A Global Corporate Trust for Agroecological Integrity

New Agriculture in a World of Legitimate Eco-states

John W. Head

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000020786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

This book examines global environmental governance and how legal, institutional, and conceptual reform can facilitate a transformation to a new 'natural-systems' form of agriculture.

Profound global climate disruption makes it essential that we replace our current agricultural system – described in this book as a fossil-carbon-dependent 'modern extractive agriculture' – with a natural-systems agriculture featuring perennial grains growing in polycultures, thereby mimicking the natural grassland and forest ecosystems that modern extractive agriculture has largely destroyed. After examining relevant international legal and conceptual foundations (sovereignty, federalism, global governance) and existing international organizations focusing on agriculture, the book explores legal and institutional opportunities to facilitate dramatic agricultural reform and ecological restoration. Among other things, it explains how innovative federalism structures around the world provide patterns for reorienting global environmental governance, including what the book calls eco-states that would, through exercise of pluralistic sovereignty, be responsible for agroecological management. Drawing from his experience working in international institutions, the author provides detailed global-governance proposals for facilitating the type of agricultural reform that can help avoid ecological collapse, especially through soil degradation and climate change.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international law, agroecology, climate change, ecological restoration, sustainable development, and global governance, as well as policy-makers and practitioners working in these fields.

Part I

Reorienting agriculture

The promise and challenge of agroecological husbandry

1 Modern extractive agriculture and agroecological husbandry

I. Modern extractive agriculture and its discontents

IA. A historical and critical account of modern extractive agriculture

IA1. A legacy of accelerating extraction

IA2. More matters of terminology in today’s agriculture

IA3. A long view of ecospheric development and agriculture

IA4. The shape of agriculture today

IB. The unsustainability of modern extractive agriculture

IB1. Ecological unsustainability

IB2. Economic unsustainability

IB3. Social unsustainability

IC. A convergence of crises: climate change, consumption, extinction

II. Agroecological husbandry as a viable alternative

IIA. Agroecological husbandry explained

IIA1. The ecosystem as the standard

IIA2. Husbandry over production

IIA3. The historical roots of agroecological husbandry

IIA4. Agroecological integrity explained

IIA5. Can perennial polycultures feed humanity?

IIB. Advantages of agroecological husbandry

IIB1. Ecological issues

IIB2. Economic issues

IIB3. Social benefits

IIC. Other alternative innovations for food production

IIC1. Vertical farming

IIC2. Food production from hydrogenotrophs

IIC3. In vitro “meat” (cultured meat)

IIC4. Annual non-plow polycultures?

IIC5. Silver bullet or silver buckshot?

In this opening chapter, I emphasize two propositions. Proposition #1 (examined in section I) asserts that the form of extractive agriculture that humans have developed over about 10,000 years presents a cluster of problems, especially in its most modern form. These problems are ecological, economic, and social in character, and they are so substantial as to conclude that modern extractive agriculture has failed – an assertion that might of course come as a surprise to most of my rural neighbors engaged in agriculture. Proposition #2 (examined in section II of this chapter) has a more upbeat but probably equally surprising message: A fundamentally different form of food production and rural life – what I call agroecological husbandry – is possible, and it is highly preferable to modern extractive agriculture, particularly in terms of producing grains and legumes that account for the largest portion of global human caloric intake.

In exploring these two propositions, I build on my 2017 book International Law and Agroecological Husbandry.¹ This chapter thus updates and elaborates on that earlier work, with a special focus on the scientific and operational aspects of food production in today’s world. My overall aim is to set the stage here for summarizing in Chapter 2 some key legal challenges (both at a national level and at the global level) involved in substituting a new form of food production for the old one – again, concentrating especially on grains and legumes. With these topics outlined in the first two chapters, I proceed in the remainder of the book to evaluate and propose a set of reforms in (i) our time-worn concept of state sovereignty (Chapters 3 and 4) and (ii) the outdated structure of our international institutions, especially those relating to food, agriculture, and ecology (Chapters 5 and 6).

I. Modern extractive agriculture and its discontents

I am an unlikely critic of modern agriculture. My family has owned a sizeable farm in northeast Missouri for over a century. We participate in, and benefit economically from, modern agriculture. Our farm is part of our family heritage and a source of considerable pride.

For me, however, the family farm is also a source of unease and even embarrassment. My research in recent years has led me to believe that agriculture in general, and modern extractive agriculture in particular, should undergo radical transformation in order to arrest and then reverse its damaging ecological, economic, and social consequences. I am hardly alone in this view: modern agriculture has many discontents, and for many good reasons.

IA. A historical and critical account of modern extractive agriculture

Why, though, do I use the term “modern extractive agriculture”? And perhaps more fundamentally, how broad a definition of “agriculture” do I use? Let me address that second question first by offering a sweeping synopsis of the history of agriculture, giving special attention to how the so-called Agricultural Revolution modified the planet we share with multitudes of other species. Then I can, in bringing the story up to the present day, explain the myriad ways in which modern agriculture has become ever more extractive in character.²

IA1. A legacy of accelerating extraction

By roughly 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, farmers around the city of Jarmo, in modern-day Iraq, cultivated several cereal crops that were similar to today’s wheat, barley, and rye. Those so-called cultivars³ were annuals with large enough seed heads to make it worthwhile to plant them each year, typically in designated plots of land, in order to produce food for the city’s residents and feed for their (non-human) animals. In the long stretch of time before this way of life, humans fed themselves largely by gathering and hunting. One authority offers this summary:

[P]erhaps the most amazing fact about the history of our ancestors is how remarkably little things actually changed over an incredibly long period of time. Back 3.6 million years ago, our australopithecine predecessors were already acquiring their food from scavenging, gathering, and hunting small animals. Yet 3.59 million years later, just 12,000 years ago, our immediate (and by then fully human) ancestors were still subsisting by hunting, gathering, and scavenging, along with some fishing.⁴

Most accounts of how the shift to agriculture occurred emphasize the likelihood of a long process involving “protoagriculture.” For some period of time, that is, a mixed system – some farming, some hunting and gathering – probably coexisted. According to one line of thinking, a competition between the two approaches (farming versus hunting and gathering) played out:

The economist Colin Tudge argued from the concept of protoagriculture that basic farming skills gave farmers advantages over neighboring non-farmers. Farmers could survive temporary declines in foraging and hunting food sources, which may have encourage them to hunt more intensively, and might explain the Pleistocene extinctions of large animals; the hunters may have calculated that they could fall back on raising plants if the animals disappeared.

This fall-back plan, in Tudge’s view, turned out to be a trap. Farming increased food production and enabled more children to survive, which in turn obliged people to rely on farming to support the growing population. He notes that early writings such as Genesis in the Bible as well as archaeological findings emphasize how strenuous and difficult farming was and how people hated it. Some ancient myths, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Biblical conflict between Jacob and Esau, contrast the free but animal-like (e.g., hairy) hunter with the more civilized farmer, and in both stories show the farmer tricking the hunter into giving up his freedom for the attraction of civilized life.⁵

Whether best described as a trap or as an escape, though, agriculture almost completely displaced hunting and gathering. Central to its success was the fact that grains – including of course those being cultivated in Jarmo 5,000 to 7,000 years ago – could easily be stored for later use and transported long distances to feed faraway cities.

If agriculture’s history stretches back so far, why do I refer to it as “modern” … and why “extractive”? Let me first explain the latter term, and why it applies to agriculture not only today but also to the days of Jarmo and before.

As I noted above, the foundations of agriculture as seen in Jarmo featured the annual planting of seeds in designated plots of land. This process was extractive to the degree that the integrity of the soil that the farmers used for such cultivated agriculture was diminished or compromised by using – or abusing – that soil. Such abuse might take the form, for instance, of either (i) erosion or (ii) fatigue (extracting the soil’s nutrients without replacing them). Of course, erosion could be reduced by various prudent farming practices, and fatigue of the soil could be counterbalanced in part by using manure from livestock. Yet some erosion and fatigue still inevitably occurred.

The degree to which this traditional form of agriculture was extractive in character gradually increased with the development of more effective means of tilling the soil. Various styles of plow (plough) emerged over time, including the scratch plow (used in Mesopotamia), the crooked plow (used by the ancient Greeks), the mouldboard plow that was in use at least as far back as the Han Dynasty in China (which started in 206 bce), and the much lighter Rotherham plow developed in England in the 1730s. Such plows would often have been pulled by draught animals, such as mules, oxen, or horses – or sometimes humans.

Then, in the nineteenth century, two developments suddenly changed agriculture in ways that made it drastically more extractive in character. The first was the creation and manufacture of the steel plow. This implement appeared in the 1830s and triggered what has been termed “the Great Plow-up” leading eventually to the Dust Bowl days.⁶ The second development, which occurred in the following few decades, was the introduction of the gasoline-powered tractor. These two developments are so central to the character of modern agriculture that they warrant some more detailed coverage.

Don Worster, the widely lauded emeritus distinguished professor of environmental history at Kansas University, has offered this description of the first of these developments – that is, the appearance of the steel plow in the 1830s – and how it figured in the rise of modern agriculture on the Great Plains of North America:

Down to the nineteenth century the grasslands resisted the farmer’s plow. For thousands of years plows had been made of wood, and even when they were given cast-iron edges, they could not penetrate the grasslands. They would br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on usages, citations, and abbreviations
• PART I: Reorienting agriculture: the promise and the challenge of agroecological husbandry
• PART II: Reorienting sovereignty: from nation-state to eco-state
• PART III: Reorienting ecological governance: a global public trust
• Appendix: A “bare-bones legal and policy brief ”: creating a Global Corporate Trust for Agroecological Integrity to facilitate and manage a new agriculture in a world of legitimate eco-states
• Selected bibliography
• Index