By Dr. Bernadette Tobin
A Review of: Food Crash: why organic is the only way forward
A farmer who is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life? How so?
In November 2016 Pope Francis issued new statutes for the Pontifical Academy for Life. He directed that the Academy, which was originally founded in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to defend and promote ‘the value of human life and the dignity of the person’, was to widen the scope of its research and teaching so as to include not only “the care of the dignity of the human person at different stages of life”, but also “the promotion of a quality of human life that integrates its material and spiritual value with a view to an authentic ‘human ecology’ that helps recover the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe”.
The year before, in 2015, Pope Francis had issued his encyclical letter Laudato Si’. In that letter, he made a major contribution to a tradition of teaching which goes back at least to the 12th century, to the writings of Francis of Assisi.
The earlier Francis, in his Canticle of the Creatures, had called the earth ‘our sister, our mother’ who cries out because of the harms we have inflicted on her by an irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.
The later Francis claimed that the external deserts of the world are growing because the ‘internal deserts’ in the human heart have become so vast. For this reason, he said, the ecological crisis is itself a ‘summons to interior conversion’. And he added that some committed and prayerful Christians, excused by ‘realism and pragmatism’, tended to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive, choosing not to change their habits. What both need, Franics said, is an ‘ecological conversion’.
And so, it should not have been surprising that one of the people Francis appointed to the newly-refreshed Pontifical Academy was an internationally-known and widely-respected agronomist, an expert in organic farming, someone who had spent his life not only cultivating a farm in Bavaria (originally, using industrial or ‘conventional’ techniques) but also working for three years in Haiti and in other parts of the world with people who do not enjoy our western prosperity.
That ‘farmer’ is Felix zu Löwenstein. His book, Food Crash: why organic is the only way forward, was originally written and published (in 2011) in German. Only recently has it been translated into English and thus made available to an English-speaking audience.
A food crash is a collapse of the global food system. The thesis of Food Crash can be stated simply: the world will not be able to feed its people, there will be a collapse in the world food system, unless we turn from ‘conventional’ farming to organic farming and unless organic farming undergoes significant development. Conventional farming (often still referred to as ‘industrial’ farming) is the form of agriculture practiced by the majority of farmers in industrialized nations. It uses all the new possibilities offered by agricultural technologies, agrochemicals and genetic engineering; it is capital-intensive (because seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and feed have to be brought into the farm from outside) and labor-intensive (because technical progress requires higher production per hectare and per hour worked).
The term ‘organic farming’ originally referred to farming’s use of organic matter as the primary source of soil health and plant nutrition in contrast to the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers in conventional farming. Today organic farming should be understood as embodying four principles; the principle of health (that it should sustain and enhance the health of the soil, plant, animal, human and planet as one and indivisible); the principle of ecology (that it should be based on living ecological systems and cycles, work with them, emulate them, and help sustain them); the principle of fairness (that it should build on relationships that ensure fairness with regard to the common environment and life opportunities); and the principle of care (that it should be managed in a precautionary and responsible manner to protect the health and well-being of current and future generations and the environment).
The ‘green revolution’ promised that only by employing the methods of industrial farming which include the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, genetic engineering, etc, would we be able now, and in the future, to feed the world’s growing population. To anyone brought up on the notion of the ‘green revolution’, the thesis of Food Crash is therefore challenging and unsettling. But that reaction might be explained by agribusiness and its lobbying in the political domain: this typically works against the development of knowledge and awareness of how wasteful are our lifestyles and how undesirable are our ways of using land and producing foods (not to mention our individual dietary habits). Food Crash provides a wonderful tool for dispelling that ignorance. Full of technical detail, it is immensely readable.
Food Crash starts with the facts of world hunger and asks whether insufficient production per acre of arable land is the cause. Dr Löwenstein argues against putting our trust in agribusiness as the solution: he argues for what he calls ‘ecological intensification’ as the basis for food production. And he sets out a range of instruments for uncoupling agricultural and food economy from its current unreliable basis in industrial farming and for shifting to a sustainable basis in organic farming.
The subject matter of Food Crash is complex. Connections are made between how soil is nourished or depleted, why non-economic criteria should be included in world trade agreements, how patent and tax laws need rethinking, why organic farming needs to develop just as much sophistication as has conventional farming.
The argument is dotted with illustrations: for example, the success story of a partnership between small farmers and scientists in the Philippines; the political causes of the potato famine that drove so many Irish to Australia; the usury trap for farmers in the ‘third’ world; why jumping ‘cold turkey’ into organic methods as happened in Sri Lanka is not a good thing; and about the complicated story of Haiti where international aid generally fosters dependency but where some individual initiatives show that it is possible to provide aid so as to generate sustainable success.
Dr Löwenstein puts forward ways in which we non-specialists can evaluate the range of solutions advanced in debates that rely on technical arguments: about whether human activity is the cause of climate change, about whether setting aside productive arable land for the growing of biofuels such as rape-seed is overall a good thing, about why speaking the ecological truth requires internalizing the ‘external’ costs of goods and services. A story about alternative contracts for waste disposal in the streets of Naples is his telling example of this last question; imagine the difference in two bids for a contract, one which internalizes all the true costs of the final disposal of the waste, the other which ignores (‘externalizes’) the social costs of, say, dumping the waste into the sea. Which is likely to be the successful bid?
He is instructive about how cattle and sheep have gone from being food partners – that convert grasslands unsuitable for the direct production of human food into meat and milk – to being food competitors of humans, living on energy-concentrated feeds that, though they bring high yields of meat and milk, are not good for the health of the animals themselves (let alone the human consumers). Not only does this represent a failure of our responsibility to be good stewards, co-creators of the world in which these animals live with us, but it’s also no good for human health. There is a relationship, though it’s complex, between the affluent’s world’s over-eating on the one hand and the impoverished world’s hunger on the other. Dr Löwenstein’s book opens up the complexities of that relationship to the ordinary reader.
And so the crucial issues are protecting soils, mitigating climate change, adopting diets and lifestyles adjusted to the capacities of the global ecosystem, and enacting equitable policies for access to food resources.
Felix zu Löwenstein is not ‘holier than thou’; he never preaches. He himself was an industrial (or as he says ‘conventional’ ) farmer for many years! Rather, his style, though serious, is self-deprecatory, often humorous. The references are all there for the experts, but the book is addressed to a lay audience. We should eat less meat, use fewer scissors (to cut open plastic bags) and more knives (to slice vegetables!) …and waste less. Who needs to change? You and me.
Some ‘farmer’!
Dr. Bernadette Tobin
Food Crash: why organic is the only way forward
By Felix Löwenstein
Acres, 2024. ISBN 978-0-911311-12-9