The Organic 1%: Sustainable Farming in a Broken System

By Cyndie Hoffman

Local, sustainable food has become a regular part of our everyday culture as demonstrated through the growing interest in school gardens, Community Supported Agriculture, local farmers' markets, underground dining clubs, and organics in general. This enduring trend in sustainable food reignites a question posed on Triple Pundit two years ago: "Is Sustainable Farming Going Mainstream?" Unfortunately not at all as the sustainable food hype trumps the numbers.

In 2008 organic cropland represented only 0.7 percent in the United States and, at the current growth rate, it is expected to reach not more than 2.5 percent by 2050.

Much of the momentum and buzz in the organics industry has been sparked by key icons and influential leaders who have driven the conversation through thought-provoking books, films, TV shows, and other media engagements. Storytelling about food issues has changed the way Americans view and think about food. Since Michael Pollan unveiled Omnivore's Dilemma in 2006, vivid images of cattle crammed together in CAFOs and swimming in antibiotic-infused manure occupy the minds of many. And, when Jamie Oliver visited schools in 2010 and discovered that kids confuse potatoes with tomatoes and school bureaucrats call french fries a vegetable, education about where food comes from has become increasingly popular. 

The Sustainable Seafood Myth

By Brendan Smith
Stroll by any Whole Foods seafood counter and you will see color-coded fish: Green for fully sustainable, yellow for partially sustainable, and red for fish threatened by overfishing or grown on polluting fish farms. Buy a "green" fish and you eat guilt free, confident that you are doing your part to save the ocean and its inhabitants.

Put down your fork -- Whole Foods is not telling you the whole story. The dirty little secret of their seafood rating system is that it ignores the largest and most imminent threat to our oceans: greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if every human on the planet miraculously decided to buy only seafood stamped with the Whole Foods seal of "sustainablity," marine species will still be doomed.

This is not a secret threat: Just last month, the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) -- a consortium of 27 of the top ocean experts in the world -- declared that effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and oxygen depletion have already triggered a "phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history."

Commission Aims to Produce Clear Course of Action on Sustainable Food System

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)-a consortium of international research centers focused on sustainable agricultural development-has launched a new initiative focused on agriculture's contribution to food security in the context of climate change: the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. "The food system is really not sustainable," says Professor Sir John Beddington, U.K. Government Chief Scientific Adviser and Chair of the Commission. "What is happening is it's getting big subsidies of fossil fuels, it is over-exploiting water.

Sustainable Peasant and Family Farm Agriculture Can Feed the World

The 2008 world food price crisis, and more recent price hikes this year, have focused attention on the ability of the world food system to "feed the world." In La Vía Campesina, the global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations, we believe that agroecological food production by small farmers is the agricultural model best suited to meeting future food needs.

The contemporary food crisis is not really a crisis of our ability to produce. It is more due to factors like the food speculation and hoarding that transnational food corporations and investment funds engage in, the global injustices that mean some eat too much while many others don't have money to buy adequate food, and/or lack land on which to grow it, and misguided policies like the promotion agrofuels that devote farm land to feeding cars instead of feeding people. However, we cannot deny that our collective ability to grow enough food - including, crucially, how we grow it -is an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of ending hunger.