We have a global crisis on our hands. For decades, industrial agriculturists have ravaged and monopolized our global countryside and our global resources. Recently, as world hunger awareness has grown, these corporations would claim in the name of good will and the elimination of world hunger to save the lives of millions of people worldwide. But in fact, industrial agriculturists consume people much like they consume resources. Due to the fact that industrial farming alters the lives of populations worldwide, this problem is not simply one for Mother Nature to work out. This essay will collapse the solidarity of the industrial agriculture system by both exposing its faults and suggesting solutions (like the simplicity of sustainable agriculture) to the problems it has created.
[...] In their role as educators, they must refuse to ‘domesticate' people” (qtd. in Drummond 15). This quotation expresses the importance of organizations like the Kerr Center and the Youth Farm and Market Project. Organizations such as these allow youth and families to use hands-on educational farming methods, which Drummond and Freire suggest are so essential to learning, and ultimately achieving a sustainable agriculture. Works Cited “Thirtieth Anniversary of Misguided Ban on DDT—Without This Pesticide, Millions Die of Malaria, Says Health Group; Senate [...]
[...] [but] found its way into dozens of popular food products in supermarkets around the country; causing one of the largest food recalls in recent history” (77). The article “Sowing Disaster?” (The Nation 2002) details a case in which such bioengineered products, in this case the Bt corn gene, have changed the global landscape. The article relates the history of the ancient corn crop in the Mexican village Capulalpan. There are 60 different varieties of corns grown in Capaulalpan, and until recently, its soil remained untouched by genetically engineered corn (11-12). [...]
[...] These factors, paired with the apparent manipulation of farmers by agribusiness, suggest that, as Kimbrell states, “industrial food creates a moral as well as an environmental crisis” Another harmful aspect of industrial agriculture is that it simply produces more hungry mouths than it feeds. Kimbrell exposes this fact in his section entitled “Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture.” Kimbrell argues that Word hunger is not created by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access to food. [...]
[...] of which claims that the imposed worldwide DDT ban has increased deaths caused by malaria- carrying mosquitoes < http: releases ddt061002.html>. Sources such as these suggest that a more in-depth study of pesticide is needed to answer the “pesticide question.” Numerous sources doubt the capability of such pesticides, and in turn question their necessity. For example, according to The Foundation for Deep Ecology's Fatal Harvest, after DDT's inception during World War II and the end of the [1940s,] houseflies were already showing resistance to DDT, and dairy farmers were warned to stop using it in milking parlors because DDT was showing up in milk” (Kimbrell 24). [...]
[...] agriculture today” This suggests that the remedy for the globally degrading effects of industrial agriculture is a simple sustainable food system, and that sustainable foods are an achievable goal. The sustainable agriculture method is perhaps the epitome of the adage “Think Globally, Act Locally.” According to Fatal Harvest, fully integrated food system connects the farm to its local community; allowing consumers to regain a lost connection with the farmers growing their food” (351). In contrast to this solution, Kimbrell shows the effect on a community that relies of industrial agriculture: The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know one another and in which the histories of all products will be lost. [...]
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