Eat Poi

“This is a systemic problem... farming is only marginally profitable.. If the farmers can not make money, they are not going to farm.”
- Jerry Ornellas
Director of Kaua'i County Farm Bureau

My back is shot.  No, it’s not from paddling.  Or from that propeller a few years ago.  Or from sitting at a desk all day.  This is different.  It feels like someone inserted a molten iron bar along the length of my spine and into my glutes.  Lying down is uncomfortable; walking is painful.  While my breakfast of fried taro dipped in poi was good, I’m not sure if it was worth the pain.
  
A few days ago I helped my friend pick kalo for four hours.  If you’ve never worked in a lo’i before, it’s really hard.  Bend over, grab your ankles, and pull upwards for the rest of the day to get an idea.  Along with a small bag of taro and a temporarily crippled back, I limped away with a valuable appreciation for the failures of our food system.  Farming is hard and the global market suppresses the price of real food.  Twelve man hours of pulling taro (I was only there for the final stage), thirteen months of weeding and fertilization, and generations of cultural connectivity netted the farmer I was helping about $500.  

On Kaua’i, we have lost 7,400 acres of tillable land since 2007 accompanied by a 28% decrease in small (under 9 acre) farms.  On top of a steady decline in small farms and tillable land, there are pesticides in our rivers, oceans, and schools.  And, as an island, we are producing less food than we have in 1000 years.  From a global perspective, the failures of industrial farming are even larger: obesity, deforestation, climate change, increasing cost of federal subsidies, and nearly a billion starving people around the planet.   

Kaua’i farmers can not compete with the efficiency of industrial farming because when you purchase a calorie of processed foods, you’re not paying the full cost of that calorie.  The US health epidemic (largely related to processed foods) leads directly to our bloated (pun intended) health care system, yet isn’t calculated into the price of food.  The pollution and contribution to climate change resulting from the 10 calories of fossil fuel that went into producing and transporting a single calorie of food are also not added to the price.  And the wake of environmental destruction from reef die-off on Kaua’i, ocean deadzones in the gulf of Mexico, to desertification in the midwest goes completely unaccounted for.  

Obviously we have a problem.  And GMOs are an easy culprit as they are the epitome of what is wrong with our food.  In the quest for ever increasing efficiency and profit, GMO crops are a crutch for a failing system.  For example, weeds and pests are continually developing resistance, but instead of traditional polycultures and crop rotation, we continue on the dead-end cycle of developing stronger poisons and then engineering plants that can withstand the poison.  Increased control over nature is the market-based response to our environmental problems.  

So, understandably, Kaua’i is now the epi-center of the nation’s anti-GMO movement. However, as much as GMOs represent the failings of industrial agriculture, they are not the cause. Remove genetic modification from the equation and nothing changes.  Seeds can still be patented, hybrid crops still won’t grow true to their parents (discouraging seed saving), family farms won’t be profitable, pesticides will still be applied, corn will still be king, and processed foods will still make us fat.  However, remove industrial farming from genetic engineering and you open up a world of potential good.  

Genetic modification, even as a tool of industrial agriculture, has resulted in a number of concrete environmental benefits. For example: organophosphate (insecticide) use dropped 55% between 1997 and 2007.  In a rapidly changing climate, crops can be engineered to grow with less water and more readily adapted to local climates.  No till farming (increasing carbon sequestration in the soil) is expanding rapidly.  Any crop can theoretically be engineered to fix nitrogen in the soil, thereby one day eliminating one of the most harmful aspects of modern agriculture (nitrogen fertilizer leads to massive ocean dead spots, and is fossil fuel intensive).  And Golden Rice (produces beta carotene and is the only GM food nearing approval that was funded by an entity other than the large seed companies) has the potential to save millions of people through reversing nutrient deficiencies. 

By focusing entirely on criticizing genetic modification, we are missing the opportunity to find real solutions to our most pressing agricultural issues.  The valid arguments for increasing sustainable local food production and minimizing some of the harmful effects of industrial agriculture are overshadowed by heated argument over a breeding technique.  We need to address the market failure that allows industrial agriculture to displace local food production.  

Globalization and industrial farming have resulted in unprecedented efficiency per acre with a fraction of the labor.  With the loss of one farm every half hour, we have a farming population that used to consist of half the population of the US down to less than 1%.  That growth in overall efficiency has allowed for an explosion of productivity in other realms of the economy.  But, it has also come at a huge and unsustainable cost.  

In a perfect regulatory system, we could accurately account for the externalized costs (discussed above) of our food system.  But, we don't have a perfect regulatory system in place (as the legal challenge to 2491 highlights the potential shortfalls of the county's regulatory powers), yet the market failures of industrial food still need to be accounted for.  So, I applaud council member Tim Bynum for introducing bill 2546, as the county of Kaua'i should use property taxes as a tool to reverse the displacement of local agriculture by industrial agriculture.  

In an out-of-context quote from a Paul Krugman editorial in yesterday's NY Times on the politics of climate change, Krugman unknowingly offers up a perfect argument in defense of bill 2546: 

Readers well versed in economics will recognize that I’m talking about what is technically known as the “theory of the second best.” According to this theory, distortions in one market — in this case, the fact that there are large social costs to carbon emissions, but individuals and firms don’t pay a price for emitting carbon — can justify government intervention in other, related markets. Second-best arguments have a dubious reputation in economics, because the right policy is always to eliminate the primary distortion, if you can. But sometimes you can’t, and this is one of those times.

The point being that the imperfect solution of correcting the market failures of industrial agriculture through increasing property taxes on land used primarily for ag research, may likely result in unintended negative impacts elsewhere.  Such as increased pressure to develop ag land and financial burden on other seed crops.  But, it still may be the best option.  While I strongly support the intent of 2546 and the boldness of council member Bynum in introducing it, I hope that our county council uses the two month deferment to analyze and minimize the potentially negative impacts of the bill.  And, for those who feel the negative ramifications of the bill outweigh the positive, what alternatives do you suggest?  As I'm sure that we can all agree that we can not continue on our current path. 

Conserving nutrients, limiting erosion, getting higher yield per acre, and limiting green-house-gas emissions, while feeding a growing planet is one of the greatest problems that humanity has ever faced, and industrial agriculture controlled by a few corporations is not the solution. For Hawai'i, we need to promote local farms (growing real food), preserve healthy farmland with organic agriculture, limit pesticides, and work to increase our ag workforce.  Let's use biotech as part of the solution. Let's support our county in taking bold moves in support of the above goals.  And, most importantly, let's eat local food.