I travel quite a bit in my job. It is a time when I like to work, reflect, read or rest. Other people get on the plane and anticipate an opportunity to socialize with the person strapped to the chair next to them. So I think about strategies for deflecting overzealous communicators. And I have made an interesting discovery. If I want to repel boarders, I say, "I write about agriculture." Upon hearing this people usually turn away in search of another victim, and I can fly in peace.

If I say, "I write about food," the opposite happens. Everyone is interested in food, everyone is an expert. If I use the word "food," I had better be ready to talk-or actually, to listen.

This seems logical, because if you talk about agriculture, people think this means long-winded dissertations on price supports, fertilizers I have known, and people like Dan Glickman.

In fact, the two topics-food and ag-are the same, and we neglect either one of them at our grave peril. All of our food comes from agriculture. Our relationship to food is a primary and intimate one. Every day of our lives we put food into our own bodies, we seek to make the food literally become us.

Agriculture is how the human race has been reforming and revising the earth for thousands of years. It is our greatest impact on our world: changing the courses of rivers, the shapes of plains and hills, the composition of soil, water and air.

So if agriculture is so important, why is it on page 16 of everyone's newspaper? A few numbers might help us to understand. At the time that our country was founded, 95% of the population were classified as farmers. Agriculture was not only our single most important activity, it was the major source of our country's commerce and wealth.

Compare this situation with the current era. In late 1993, according to the New York Times, the United States Census Bureau decided to stop counting American farmers because it was expected that farmers would fall to below one percent of the population, a figure that the Census Bureau felt was quote not statistically significant. The source of our and much of the world's daily food not significant? What is going on?

The drop from 95% to 1% means that 99% of us are deficient in what I'd like to call agricultural literacy. We don't understand many of the most basic issues about production and distribution of our food- who grows what and why, what the present and future problems are, what our choices may be. Yet many people know a fair amount about things like compact disks or cars, interesting but not necessary to human life, in spite of what your teenagers may tell you.

When issues come up like renewal of the farm bill, we tend to turn the page or change the radio station. We shouldn't be blamed for this - we don't have the information or the conceptual framework to be able to exercise full and thorough citizenship, even though food is one of the primary areas of human concern.

So what I am going to offer today is a quick and I hope interesting exercise in increasing our agricultural literacy. Even though few of us are farmers, every one of us is an eater.

As I see it, the relationship of human beings to food has gone through four stages.

Let's begin with stage one. During this time people obtained all their food either by hunting animals or by gathering wild plants. With no cultivation, no control of nature, people were 100% subject to the vagaries of weather, pests, drought, and always having to be on the move to find fresh supplies of food.

For me, the key feature of this first step is that it occupied 99% of human life on this world so far. For about a million years, our societies and cultures, as well as our bodies, evolved to accommodate eating and making use of what could be caught or found. If I were a Martian anthropologist-and sometimes my kids say that I act like one-I would base much of my primary understanding of human culture and human physiology on the fact that we evolved, in some respects were designed, to function in roaming bands of food gatherers.

Only in the past 10,000 years, a mere one percent of our existence as humans, have we cultivated plants and animals for food. Sometimes when I am distressed over the puzzles of our current world, I think back to what it must have been like ten thousand years ago when people made this profound and abrupt shift in their lives. Current theories of the development of agriculture tell us some fascinating things. Agriculture arose very suddenly, within something like 200 years, in about eight places simultaneously, scattered around the globe. I think that one of the deepest mysteries in all of human history concerns just how this radical change came into being at the same time in places too widely scattered to have been in any contact with each other. Why did humanity wait for a million years and then suddenly invent an entirely new relationship to food, nature, and each other?

There are other interesting features of this precipitous change. As far as researchers know, almost all agriculture everywhere was the invention of women. It is interesting to speculate about why this is. It is also interesting to wonder why some societies that were in easy communication range of people inventing agriculture never themselves made the switch.

Many books have been written about the invention of agriculture, so I'm not going to even attempt to get into the details. The major points I want to keep in our introduction to agricultural literacy is that the transition from gathering food to growing it occurred very recently in human history, that it was the invention of women, and that the effects of the transition are still being felt today.

Before we move to the third stage of agriculture, I need to pause for a word from our sponsor, Mother Nature. In order to prepare us to really understand what is happening in our food situation now, we need to understand a biological fact or two.

We tend to think of biology as being spread around our planet like peanut butter on a cracker. But biology is quite uneven, although hardly random. One fact of biology is that biodiversity tends to increase as you move towards the equator, while biomass increases as you move towards the pole. All this slogan means is, there are many more kinds of living things in the middle of the planet than at the poles. An acre up here might contain several major species, while an acre in the Brazilian rain forest could have hundreds of different species present. But in the rain forest there would be very few individuals of each of those species.

At the poles there is little variety, something like only seven kinds of fish in the Arctic Ocean. But there are fantastic quantities-in other words, biomass-of each of those species.

The other very large scale fact about the unevenness of biology in our world is the key to understanding much of modern ag politics around the world: food producing plants originated in only about eight or ten places on the planet. The staples of the human diet like rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, all come from the south. What food crops can you name that originate in North America? It's a brief list of bit part players in the culinary drama, foods like cranberries, sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes.

In the early part of this century a Russian biologist named N.I. Vavilov and his students traveled the globe collecting plants. It was Vavilov who had the insight about centers of diversity, by tracing plants back to where they had originated. In fact these centers of diversity were originally called Vavilov Centers, to honor this genius who died young at Stalin's hands.

OK, let's get back to our tracing of the four steps. First, we have the big one, hunting and gathering. Second is the deep and enigmatic change in human life brought about by the invention of agriculture by women ten thousand years ago.

The third big stage started as a result of the industrial revolution, and in fact it can legitimately be called industrial agriculture. The heart of this change is that agriculture is really hard work, as even any of us backyard gardeners know, except that letting the petunias die has fewer consequences in our lives than watching your family starve when a major crops fails. So over the past few centuries, as people began inventing labor-saving machines, they quickly applied machinery to the endeavor that was the predominant work of the human race: the growing of food.

The industrialization of agriculture had many effects: I want to focus on three of the largest ones here.

For one thing, the pervasive use of machinery, especially by the end of the Nineteenth Century, enabled the development of very large scale agriculture. Prior to the use of machinery, large scale ag necessitated a feudal system, employing complex structures to support large scale human labor. Machinery changed everything, including such new issues as the problem of capitalizing agriculture, land tenure struggles, the creation of a landless unemployed class ready to work in factories, migrant or contingent labor, and other rather familiar features of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century life.

Second, after the development of large scale agriculture, people began to view agriculture not as an interactive natural process, but as an industrial operation. Industrialism is characterized by several kinds of thinking. A major one is to think in terms of the conversion of raw materials into output. Another is the standardization of both production routine and the standardization of the component parts. In other words, a major feature of industrialism is a zeal for efficiency: maximizing results per unit of energy input.

Contrast this with a traditional or ecological view that focuses on sustainability and interaction, not production and efficiency. We still use non-industrial models for managing certain human affairs, for example the maintaining of a family, in which the interactions and the sustainability of relationships take precedence over family output or efficiency, at least for most of us.

There are some subsequent results of the industrial model of agriculture that we need to examine. Two in particular bear at least a brief mention. One is that when you reframe your experience of farming into the conversion of raw materials into output - the efficiency model - you then will quite naturally take steps to boost that output since that is how you measure your success. So you may feel less reluctance to use toxic chemicals that harm the environment and even you, the farmer. You might engage in farming practices that literally use up the topsoil, because you see the soil not as a precious gift of nature that needs to be conserved because it takes so long to make, but rather as an input, a raw material to be consumed to increase output. The same mindset holds true with other so-called ag inputs, such as water. Contrast this with sustainable agriculture, a supposedly new but really ancient way of looking at the obtaining of food via the maintaining of a circular system of interacting players.

Finally, looking at ag as an industrial complex inevitably leads you to think about maximizing output by altering your input, in other words by changing the seeds and plants to fit your needs. Biology changes from being the basis for sustaining life to serving as one of the commodities that you manipulate to achieve your desired results.

This leads to the breeding of plants for efficiency purposes, as opposed to, say nutrition, taste, or what it can put back into the biological cycle that maintains all living things. My favorite example of the hundreds available is the tomato developed for machine harvesting. Machine harvesting obviously cuts costs because it cuts labor. It isn't enough that these tomatoes are squarish to pack more efficiently or that they are picked green. To withstand mechanical harvesting and shipment, these babies are tough. So tough in fact that a very popular variety of commercial tomato exceeds federal crash standards for automobiles.

And let's not blame individual farmers. Few people in our society work harder than small farmers, and virtually none ever make the comfortable living that we desk jockeys do. And the ag system encourages some of this behavior because farmers are so squeezed. According to Marty Strange of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, between 1940 and the mid 80's, huge increases in ag yield, the basic measure of industrial success, far outpaced the decline in prices that farmers were getting-farm sales, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled nationwide.

So why aren't all farmers rich? Well, during this same period of time, farm production expenses tripled, capital purchases quadrupled, and interest payments jumped tenfold. So even though farmers had twice as much money available to them, farm profits fell by ten percent and the actual number of farmers fell by two thirds.

As a kind of seventh inning stretch before we get to the last piece of our ag history excursion, I want to present you with one other prerequisite idea for putting it all together in the fourth stage of humanity's relationship to food. This is the word you have heard before, biological diversity. Remember earlier we saw that there was more biological diversity at the equator, and that almost all of our food plants come from that tropic zone? Well this turns out to be a terribly important step in getting to the emerging stage four agriculture.

Biological diversity or biodiversity for short is the basic strategy that nature uses to hedge her bets. It is a biologically rough world out there: severe weather, billions of bugs, climate change, to name some of the external factors that cause plants to die. The Irish Potato famine caused well past a million deaths from one plant disease, Phytophthora Infestans. Because all of the Irish potatoes were genetically uniform, they all got the disease that turns them to inedible mush. P. Infestans is back, by the way, in a virulent form. The hope for dealing with it probably lies less in finding some kind of drug or chemical, and more in locating a potato that is resistant.

So we need to maintain that diversity out there to continually renew our food producing plants. There are some other very major reasons why biodiversity is important that I wish we had time for, but I need to get done with this seventh inning stretch before the ball game is over and you all start hoping that I never sit next to you on an airplane.

Well industrialized ag, the third stage, was a great success for a while. Larger and larger numbers of people were fed by fewer and fewer farmers. But during this century, just as this much desired efficiency was peaking-and most measurements show that ag efficiency has peaked and is in fact declining-the tide began to turn against farming. There simply wasn't enough cheap land, labor, water and custom designed plants to keep up with falling prices and the declining effectiveness of Twentieth Century efficiency enhancers like pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, nematodicides and all the other chemicals sprayed by the millions of pounds onto our food.

This leads us to the early signs of the fourth age of agriculture, what I'm going to call commodified ag even though the word commodified takes a lot of explaining.

This emerging fourth stage is characterized I think by three revolutionary elements: genetics, ownership, and globalization. If you can stand it, we're going to walk through each one, because getting a grip on these three issues will make you truly among the agriculturally literate, or at least the most knowledgeable one at parties.

The work of women for thousands of years was the shaping of the natural world with their minds. Early farmers had an idea of the best tomato or best ear of corn. She saved the seeds from the biggest or sweetest tomato, or the most productive ear of corn. Villages or communities had ideas of what was good food, so food plants quickly evolved according to community standards, seeds passed from parent to child.

This method as been the basis for improvements in agriculture for ten thousand years. But it is slow, limited by the genetic qualities that each plant brings to the mix, and not very predictable. Industrialism likes speed, uniformity, predictability. Thus plant scientists began to get into the genetics of plants.

Skipping right up to the present time, we now see that biotechnologists can not only cross entirely different plants, but even plants and animals. This is not an extension of the old plant breeding technology as some would have us believe, but an entirely new thing. The old way of plant breeding was to change plants via observation of gross physical differences combined rather crudely. Plant breeding speeds up changes that could have or would have happened anyway. The basic balance of nature, therefore, is preserved. At the genetic level, the genes are like Lego pieces, interchangeable parts that are combined for very specific effects. So you get fish genes in tomatoes, fire flies in tobacco, or brazil nuts in soybeans. In contrast with traditional plant breeding, scientists can now operate entirely out of the natural boundaries of evolution and ignore the interactions of a biologically diverse community of living things.

I would propose to you four problems with this kind of fooling around with mother nature. First of all, there are unanticipated consequences. The New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that, as many biotech critics had predicted, allergens can be passed through at the genetic level. Those soybeans which contained Brazil nut genes did cause reactions in Brazil nut allergic people who ate the soy. Yet I know of no ingredient labels that cover the genetic level. How can you find out if a food contains substances you might be allergic to, how can a strict vegetarian know if there are meat genes in a plant, or a Jew or Moslem know which beans or tomatoes might contain pig genes?

Second, the vast majority of genetically altered plants are changed not for nutritional reasons, as were those soy plants, but rather for resistance to pesticides or herbicides. If the food crop can be engineered to not die when large or even huge amounts of chemicals are applied, then more of the bugs or weeds are killed and more of the profitable plants remain. The difficulty with this strategy is that much larger quantities of these noxious chemicals are let loose into our environment, there is a greater likelihood of residues remaining on the plant, and those herbicide resistant genes can cross over to plants around the food, creating the so-called superweed. The journal Nature has reported this year that the oilseed plants that make canola oil, genetically altered in the lab to resist weed killer chemicals, needed only two generations for those weed-killer resistant genes to migrate to nearby weeds. Once something is out of the lab, into nature, it may be impossible to control. What are we letting loose out there?

Let me touch very briefly on two other factors in genetic engineering of food crops. One is that this kind of biotechnology is expensive and resource intensive, and the raw material, the original plants, need to be used as the basis for engineering. So natural plants in those Vavilov centers are both a crucial raw material and in competition with the expensive, newly engineered plants. It adds up to a strategy from some big biotech firms to gain control of food plant stock in the wild. In other words, to place under private corporate control the biodiversity that is our world's number one biological safety net.

The other factor in genetic engineering of plants is the need to recoup investment. The recouping of investment from invention is not new, and in fact it is built into our US Constitution. But it brings us to the second big enchilada of the Age of Commodification: the ownership of plants, genes, and yes, even human beings.

Originally, plants were seen as products of nature and therefore not patentable. Starting in about 1930, the door was opened to permit the patenting of plants to encourage the development of improved varieties for the industrial model of agriculture. Under that industrial conceptualization of agriculture, plants were after all raw materials, just stuff to make into more stuff. If you can patent a computer or an auto tire, why not a plant?

Genetic engineering was the key to owning plants, because an invention has to be novel. By inserting a gene, even one that is small and relatively functionless, you have made something new, and you can own it. Look at all the problems this solves for the industrial model. You can now patent whole species. For example, all transgenic soybeans are owned by Agracetus, a company Monsanto recently purchased from W.R. Grace & Co. As worldwide patent rights may be established, Agracetus will be able to control any soybean production based on modified soybeans, and in fact control all genetic engineering of soybeans for the life of the patent.

The owner of a food patent has many advantages. Instead of buying land, hiring labor, finding water, harvesting and storing and shipping a product, the owner of that species can just sit back and collect royalties. The owner of the patent will also push to have everyone possible grow its product, so a great momentum towards monoculture emerges. Monoculture, the massive growing of the same kind of plant, is the exact opposite of biological diversity, the scheme used by nature to sustain life.

Finally, owning plants leads to what is called biopiracy, as quote collectors rush to communities around the world, especially in those Vavilov centers of diversity, to grab traditional varieties of plants and place them under patent, without so much as a by-your-leave to the communities that might have spent thousands of years developing that food plant. Imagine if the women weavers of Peru-whose naturally colored cotton was taken and placed under US patent and is now sold by companies like LL Bean-came on up here and dug up my roses, or the metallic ore in the hills around Santa Rosa, or your grape vines.

Just as genetic engineering leads us to ownership, ownership leads us to globalization. That darn democracy can sure be inconvenient when you are trying to do business globally. We uppity Americans pass laws with commodity quotas to protect our farmers, we have tariffs, we even have a patent system that is out of sync with much of the rest of the world. So first, you move your company off shore-you become not a multinational, a company based in many countries, but a transnational, a company with no real home base, no particular allegiance to a flag or a people. Then you and your friends start pushing for obscure laws that diminish national sovereignty, and quote harmonize all that cultural and political diversity, so our patent laws have to match everyone else's, our commodities can be traded across borders, and others can sell things here regardless of their lack of regulation about chemical use or human rights abuse, and our tariffs no longer prevent transnationals from doing business here at their whim. If you did such a thing, you would call it the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or the World Trade Organization.

By means of these devices biology becomes like money: fungible. You can move plants, genes and patents across borders with ease, you can work at a global level without worrying about an angry citizenry passing laws to limit your profit or regulate your pollution. You can own life itself.

When I talk like this I worry about sounding like a Buchanan or a Perot. Well I guess even bigots and nuts can feel scared by the same process of globalization that scares me. But my motivation is not some kind of nutty ideology. I am interested in our food supply, and in preserving a healthy and sustainable world for my children. What we're talking about in the emerging fourth stage really is a major change, the changing of our food from a raw material or a product into an owned commodity; switching control of the one thing that sustains every human on the planet from the most local of endeavors to a substance that is totally-genetically and legally-the property of distant, unelected people. I am talking about a developing world system that views biologically based diversity not as the ultimate safety net for life but as a threat and a rival. And finally I am talking about people who view life not as the ultimate sacred gift of the Creator, but as a new source of possession, exploitation and wealth.

All is not lost. Sustainable agriculture is growing, not going away. People around the world are catching on to the threat of commodified agriculture and globalization: witness the 100,000 demonstrators who burned the WR Grace headquarters in India when Agracetus patented the sacred Indian neem tree, causing the Indian Parliament to rescind the patent. I think there is little chance of rolling back the clock-I am not on a luddite crusade-but it is by no means too late to make choices that favor sustainability, local and democratic control of our food supply, and at heart, a fundamental respect for the diversity, interdependence and even sacredness of life on our planet.

Martin Teitel ([email protected]) Speech to the World Affairs Council of Sonoma County, California August 16, 1996

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