What's Wrong with American Agriculture [View All]

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What's Wrong with American Agriculture
By Jane Smiley, novelist and Professor of English at Iowa State
The Huffington Post, August, 2006
Straight to the Source

In the late eighties, I wrote a novel called A Thousand Acres. Everyone thought it was about incest and "King Lear". To me, those were plot elements that I was using in service to the theme, which concerned the transformation of the midwestern American landscape from a unique, diverse, and rather fragile natural ecosystem that supported methods of European animal and grain farming imported by German, English, and Scandinavian farmers during the nineteenth century to a denuded and lifeless "food" factory in which a few crops (corn, soybeans, hogs, and beef) and the money that could be made from them pushed every other consideration of human endeavor and biodiversity to the margins, or snuffed them out entirely.

My book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and made into a movie. American agriculture got worse.

In the early nineties, I wrote another novel about farming called Moo, a comic novel that took place on the campus of a land grant university. While researching Moo, I discovered BSE, which was only just then (1992) emerging in the UK as a relative of scrapie, a form of brain-wasting disease that occurs in sheep. As far as I know, the references to BSE in Moo were the first to appear in the US. The characters in Moo discuss the practice of feeding cows, normally vegetarians, the animal byproducts of sheep farming. They are appalled. And it still seems like a no-brainer. If cows eat offal and then people eat cows, a certain proportion of people will become ill with sheep and cow diseases, and, voila, scrapie crossed two species barriers - to cows and to humans - because the agriculture corporations either didn't know what they were doing or didn't care. Nevertheless, American agriculture got worse.

After I left Iowa and started writing about other things, the ag companies (according to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and the film "The Future of Food"), continued to perpetrate vicious idiocies, and to do so in a more and more aggressive manner, challenging the rights, and the abilities, of people in all parts of the world to have any say in the nature and composition of the food we put into our bodies. They have done so, as far as I can tell, solely for profit. They have exhibited greed that crosses over from mere selfish immoral criminality into actual insanity.

Here's an example. By the time I was writing A Thousand Acres, it had been apparent for some twenty-five or thirty years that insecticides and herbicides were contaminating the landscape and the water supply, killing off wildlife, destroying fertility in males and females of all species, and causing disease in the farmers themselves and their families. The common sense solution to this increasing problem would have been to acknowledge the destructive power of these unnatural chemicals, and to have shifted American agriculture away from their use. The ag companies, however, preferred to remake the ecosystem so that farmers would use more chemicals rather than fewer; they genetically modified seed to make it resistant to an herbicide, Round-up, that when applied would destroy every living plant around it except the proprietary seed plants also owned by the corporation that formulated Round-up. This is exactly analogous to an act of war against the natural ecosystem. It produced acts of war against the farmers, too, because Monsanto aggressively pursued royalty payments from anyone and everyone who had those genetically modified plants in their fields, no matter how they got there, and even if the farmer didn't want them there. Let's say vandals invade your house, eat all your food, drink all your liquor, and make a terrible mess. After they burn the house down, they send you a bill, and sue you if you don't pay it. And the judge backs them up. That is what Monsanto has done to the farmer, and what it is doing to the ecosystem. Still, it's a no-brainer. If chemicals are killing us and our world, we stop manufacturing the chemicals, unless we are insanely greedy and demonically possessed by the idea that every single element of life, every seed and bit of DNA can and must be owned by someone. Here's what the big ag companies want to do - they want to own and contaminate the entire gene pool of all the world's food resources for their own profit and without the knowledge or input of anyone who will actually be eating the food or living in the world they create. So far, the French and the Japanese and some other nations are standing firm, but the US government, our government, your government, is trying to enforce the will of the big ag companies. With regard to ag policy, Clinton and Gore were bad, but Bush and Cheney are infinitely worse. Let's call a spade a spade here. By means of corrupting the Congress and the Executive and the Judiciary branches of our government, the ag companies have changed the rules, and deregulated themselves. They have given their crimes against humanity technical legality, but they are still crimes against humanity (and, in fact, against the entire natural world).
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