Are small farms a smarter solution to reducing hunger, climate change?

This is the third part of a continuing series columns on the topic of genetic manipulation, agro-giants, and the right to farming. For part 1, read here. For part 2 read here. Last column, we re-acquainted readers with Maurice Robinette, a fourth-generation rancher and farmer from the Lazy R Ranch near Cheney. Robinette with his few hundred heads of cattle and calves on 1,500 acres is well-read on the global situation and the Northwest dilemma of more and more push to get genetically-engineered hay, AKA Round-up Ready alfalfa, and even Round-up Ready wheat planted in our farmland. Organic farmers and ranchers can kiss the farm goodbye if these Monsanto-sourced crops get near their fields because contamination is the vessel of collapse for all organic fields. Wind, rain, and pollinators can’t be controlled, and then so-called cross-contamination results. Robinette, his daughter Beth and thousands of growers in Washington can’t afford to mitigate if this contamination occurs. Derivatives traders, banks, seed monopolies, pesticide and fertilizer companies do not care much about the peasant farmers and smallholders who have the answers to food security and climate change mitigation in their respective regions. Corporations headquartered in countries like Canada, the U.S. and China and many in the European Union are putting Africa on their bulls-eyes to grab land by the millions of acres to grow commodity crops to feed the biofuel and animal-fed industries. Puerto Rican journalist Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, who directs the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety, tells us that about 70 percent of the water Homo sapiens use goes to crops and farm animals; plus, agriculture covers more land than any other human activity. On top of this, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agriculture employs at least half of the world’s workforce. “It’s evident that no economic sector will ever create as many jobs as farming does. Agriculture therefore must be at the very center of any project for revolutionary social change,” Ruiz-Marrero writes. What’s fantastic about Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network (www.wsffn.org), AGRA Watch, and dozens of GMO and organic farming watchdog groups and organizations supporting sustainability, is they have folk like Robinette not only a part of the conversation but also in the midst of strategy planning. For Maurice and Beth Robinette, the global 40,000-foot perspective is not only NOT lost on their own frames, but they are some of the first to broach the global landscape tied to GMOs and GE technology killing hope and farmer-independence and interdependence. Here’s a typical example of the large affect the GMO seed and industrial AGRA model presents. We have Iowa-based investor Bruce Rastetter and crony investors in the industrial ag giant AgriSol Energy putting their money behind 800,000 acres of farmland in Tanzania, home to 162,000 people. The proposed site is populated by former refugees from neighboring Burundi, most of whom are part of several generations of families who have successfully set down roots by farming the land for more than four decades . The deal between AgriSol and the Tanzanian government will displace almost 162,000 against their will. Unfortunately, as I’ve talked with Maurice over the past decade, this scenario is repeated in many countries in Africa. When the GMO-taint hits Eastern Washington hay, grain, produce, fruit and livestock producers, the same sort of disenfranchisement will occur. Farmers need help with small loans and insurance for climate-related damage caused to crops, and Maurice knows the sustainable model is about small and mid-sized farms and ranches, not huge industrial models AGRA and Monsanto and others in the corporate world are forcing onto communities. GMO vs. small farms? Who wins? A new report given to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva pushed hard on the point that agro-ecology is the solution, not top-down, GE-driven solutions from outfits like the Gates Foundation. “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” the report states. The solutions rest with farmers and ranchers like Robinette, as well as with smallholder farmers. Please read my recent DTE article on Brazilian activist who spoke Washington recently on the power of small farmers, here. They are the majority — the world’s hungry are more than capable of growing food. So this “net” increase in global food production, the report states, won’t guarantee the end of hunger. It’s about access, and the poor aren’t getting access to the commodities the West and China are gobbling up. Lazy R stays in business if it stays economically sustainable. That’s through the organic and environmentally-friendly ranching practices they use which add value to the product, Robinette and his daughter keep saying. The solution is to develop small farms and ranches that are agro-ecological so the families, whether outside Cheney or in the middle of Tanzania, can increase productivity and work with environmental tipping points, as well as tie into climate change – storing carbon in the soil, fixing nitrogen in the crops and using less fossil fuel. I’ve been talking with Maurice for years about secret test fields and now the unabashed open fields of genetically modified alfalfa, patented by Forage Genetics (owned by Monsanto Corporation), throughout California and now recently spreading like a locus invasion on thousands of acres of in the Columbia Basin, Kittitas County, and near Walla Walla. “I suspect contamination is inevitable,” Robinette said in the Crosscut article. “Someone nearby will plant GMO alfalfa or someone will unknowingly sell me contaminated alfalfa and accidentally contaminate me. It is genetic trespass and there is nothing you can do about it — bees will pollinate wherever they want to. You can’t stop them.”