Unit 1 happened a long time ago and unfortunately, I didn't write down a lot of the feelings I had about organic food and agriculture because I was so busy being a UFac.
I want to remember how I felt about this Unit because if I don't, I simplify the problem down to black and white but there's a whole lot of gray to analyze before deciding how to separate it into black and white.
So here are some interesting quotes/points from the readings they gave us:
"Corn, rice and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe...Farming is the process of ripping that catastrophic niche open again and again...it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm."
"On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99% of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness." -Richard Manning
"The Green Revolution had little to do with making plants bigger; rather, it produced high yields by persuading more plants to grow in the same space and by getting them to put less effort into growing stalks and leaves and more into seedpods, the part people eat. The nagging fear is that both trends may be reaching a limit."
-The Economist
"The consumption and meanings of sticky rice and fermented fish - two indigenous and essential foods for the Thai-Lao people of Northeast Thailand - embody the role of food in Thai political culture. Bangkok Thai use these foods to mark and discriminate against Thai-Lao who live at the Kingdom's edge. Contrarily, the Thai-Lao make references to sticky rice and fermented fish as mechanisms for the assertion of regional pride and ethnic group identity and cohesion in opposition to Central Thai."
"In Thailand, the start of the Green Revolution was marked with the acceptance of bilateral aid from the US Department of Agriculture in 1950....farmers had to adopt the rice farming technology package developed for the Green Revolution. This includes application of chemical fertilizers, intensive pest control with pesticides and efficient water management through irrigation." - Green Peace South East Asia
"Many families in Surin province are attempting to move toward healthy and sustainable practices through chemical-free farming...the overwhelming majority is unable to transition out of chemical use...The State has failed to acknowledge the non-nutrient values attached to indigenous varieties and indirectly forced Surin farmers to choose between economic stability and cultural preservation."
So some of the problems I see with this:
Everyone can easily say how good organic agriculture is for the environment and for people. But a lot of people get their 'eating ethics' confused - there's a difference between eating vegetarian, local and organic.
Some people do one out of three or two out of three but it's important to differentiate and a lot of people don't bother. The ideal diet would incorporate all three but sometimes our personal choices won't make as much of a difference until the entire system changes.
Some of the students in my group already ate vegetarian, local or organic but I've never really done any of those three. I think it's pretty hard to accomplish any of those three when you are not rich, Asian-american and don't choose what you get to eat at home. First of all, a lot of grocery stores don't offer local or organic Asian produce. Second of all, I can't afford to buy local or organic when non-organic, mass-produced food is still much more convenient and cheaper. And as an Asian-American who loves very much eating Mom's cooking at home, I'm not going to tell her I don't want to eat meat anymore and have her cook separate dishes for me when she already is busy enough making food for four other people.
But enough about me.
In the Thai context, there's a whole lot of chemical usage going on in agriculture and it's a result of the Thai government really pushing genetically-modified rice and pesticide use during the Green Revolution.
For those who've heard of the Green Revolution, it's not all miracles and piles of unlimited food. It changed crop seeds to become dependent on pesticides and chemical fertilizers that farmers now have to buy in order to have a successful yield each season. In Thailand, it got rid of all those different rice varieties that each region, each village had as their own cultural reminder and had all farmers grow only 2-3 varieties because they are the most popular exports.
Farmers were taught that it would be impossible to make any money if they didn't use copious amounts of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers and remained unaware of how those chemicals would leech into their water, soil and skin.
Therefore, organic agriculture shouldn't be promoted in Thailand just as a way to save the environment but organic went hand-in-hand with integrated, self-sufficient agriculture. It was a great way to get rid of their health problems and slowly help them become more self-sufficient on the crops they grew. Instead of monocropping just jasmine rice, when farmers were helped to also grow sticky rice, papaya, bananas, herbs and fish, they were more aware of their health, the environment and their sufficiency.
Unfortunately, there still isn't enough support from the Thai government - especially if the US dumps a lot of chemicals into the country - and they keep promoting chemical agriculture so farmers could grow the genetically-modified rice that sells better on the global market.
It's a shame.
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Here are some of the questions my UFac group and I came up with at the end of the unit to challenge ourselves. For those of us who were in danger of simplifying the issue - I hoped to ask these questions to really provoke more thoughts so we don't let the dust settle.
I want to look back on these and hopefully still remember how to answer. I also want these questions to always be in the back of my head in case I ever enter a discussion about food with another person so I can sound intellectual and sophisticated. I'm not out to just agree with a person.
Why should we oppose large corporations when they help make things affordable for poor, low-income families?
How easy will it really be to give up some of our consumption and consumer habits? For example, do we take it for granted that we can eat bananas year-long?
In our first exchange, the Ban Dong Dip village receives the same price for organic and chemically-grown sugar cane from the factory. Similarly, organic products from the Green Market are the same price as non-organic products. How is this both a negative and a positive for organic farmers?
I wonder how many people I can get to think about these questions after this program.
