15 - Seeds & sprouts

As I take a bite and stare at the black seeds embedded in the apple I am holding, it hits me: One day I might be forbidden by law to take that seed and plant it in my back yard. The fact that I don’t have a back yard is irrelevant. It’s the principle that bothers me. That seed might be the intellectual property of a bunch of shareholders on the other side of the planet. Planting the seed and reaping the fruits from the future tree could well be considered as theft!

This concept fascinated me. It seemed absolutely absurd. So I decided to visit Actionaid and speak to Glauci, an advocate against transgenics and for food security. I took a cab from Ipanema and we drove around the lake to Actionaid’s beautiful little house on the other side of the large expanse of water. An old pink house sprung humbly from a plush concentration of plants and flowers. A few seconds after pressing the button on the interphone I heard the reciprocal buzz allowing me to push open the black gate. I entered the pleasant and welcoming world of Actionaid, the Brazilian arm of the UK’s biggest NGO, with offices in several countries around the world.

Glauci finds me flicking through the front covers of the last three editions of The Economist magazine placed next to the latest edition of Democracia Viva, a thematic publication by Ibase, which I highly respect for its depth and breadth. I am lead into an inviting conference room where I am slowly exposed to the world of agriculture.

As a city guy I never really gave much thought to agriculture, and pretty much took the landscape of the countryside and the food in the shops for granted. Here I am with a professional who dedicates her life to the cause of monitoring and solving the problems of the rural sector. Within a few minutes Alberto Silva, a director of Actionaid Brazil joins us. He tells me about their work in Paraiba, in the North East semi-dry region of the country. There he says they are working with communities of family farmers, helping them build primitive but effective water tanks using the roofs of their houses to collect rainwater. He even draws a house and its roof on the blackboard to illustrate his point, maybe conscious of my weakness Portuguese. He also tells me about a community seed bank, which is exactly what the name suggests, a bank that borrows and lends seeds as opposed to money. At this point I am beginning to wonder what all this has to do with GM crops.

Soon I learn that the GM issue is part of a wider struggle for eradicating hunger and for the preservation of our environment.

Before I even delve into the question about GM, I am exposed to the bigger picture. And for an ignorant city boy like myself, I am astounded that such a far-reaching struggle with such incredibly profound consequences has been taking place away from the public sphere I have been exposed to. The mainstream media I guess decided that bringing these issues to the attention of the masses is unnecessary, and would rather keep this debate behind closed doors.

But what a debate! Farming touches issues well beyond the obvious production of food for consumption. It has impacts on our health, the environment or more precisely the ecosystem and its bio-diversity, the economy, our culture and way of life, employment and of course, securing food and nutrition for our survival.

The world of agriculture can be split into two camps, family farmers and large commercial farmers. They are not just thought of as separate because of the difference in size, but because their effects on all the above aspects are clearly different. The European Union gave farming an adjective that describes this multi-dimensional relationship it has with the world around it. It calls it the ‘multifunctional’ nature of farming.

In Brazil, approximately half of the people below the poverty line live in the countryside, and many of them are excluded family farmers struggling to make ends meet. There are over four million family farms (plots smaller than 100 hectares) occupying almost 108 million hectares and over half a million commercial farms occupying 240 million hectares.

That’s over 85% family farming establishments occupying 30.5% of the farmland, and actually contributing 37.9% of the National Gross Value of agricultural production (NGV). That’s about 6 billion dollars (18.1 billion Reals). In the North east family farming contributes about half the NGV.

Despite cultivating just over 30% of agricultural land, family farming employs 76.9% of rural workers. This is because large commercial farms exploit 67.5 hectares of land per employee, compared to 7.8 hectares per employee in family farms. Furthermore, large commercial farms are known to be the worse employers in Brazil. 

So as we can see, family farmers contribute significantly to economic activity, and actually contribute much more per hectare to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product, often used to measured economic growth in an economy) than commercial farming. In fact, you might be as surprised as I was to learn that on average, a family farm generates R$104 per hectare per year, whereas a large commercial farm only produces an average of R$44 per hectare per year. This higher efficiency occurs in all the regions in Brazil. This is despite receiving only 23.5% of total agricultural financing. So large commercial farmers, who own a disproportionately large share of the agricultural land in Brazil, owing to the distribution of power back in the days of colonisation, receive 76.5% of the government financing, despite being less efficient.

Most of the products grown by family farmers are for domestic consumption, whereas most of the crops grown on large commercial farms are for the export market. Most poor people living below the poverty line survive on products grown on family farms, such as rice and cassava beans in the North East. Family farming offers the poor more than just home-grown food. It offers millions of poor people access to food through the wages paid to those millions working in family farms.

With overall agriculture occupying just under half of Brazil’s ecosystem, it is not surprising that as well as having a profound economic impact, it also plays an significant role when it comes to the environment.

Methods of farming have a tremendous impact on land and water in a multitude of ways. Chemicals, whether herbicides or pesticides, used to protect plants from insects and herbs for instance penetrate the land as well as rivers and lakes. Methods of planting and harvesting also affect the soil and the bio-diversity. Commercial methods of farming for example tend to replace diverse flora with monocultures. They also often cause land erosion. Large commercial monoculture farming needs enormous land cleared of trees. This method of farming was developed during the ‘green revolution’. But the absence of trees and roots allows the healthy top layer of soil to slide away when it rains, or to fly off when it’s dry and the wind blows. This is known as land erosion. These are just a few examples of the potential negative impacts farming can have on the environment.

Family farmers on the other hand often have a positive impact on the environment. Their priority is to feed themselves, the family, and to preserve their land for future harvests and future generations. They are less likely to sacrifice the long-term sustainability of their land for the pursuit of short-term profits. Put it this way, if the economy pushes the agricultural sector into a crisis, a family farmer can eat what he grows and live on very little money and survive, albeit only just; a commercial farmer on the other hand would have the dark shadow of bankruptcy looming and would feel much more pressure to ‘cut corners’. It’s this commercial pressure to ‘cut corners’ that drives the ‘environment’ further down the priority list of commercial farmers.

Family farmers usually grow several different types of crops, such as rice, beans, tobacco, tomatoes and onions. This is in direct contrast to the monoculture of a large commercial farm that specialises, say, in corn. The diversity is good for the land, and helps preserve the bio-diversity. Even the decision makers in family farms are in a better position to make decisions aligned with the environment, as they are the ones working in the fields. They touch the fruits; they know every inch of their land. Decision makers in large commercial farms are usually detached from the reality on the ground, and their decisions are more aligned with the profits that they seek. Family farmers value the ecosystem in a way that is meaningless to a purely commercial mind frame. The birds and butterflies for example are worth zero to the bottom line of a balance sheet, but are priceless to a family farmer who would be horrified to wake up one day and find that they have all disappeared.

Even a family farmer has a choice of techniques available to him or her, each with varying effects on the environment. The relationship between farming and the environment has been the subject of continuous studies. A method of farming has been developed, which according to the experts is the most sustainable and healthy method of farming available today, for both the environment as well as our health. It is called agro-ecological. This method requires small patches of land, and requires more people to tend to it.

The viability of family farming doesn’t just depend solely on producing crops. Numerous social factors play an integral role in the viability of family farming, such as access to healthcare, education, culture and leisure amongst many others. If I were born in a family farm, I would need more than just a good harvest to keep me from pursuing another life in a big city far away.

Public politics, in other words the actions society takes as a whole, can have a tremendous effect on family farming. These include macro-economic decisions, decisions on infrastructure projects, decisions regarding incentives and taxes, regarding government spending on health and education. In fact every decision taken by society, or by the government, will inevitably have effects on certain sections of society. The multifunctional aspect of family farming, with its critical impact on the world around it, calls for ‘political’ decisions to be made in light of their possible effects on this crucial sector of society. I put an inverted comma around ‘political’ because some people try to separate political decisions from economic decisions. Economic decisions are political. What a just society aims to do is make political decisions for the benefit of the majority, or in favour of those most in need. This is why the belief in democracy, the equal representation and participation of all the people, is so widespread.

Unfortunately in Brazil it seems that those making the political and economic decisions on behalf of society at large do not consider the repercussions on family farming as worthy of primary concern. This is evident when looking back at Brazil’s economic models of ‘development’ before and after 1990.