When Big Change Takes on Big Ag
Part 3: Is the Food System Transition Campaign Going Down the Same Climate Idealism Dead End?
I attended the annual Forum for the Future of Agriculture event in Brussels this week. It is an event where the dreamers and idealists are given center-stage to promote their visions and insights into the future of agriculture and the food system. It seemed like everyone at the conference agreed that a food transition (away from chemical crop protection, fertilizers and conventional farming techniques) was a foregone conclusion. I couldn’t help but notice how yet another transition movement was heading down the same path as the recently failed climate campaign and energy transitions. So how did Big Change fail then, and how might the same issues undermine the food system transition campaign?
This is Part 3 of an ongoing series on how Big Change is imposing their transition strategies in an attempt to disrupt Western political systems. Part 1 defined Big Change as a monolithic complex of forces and interest groups that thrive on endless transition strategies to push for massive social, economic and political disruptions. The last part looked at how and why the Big Change climate campaign and their energy transition strategies failed. This third part will examine whether their campaign for a food system transition will meet the same demise and consider if Big Change is listening to a key player in that strategy, farmers. Part 4 will be a case study on how Michael Bloomberg could create a Big Change infrastructure from scratch for less than two billion dollars.
At the Forum for the Future of Agriculture, Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission European Commission Director General for DG CLIMA, presented the EU’s recent “Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming” regulation. From the perspective of climate change regulators, it seems that farmers exist to grow carbon stores, not food. After Kurt’s keynote, the bean counters all came out with their own agriculture carbon calculations. Afterall, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But what exactly are they managing? The financialization of soil, carbon and nature are just further examples of how detached leaders are from what farmers actually do. Their metrics reminded me of the “Quick Fix Doctors” from the carbon emission trading scheme, building great solutions to answer the wrong questions.
My favorite quote of the conference came from Martin Stuchtey, the founder of the Landbanking Group, saying that “nature needs to be treated like an infrastructure project”. This reminded me of the optimism of the geo-engineers ready to take on the climate and “fix” Mother Nature. Once again, a great solution to answer the wrong question.
So what is the right question? Why didn’t anyone at this conference ask the farmers what they need? As in years past, a full day of speakers and panels at the Forum for the Future of Agriculture did not include a single farmer to voice their concerns. No, the experts and gurus thought they could speak on behalf of the agricultural sector and the food chain, shaping farmers’ needs to fit their own dogma while ignoring the interests of the most important link in the chain.
At times, some of the comments toward conventional agriculture at this Brussels event were downright offensive. Sandrine Dixson-Declève, the Global Ambassador for the Club of Rome and Executive Chair of Earth4All, did not earn any compliments from discussions during the coffee break when she crowed that organic produce is now cheaper than conventional (due to the high price of fertilizer following the US-Iran war). But what did we seriously expect? No one in the room was expecting a speaker from the Club of Rome to be sensitive to the plight of real people.
In the same way that Big Change failed to listen to the concerns of consumers and real people in crafting their solutions to the wrong questions on their climate campaign and energy transitions, the dreamers, idealists and activists plotting out their food system transition are working from their echo-chamber and not asking the farmers for their advice. Big Change’s cosmopolitan opinions of farmers are even more demeaning than the climate campaigners view of consumers: “Just pay them a short-term subsidy and that will be enough to make them go away and keep their tractors away from my office.”
To Big Change, farmers will just have to adapt to the new rules as we all set out on implementing our food system transition. Consumers will have to change their eating habits (maybe only meat on Mondays?) and the food industry will have to retool to adapt to the new reality. What could possibly go wrong?
It might not be a bad idea for Big Change activists to be asking the farmers what they need and want, and maybe these activists should also expand the sources of the advisers they are listening to. … And it would probably help if they were a little less arrogant in approaching the issue.
What do Farmers Want?
Farmers want to earn enough to make a living, protect their soil and land and safely bring the harvest in. They don’t wake up in the morning and think of how they can contribute to the great food system transition. They would love to save money using fewer inputs and less labor, but they also need solutions that will work. If they try something and it fails to perform, they will not use it again. They want better seeds, fewer weeds and a secure access to water and fertilizer. One thing most farmers absolutely hate is the amount of paperwork and delays they face with regulatory compliance, as they seem to spend more time at a desk than in the field.
So what is Big Change promising farmers? More paperwork, especially if their main job is now “carbon farming”. The Big Change campaigns to block GMOs and gene editing will restrict farmers from the best available seed technologies. Their strategy to ban herbicides like glyphosate not only restricts weed control, it also inhibits a farmer’s means to protect the soil with complex, multi-species cover crops and no-till farming (so they will release more carbon and moisture via tillage while requiring more fertilizer … unless, of course, if Big Change succeeds in restricting fertilizer use). As for access to water and irrigation, essential in a warmer climate, let’s not forget the almost annual attacks in France by militant peasant groups on farmers who try to build irrigation ponds to capture the winter rain. So the Big Change food system transition campaign will make it harder for farmers to make a living, to protect their soil and land and to bring in the harvest – the opposite of everything farmers need.
“It’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”
Farmers are not the only ones who will suffer from the Big Change food system transition.
Consumers will have to pay more (just like the energy transitions consequence).
People will eat fewer fruits and vegetables, not because of fear of Big Change’s contrived pesticide risk campaign, but because of high prices and lower food production supply.
This will have a knock-on effect on public healthcare costs as diets deteriorate.
As more farmers abandon their land or shift to agroforestry (exactly what Big Change wants in their campaign to re-wild farmland), rural communities will suffer as more economic activity leaves these agricultural regions.
The food processing and manufacturing industries will struggle to maintain secure supplies, not just from fewer farmers but also from increased risks from crop failures. Costs will go up.
This will affect retailers as they face longer supply chains, less price stability and access to quality produce.
All of this because a small group of well-funded activists just wanted to ban GMOs and pesticides. Big Change clearly does not realize how integrated the food system is.
What is infuriating is not only that Big Change is ignoring all of these issues, but that they will celebrate many of the negative consequences as they advance their transition strategy toward their real goal: a short-chain, local, organic food system without industry scale and involvement. Agroecology is essentially Marxism applied to the food chain. This transition is presented as inevitable and urgent, a foregone conclusion everyone has to accept, and Big Change, once again, does not care about the consequences, but only about winning this campaign.
Big Tech to the Rescue
Big Change is imposing their ideal-driven transition on the food system, without science-driven innovation. But given the dogmatic handcuffs these activists have placed on farmers (affecting the rest of the food chain), Big Tech is trying to find solutions and quick fixes.
Rather than fighting the finality logic of the food system transition, like the transition to renewable energy, researchers are trying to introduce new technologies to help adapt to the appropriated agricultural solutions (that are now deemed unacceptable by the self-appointed transition architects). Like the Smart Grid that was developed to deal with renewable power production inefficiencies (that benefit the affluent at a cost to the average consumer), farmers are now being offered high tech solutions to deal with what used to be minor problems.
A new era in agriculture is being rushed forward, including precision farming with AI decision-making tools and on-site sample analyses, drones to spray and measure yields, self-driving combines to better utilize land use … When a Big Change activist mentions vertical farming or digital labelling, everyone gets excited. These are all amazing emerging innovations to deal with problems that had never been serious or considered until Big Change started to obstruct how farmers farmed.
Like the expensive energy transition solutions, if you are wealthy ag-pioneer, own your land outright and like to play with new gadgets, these transition technologies will do the trick. But most farmers are struggling to make it to the next harvest. They cannot afford to invest in all of these Big Tech solutions for a low-tech operation. And by the way, how certain are we that Big Change peasant farmers, the ones who stormed French irrigation ponds as symbols of some undefined agro-industry, won’t start shooting drones out of the sky because of unfair competition with their tiny, permaculture or biodynamic plots?
Like the transition to electric vehicles, a great technology whose time has not yet come, Big Change will force the (too early) adaptation of these emerging agriculture technologies to speed up their transition timeline. As they develop and the food system adapts, then these technologies can be gradually implemented with continuous improvements and innovations (what industry production stewardship advocates consider as a “transition”). And they will develop according to what farmers need, and not to what some well-funded activists want.
Sure, Deere and Co, Microsoft and other major companies (all sponsoring the Forum for the Future of Agriculture events) will do well when these emerging technologies are widely adopted (when every farmer has a fleet of drones). But most farmers won’t or will suffer from the setbacks of developing emerging solutions that should have been given more time to evolve into an affordable, practical and successful solution to real problems. Once again, Big Change, with its “No Time to Lose” transition urgency, won’t let that happen.
So will the food system transition go the same way as the climate crisis energy transition? Surely some good things will come from it, but they would have in any case, just in their own time. But more farmers will go deeper in debt, abandon the fields or rotate to other, less consumer oriented crops. Markets will suffer supply shocks, affecting consumers and the rest of the food chain.
The campaign to impose a food system transition is just one further example of how the arrogance and hubris of Big Change puts humanity on another unnecessary collision course. Like the demise of their climate campaign, the public will react negatively to Big Change’s demands. It won’t just be tractors in front of government offices. Food and energy are seen in the West as basic rights. Nobody wants Big Change to go into their cupboards any more than they wanted them to turn down their thermostats.
Part 4 of the Big Change series will look at how a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg can single-handedly build a movement to impose his will. If you have two billion dollars in spare change, you too can create a movement to change the world.