To borrow from Che Guevara: Two, three, many Sri Lankas (emphasis mine)!
Industrial Farming Causes Climate Change. The ‘Slow Food’ Movement Wants to Stop It
Aryn Baker
Wed, September 28, 2022 at 10:10 AM
A biennial celebration of international small-scale farmers, breeders, fishers, and food producers just wrapped up in Turin, Italy. Convened by the Slow Food movement, one phrase in particular dominated the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto festival’s long roster of panel discussions and workshops: “Food is the cause of the environmental crisis, but it can also be the solution.”
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Food production contributes approximately 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making farmers both contributors to, and victims of, climate change. But it doesn’t have to be that way, say proponents of Slow Food, a movement started in Italy 36 years ago that promotes “good, clean and fair food” along with a stronger connection between people and the food they eat. Adopting climate-smart farming practices, and taking a more flexible approach to what is farmed where, will make food production more resilient in the face of climate change. But even then, it may not be enough—absent severe reductions in fossil fuel emissions, some places will likely have to give up farming entirely in the near future.
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Improving Resilience
Conventional agriculture seeks to maximize production via large scale farms that rely on monocrops fed by greenhouse gas-emitting fertilizers, protected by biodiversity-damaging pesticides and harvested by fossil fuel-spewing combines and tractors. Industrial farming may be able to produce food cheaply, but it comes with a great environmental cost, says Edward Mukiibi, Slow Food’s new president. The pursuit of profit above all else has resulted in soils so stripped of their nutrients that farmers have no choice but to add increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to maintain production in a downward spiral of additive addiction.
But by focusing on soil health—by letting fields lie fallow, rotating crops, planting hedgerows, or letting cattle churn up the earth and fertilize it with their droppings, among other practices—farmers can improve the quality of their crops, with the added benefit of increased biodiversity and carbon sequestration. That’s the way smallholders used to farm, back when crops were destined for the farmer’s kitchen as much as for the market. These days the practice is called agroecology or regenerative farming, but it’s what Slow Food has been advocating for decades.
The left is obviously unfazed about what happened in countries, like Sri Lanka, who did what these environmentalists advocate. They’re not only pushing to ratchet up people’s energy bills, now they want to starve people with this declaration of war on food production and this latest climate scare propaganda piece. People need mass agricultural food production, fossil fuels, and chemicals (like pesticides and herbicides), not less. Anything else is to return to primitivism.
Green Jihad 