Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

The future of food has featured prominently in the news over the last few months, especially in relation to nitrogen emissions from Dutch farmers leading the government to drastic action that will put them out of business. As these books show, such problems are associated with intensive industrial agriculture with its high-cost chemical inputs and toxicity. Meanwhile, the corporate food complex promises such solutions as fake meat, regarded as a huge investment opportunity by Wall Street and the Gates Foundation. As Vandana Shiva shows in both of these brilliant and incisive books, this trajectory is in fact unsustainable and we need a fundamental paradigm shift in agriculture, food and health, all of which are systemically interrelated and derive ultimately from the health of the soil, as Sir Albert Howard spelled out in his 1940 Agricultural Testament based on his experience in rural India.

These books are essential briefings informed by agroecology, systems science, biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, localisation, ecofeminism and biodemocracy. Fundamentally, Vandana’s approach is to work with Nature to regenerate ecosystems rather than the current corporate approach based on centralisation, power and control, which has led to a monopolistic concentration vested in a small number of increasingly large companies. The first book is effectively a textbook with in-depth coverage of the key issues, while the second is more autobiographical and is subtitled ‘my life in a biodiversity of movements’ – an extraordinary account of Vandana’s engaged activism on a large number of interrelated fronts since the 1970s. She really works as a Force of Nature, much to the discomfiture of industrial agriculture which has attacked relentlessly. In this respect, she is just as resilient as Nature herself. When awarded a Bullshit Certificate in the form of cow dung by the industry for her promotion of organic agriculture, she celebrated by composting the gift!

It is important to understand Vandana’s diagnosis of the relationship between agricultural systems, food and health as detailed in the initial chapter of the first book. Here she analyses multiple crises in agricultural systems and the urgent need for a paradigm change. These include loss of biodiversity and species, climate instability, soil erosion and land degradation, water depletion and pollution, and the spread of toxins throughout the food system. Then there is the public health crisis not only of hunger, but also over-consumptive malnutrition through junk food (a record 2 billion are overweight, while 1 billion are undernourished) and an epidemic of chronic lifestyle disease. Finally, the third crisis relates to the farmers’ livelihoods, debt and death by suicide due to high-cost inputs and displacement – the current policy trajectory is dictated by corporate interests and captured international agencies and institutions, all in the interest of further monopolisation and higher profits. Moreover, they would rather see farmers move to ‘smart cities’ to be replaced by further mechanisation.

The books clarify the contrast between industrial and regenerative agriculture approaches. Interestingly, Vandana’s training as a physicist enables her to draw a comparison between the seed and quanta, both of which ‘take us beyond the mechanistic, fragmented, divided, inert, linear, deterministic world of reductionist science, and the industrialisation and commodification of life which is destroying the fragile fabric of the planet and society.’ She continues, ‘in different ways, both the seed and the quanta create a world of relationships, of connectedness, of dynamic evolution and ever new potential.’ (TV, p. 23) She points out that living organisms ‘are complex self-organising systems. Whether genes are added, edited, or removed through genetic engineering, it disrupts the self-organising capacity of living systems.’ (ARA, p. 63) This represents the difference between reductionism and holism. Holism insists that seeds and living organisms are not computers: ‘the complex self-organisation of living systems is written by the living system.’ So to mistake one for the other is in fact a category error: organisms are emphatically not mechanisms, as Iain McGilchrist also comprehensively argues.

Vandana’s work with Navdanya focuses on reclaiming the seed from the clutches of what she calls seed imperialism: ‘Seed is the source of life. Seed creates, recreates, regenerates, and multiplies itself. Seed is autopoiesis, the poetry of life, written by the orchestra of life, in interconnected autonomy; it is a self-organised interbeing, self-regulating and coherent, from the molecule into the cell, to the organism as a whole.’ (TV p. 92) With its agenda of genetic engineering and the patenting of life protected by intellectual property rights drafted by the industry, Big Ag is driven by monoculture and monopoly fuelled by and ideology of manipulation where uniformity – sometimes called ‘harmonisation’ – is used as an instrument to impose control. Four giant corporations now control 60% of the world’s seed supply within a system based on high-cost chemical inputs leading to indebtedness, bankruptcy and the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers in India, not to mention the UN report stating that 200,000 people a year die from acute pesticide poisoning. (ARA, p. 201)

Vandana shows how the principles of the Green Revolution are based on violence and extraction, especially in relation to water – 75% of freshwater is now used by agriculture. The new Green Revolution is based on genetically engineered seeds where the seed – for instance bT cotton – itself becomes a toxic pesticide designed to be resistant to glyphosate. This process drives evolutionary pest resistance, actually requiring increased pesticide use and hence driving up company profits. Arguably more alarming is the research by Dr Zach Bush and Stephanie Seneff detailing the actual biochemical pathways of glyphosate damage in protein synthesis (hundreds of cancer lawsuits are also still in the pipeline). Initiatives such as One Agriculture, One Science and One Health are based on nothing other than ‘capitalist patriarchy’s domination and control’, all funded by the very companies and foundations who will directly profit. Such centralised systems of control are destroying the biodiversity of crops and ecosystems, indeed of life itself. Their dystopian vision ‘is intolerant of diversity, democracy and sovereignty, extinguishing seed freedom, knowledge freedom, food freedom and health freedom.’ (TV, p. 112)

More generally, it is critical to understand that all the [systemic] emergencies we face ‘are rooted in the industrial, mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric, patriarchal worldview of humans as separate from nature, and superior to other beings who can be owned, manipulated and controlled for profit and power; of men as superior to women; of whites as superior to the diverse colours of humanity. The global interconnected crises are also rooted in an economic model based on extractivism, the illusion of endless growth and limitless greed, which systematically violates the integrity of the species and the limits of the ecosystem.’ (TV p. 140) This brilliantly eloquent summary says it all. In addition, we should move away from measuring yield per acre towards assessing nutrition per acre in terms of crop diversity.

The regenerative revolution has now become an imperative, despite industry propaganda that more of the same is required. The regenerative paradigm also championed by Wendell Berry, Fritjof Capra and the late Brian Goodwin and Mae-Wan Ho is ‘holistic and aligned with nature and her ecological laws’ as maintained by rural women over thousands of years of sustainable agriculture policy. (TV, p. 140) In practice (TV, p. 165) this means adopting nature-centred and people-centred food systems based on diversity rather than monocultures; decentralisation and localisation in place of centralisation and globalisation; ecological processes instead of industrial farming processes; food rights and food security rather than free trade as the basis of distribution; democratic control rather than corporate control of food systems; patent-free and genetic engineering-free farming to ensure the respect and protection of all species and the integrity of ecosystems and cultures; cultural diversity in place of the global monoculture of fast foods and industrial food chains; small farms and small farmers in place of corporate farms and absentee landowners; and finally fair trade, not free-trade, to ensure farmers and producers get a fair return.

Even this quite extensive review hardly does justice to the depth and comprehensiveness of Vandana’s thinking and its implications for the future of agriculture, food and health that is currently locked in a vicious cycle maintained by corporate lobbying power and international regulation – the ‘Poison Cartel’. Until such a regenerative agriculture and food revolution takes place, the outlook for the future of human health is poor (see projected costs on TV p. 243). She writes that we need a new pact with the earth based on a new vision of planetary citizenship: ‘a pact based on reciprocity, caring and respect, on taking and giving back, on sharing the resources of the world equitably among all living species. It begins by seeing and cherishing the soil as a living entity, a terra viva, whose survival is essential to our own.’ (TV, p. 233) The multifaceted crisis ‘has created a new opportunity to effect a paradigm shift from the mechanistic, industrial age of separation, domination, greed and disease, to the age of Gaia, of a planetary civilisation based on the consciousness that we are one earth family, that our health is one health rooted in ecological interconnectedness, diversity, regeneration and harmony.’ (p. 244) I say, let’s commit ourselves to manifest this essential vision, and I urge every reader to study at least Vandana’s Terra Viva and to join the movement for worldwide agroecological regeneration. Our future depends on it.