficiency, community resilience, community well being, all of these are just way better alternatives than maximizing yields. And they don't have to be mutually exclusive. So it's so clear to me that if you're analyzing the food system the way we do, and even some of the people that we are criticizing where they say, look at the environmental and social problems of industrial agriculture, that the goal should be to try and find a food system that accomplishes these multiple values at the same time.
I'll just bring up another interesting recent study and then pass it to Mayowa. But in a recent paper in Science by Rasmussen and other colleagues, it's a meta analysis. So it's examining findings from 24 other studies, but that spans 11 countries and over 2,600 farms. And what they do is they measure the effect of farmland diversification practices. So things like laying hedgerows, polycropping, non crop diversification, soil conservation, these are kind of the bedrock agronomic dimensions of agroecology. And they want to measure in what cases do they deliver multiple values of not just yields, but also food security, human well being, biodiversity, ecosystem services.
Their key finding here is that when you maximize the amount of diversification practices akin to agroecological management, that's when you get the most positive outcomes, where you get those multiple benefits, especially food security.
On the other hand, the authors conclude when you just do intensification, they find that agricultural intensification is rarely found to lead to simultaneous positive ecosystem services and well being outcome. So you know, we can treat landscapes as a factory that has a certain logic, but it's a very brittle one. And I think that just like in, you know, I don't want to borrow from capitalist logic but if we in the investors know that we should be diversifying, why don't we apply that to agriculture?
[00:38:44] Speaker C: Did you want to say something Mario, about this?
[00:38:47] Speaker A: We could talk for days about this. I love agroecology but I just want to say a tiny bit about you asked like what what was our proposal for solutions? And I think the very mechanistic.
But also that's what also gives it quite a bit of appeal. I think we've talked with, I've talked a little bit on, on social media with one of our journalistic colleagues at Tom Philpot and I think there is a, an allure of this fantasy is it. You can almost visualize it in your head, right? Like if you could just like spare half of the planet or that big old forest over here and just put agriculture over here, then you've, that's the best of both worlds, right? It's a win win and you should just intensify the production and then save nature. And that's, that's quite a brilliant strategy and on some hand and you can almost see it and therefore it almost like logically seems to add up and what agroecologists have long argued that there's a lot of problems ecologically baked into that bifurcation because for example the pesticides that are used to intensify production on that half of the planet, they don't stay there, they spill over into the so called conserved sites and so that the pesticide doesn't stay contained. The other problem, and it maybe is not often talked about, but is extremely, I think rooted in racism. And so that spared nature is not actually natural and human free, is not pristine and unpopulated. This is a colonial imaginary of the forest that don't have Amazonian people in the tribes, that don't have people who have actually worked that land for millennia. So that is part of, I think what agroecology is trying to argue is that the integration of wildlife or biological life and production can create a finer grain in the systems of production and conservation of biodiversity that doesn't have to have such harsh dividing lines between what the landscape does. So it's kind of landscapes that work for food and people. We can talk more about the definitions of agroecology, but I just wanted to add that piece.
[00:41:25] Speaker C: Well, you know, I mean, there's a lot of social complexity in what you're talking about, right? And social complexity requires some kind of systems analysis. Not the, the mechanistic one that's, that's usually put forth, but a better understanding of how all of these things are interconnected and that requires interdisciplinarity. And of course our world is, is, is organized in terms of disciplines. Conservation biologists, I mean some of my best friends are. But you know, conservation biologists don't really want to struggle with social complexity. It's not part of their expertise. They don't get promotions and publications out of it.
So there is a sense in which the whole sort of agricultural research system has an orientation that is by and large not towards the kinds of values that Adam was mentioning. And the other thing of course is these values can't be monetized or at least it's extremely difficult to monetize them. And if you can't put a price on them, you can't include them in the calculations. They don't show up in terms of any kinds of benefits.
There's obviously a difficult question.
The world is set up in a particular way, the economic system and the agricultural system. And what you're arguing for is a much more socially complex arrangement. Now how do we get to that?
[00:42:49] Speaker B: Well, I really find home in people who ask that question in their research. So a lot of the critics agroecology gets is that you're just romanticizing small holder agriculture. You're romanticizing, you know, Michael Pollan's farms that just couldn't be further from the truth.
The science of agroecology. The people I work with ask that same question.
What are the economic, ecological and political barriers that are preventing from the agroecological practices that we know can produce abundant quantities of food with little resources? How do we make that more, how do we make that attractive? How do we make it politically feasible?
All of us work on this in different ways. So I'll just share mine, which is.
Is in my work. I work a lot about land politics. And I really believe, traveling over the US and now in Europe, there's an abundance of young people and new farmers who want to work in the land. They don't find the work in the city as something that's entirely compelling. And they have the skills to do farming agroecologically, but the land prices are too high, so they end up on kind of marginal lands. And so if this goal of kind of reversing the aging farmer population was taken more seriously to kind of intervene in the way land is controlled, then that price of land goes down, which actually gets to that price question in which you actually can produce food that is going for these different values and not just the highest profit. So that's like a lot of kind of root cause analysis. And it forces you to get to the some big questions. But I feel like that's just much more interesting than saying this will never work, therefore we must accept factory farming.
[00:44:32] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I agree with that. You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host. My guests today are Professors Adam Kahlo and Maywa Montenegro. And we've just been talking now about.
Well, we're talking about the fantasy of feeding the world of industrial agriculture, providing enough food so that the 10 billion don't go hungry.
And we've now been talking about agroecology, and I guess smallholder farms would be the right term that really use agroecological techniques to promote biodiversity as well as increase food production. You mentioned in the article, I think that there have been a number of studies that show that smaller farms are more productive. Can you expand on that one in particular at that point?
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, in general, theoretically, when you have a smaller area, your labor value goes a lot further.
You also have a lot easier time of producing multiple crops.
And so when you actually do yield comparisons among small farms versus these larger farms, the difference between productivity is fairly minimal.
Also, these smaller farms, just because of their parceling out the way they're arranged in space, is going to have more biodiversity without Necessarily being agroecological because you have fences and hedgerows and you're not growing all the way to your parcel. If you're a small holder, you're saving some of it. And so if you have a landscape that is built up of smaller parcels, then you're going to be able to be competitive in terms of production because of those two variables. And then I just, you know, before passing to Maywa, I want to say that, you know, I think the world of agroecology is open. The smallholder peasants are kind of the key protagonists in agroecology, but it doesn't mean that there can't be vertical and horizontal integration of agroecological farming where farmers are collaborating, pooling resources, being involved in some types of mechanization or processing.
I think it doesn't have to be equated one to one with just a world of smallholder farmers in a rich tapestry or industrial farms and no people in the landscape.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: Marwa, a moment ago you mentioned that most of your conservation biology friends are not really interested in social dimensions. And I, I think Adam and I have both been very lucky to encounter those conservation biologists who. That's their jam, right? They're very interested in like, wow. No, actually we need a transdisciplinary approach and I think that is the vanguard of how agroecology is now defining.
The frontier of what we might call a transformative practice is that it cannot just be rooted in a scientific or biophysical agronomy, agronomy or a ecology. It needs to be integrative.
So people like Claire Cremen, who is now in Canada, our mutual mentor Alistair Iles, folks like John Vandermeer and Yvette Perfecto, who are at the University of Michigan, who are conservation biologists, mathematical ecologists, but are very much bound up in how is this rooted in a peasant perspective.
I think we have very good counter examples of scientists who are thinking politically and socially to your point, about some of the studies that show counter evidence to support the benefits of an agroecological approach. There was a recent paper in Science published by Folks Want to Look It Up? It's by Rasmussen and colleagues and it was a big study of 11 countries across about 2,655 farms. And they measured the effects of farmland diversification practices. So things like laying hedgerows, polycropping, non crop diversification, soil conservation. And they weren't just looking at yields. Right? This is very important. They were looking at human well being, at biodiversity, at what we call ecological services.
And the key relevant finding here is that maximizing those types of diversification practices produce the most positive outcome. So we weren't just getting food production, which is very important because we've established early on that just boosting yield doesn't necessarily lead to people getting fed. We actually had those multiple benefits to the wildlife, to food security, and to the production. So I think what we're trying to make an argument for is we need kind of different metrics by which we measure success.
[00:49:33] Speaker C: We're coming to the end of our time together, and I know there's a lot that we haven't talked about. So are there any things that you want to bring up about your work?
[00:49:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, if people are interested in some of the work we do, I write about this stuff in a more friendly way on a newsletter called Land Food Nexus.
That's Adam Kahlo at Substack. And then I also make a podcast called the Landscapes Podcast, which interviews people who are working in this domain, kind of this transdisciplinary way. And the other kind of nod, I would say is, well, what is a hunger strategy that doesn't just emphasize yields? And Raj Patel has been doing some recent writing about Brazil's contemporary hunger policy, which really says, okay, yield is one part of the story, but if we measure success by how many people are involved in the different policies that we can change so that the people who are the most vulnerable gain access to food. Now we're being more specific about feeding people which people in which ways, rather than just feeding the world. And I think that's a great kind of counterexample to doing math about how much land is needed to produce how many calories.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: We have a website, a new website for the Agroecology Research Action Collective. You can just Google it, or it's agroecology researchcollective.org and we try to keep up with posting things. I've just recently put up, actually, another piece by Raj Patel. This one is from Boston review comparing RFK's MAHA with. With Mamdani's food hunger policy in New York City, which is a very interesting contrast of a hyper individualized approach to wellness versus collective care. How do we root collective care in structural change? And I think that one's well worth checking out. And. Yeah, and really encourage folks to listen to Adam's Landscapes podcast, though. It's terrific.
[00:51:41] Speaker C: Okay, well, listen, thank you so much for being my guests on Sustainability Now.
[00:51:46] Speaker B: Thank you, thank you.
[00:51:48] Speaker C: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dr. Adam Kahlo, Assistant professor of environmental governance and politics in the Geography, Planning and Environment Group at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Dr. Maya Montenegro, Associate professor of agroecology and Critical Technology Studies in the UCSC Environmental Studies Department.
They and several colleagues recently published a challenge to the claim that only industrial agriculture will be able to prevent global hunger and famine over the coming decades.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station and keep it going.
And so until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thrust seas.
[00:53:00] Speaker B: Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Good plan.
