AMERICAN AGRICULTURE AT THE CROSSROADS 

 by Dr. Michael W. Fox
 

U.S. agribusiness claims to feed the hungry world and produce more food that is safe, nutritious, and cheap than any other country. These and other myths promoted by overcapitalized, petrochemical-based food industries will be examined from the perspective of costs and benefits to consumers, U.S. and foreign markets, farmers, and rural communities. Environmental and animal health and welfare consequences will also be discussed. The bioethical principles for a more equitable, humane and sustainable agriculture are identified to remedy industrial "agricide." Examples will be given of positive initiatives in the U.S. to counter this inevitable nemesis, which has global ramifications now spurred by developments in genetic engineering agribiotechnology.

Current agribusiness developments and their consequences in the U.S. and abroad amount to a collision between American style industrial agriculture and reality. The following points support this conclusion.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is torn between its allegiance to the livestock industry and the public interest, telling people to eat less fat and more "beneficial" fruits, vegetables and high fiber cereals, but not to reduce their consumption of animal products, which many studies now indicate will help reduce the incidences of cancer, obesity and a host of other diet-related diseases.

Manure runoff is linked with human health problems, including short-term memory loss in and around the East Coast, and massive fish kills caused by the microorganism Pfiesteria piscicida. State officials refuse to limit the size and number of hog and poultry confinement operations because that would mean unfair competition with other states.

 The Environmental Protection Agency in August 1997 put the largest fine ever on Smithfield Foods in Virginia -- $12.6 million -- for polluting ground and surface water. Federal action to enforce the Clean Water Act was opposed by the governor of the State, George Allen.

Through the Agricultural Export Enhancement Act, the U.S. government gives millions of dollars from the taxpayers' pockets to help agribusiness multinationals gain a competitive edge in the world market. Using the GATT for leverage and the WTO as its enforcer, the U.S. government claims illegal "technical" trade barriers and protectionism when other countries find unacceptable meat and milk from growth-hormone treated cattle; unlabeled genetically engineered (GE) soybeans and other genetically altered agricultural commodities.

Trade wars erupt in a time when global cooperation is an ethically enlightened mandate. Countries refusing to accept GE seeds from U.S. multinationals are coerced by threats of trade restrictions and import tariffs. "Dumping" of surplus produce like powdered milk and chicken legs on poor countries like Jamaica undercut and bankrupt local farmers.

According to the Washington, DC-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, in their 1997 report The World Food Situation: Recent Developments, Emerging Issues and Long-Term Prospects, imports of meat and cereals are likely to rise in countries that were once self-sufficient (especially China and India) benefiting exporting nations like the U.S., Argentina, and Australia, but making the cost of feeding poor families in developing nations higher. 

 Like his predecessor who was promoting rBGH in Europe before it was even approved for use in dairy cows in the U.S., current Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman is promoting genetic engineered crops and biotechnology as being "our greatest hope of feeding a growing world population in a sustainable way."
U.S. consumers' right to be able to make informed food choices is denied by the U.S. government's refusal to label GE foods and food ingredients. The U.S. government essentially overruled the National Organics Standards Board by pushing to have municipal sewage sludge, livestock confinement systems, food irradiation, and GE seeds and other products included for consideration under the soon-to-be-finalized Federal organic farming and food standards.

Activists in the U.S. have poured milk from rBGH-treated cows down street drains in public protest, and rural communities are now uniting to fight huge hog and poultry factories and processing plants that pollute the air, drinking water, lower their property values and contribute to rural unemployment.

Activists abroad, like Greenpeace in Europe and Prof. Nanjundaswami's grass-roots movement in India respectively, have protested and blocked U.S. imports of GE products, and destroyed  a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Bangalore.

As suspicions mount in the U.S. over a porcine source of CJ disease, over 25 million pounds of hamburger (ground) beef was taken off the market in August 1997, the biggest food recall ever in the U.S. because of E.coli 0157:H7 contamination. According to the General Accounting Office some 9,000 people die each year in the U.S. from food-borne 'plagues'. Campylobacter is implicated as a more serious source of food poisoning from poultry than even Salmonella (which is found in one of every 3-5 birds slaughtered). The U.S. government responds by approving the irradiation of meat and other animal produce.

In spite of these internal obstacles, U.S. consumers, family farmers, public interest and sustainable agriculture organizations are working together and becoming a force of influence nationally and internationally. The vision of a socially just, ecologically sound, humane and sustainable agriculture is becoming a reality, as local community supported agriculture and market co-ops take root.  But as some mega-factory farming operations move across the border to Mexico where labor is cheap and environmental regulations nonexistent, like North Carolina-based Murphy Farms, to set up 40 or more hog factories  we see U.S. Agriculture reaching a crossroads. One path leads to export of confinement systems and related inputs (like antibiotics and high protein and energy feeds), which means a continuation of the nonsustainable industrial paradigm, while the other leads to domestic consumption that is coming to mean more local, sustainable, organic and less inhumane production methods.

 

Industrial Agriculture at the Crossroads   
Because of increasing soil and water conservation and animal waste disposal problems, and environmental and food safety and quality concerns, coupled with the future shortage of such key agricultural inputs as phosphates and fossil fuels, conventional agriculture in the US, as in other industrialized countries, is at the crossroads.  Current agricultural practices cannot continue along the same path.

U.S. agribusiness advocates, like Dennis T. Avery, would contest my concerns and criticisms of industrial agriculture, which he calls "high yield" agriculture.  Its proponents, who also see biotechnology as a way to further enhance agricultural productivity and to save wildlife species and biodiversity, either deny these hidden costs or accept them since the benefits -- more food (and agribusiness profits for a "hungry world") --  far outweigh such costs.
The conclusion is that because the human population is expanding and needs food, then the risks and costs of intensive 'high yield' agriculture are justified (or insignificant).  There's no alternative, like organic farming, according to Avery, because it is so low yield that it will mean global famine if more wildlife habitat isn't taken over to make up for the deficit per acre.  Thus, organic farming is seen as a major threat to conservation and biodiversity and to the human good.
People who live by such claims structure reality in such a way that they do not know when they are lying to themselves or deceiving others.  The new agribusiness myth that Avery promotes is that industrial agriculture is the best way to protect the environment and biodiversity.  Its absurdity has been well documented in a recent report by the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture.

This report details how, in the U.S. especially, chemically-based, intensive crop production (especially questionable as a livestock feed-source) harms both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems; and confirms that a range of alternatives to the chemically-based production model can achieve equivalent or higher yields per unit area of land with less harmful consequences.

Avery goes on in one of his epistles for US agribusiness to suggest that industrial agriculture, with its agrochemicals, agrobiotechnology and patented hybrid seeds will not only alleviate world hunger, it will also help reduce population growth because people who have a better income and can afford more meat and other animal produce have fewer children. 

This is an overly simplistic correlative inference.  These smaller affluent families are, per capita, as much, if not more, of a drain on the environmental economy and energy budget as poorer families who eat little or no meat and who sustain themselves on a low-input, labor-intensive agriculture.

It is education and access to family planning programs and the development of local self-sufficiency and sustainable enterprises, especially agricultural, not agribusiness 'high yield' farming, that will help control human population growth and world hunger.
But this is not to imply that either Avery and those who share his worldview are all wrong and that I am all right.  At best, I'm half right half the time.  Avery is right, I believe, in stating, "Higher crop yields add wealth, which itself encourages lower birth rates.  They also permit a shift to urban jobs and urban birth rates are almost always much lower than rural ones."  But we must ask how are crop yields increased, what kinds of crops are we talking about and who is growing them, owns the land, and controls the market.  

Agribusiness has much to contribute to help alleviate such problems as human hunger, poverty and malnutrition; and a major role to play in conservation, wildlife and biodiversity protection.  But it must be less focused upon selling products, investing in, researching and developing ever more farm inputs, since the Achille's heel of Avery's 'high yield' farming is its dependence on high-inputs from chemical fertilizers to mega-farm machinery.
A-business-as-usual attitude will leave many by the roadside as innovative farmers and food industry corporations take the right road that corrects these problems and concerns.  Agricultural economist Harold F. Breimyer points us in this direction as follows:

--The 21st promises to be a century of biomass agriculture.
--Industry's voracious demand for biomass products of agriculture will have two startling effects. 

The first is to draw farming resources out of animal agriculture, converting us all into pasta-and-vegetable eaters. 

The second is to make us as a nation more protective of our farmland resource than ever before.

Our cropland will be farmed more intensively than it ever has been in the past.  Farming practices will be much more labor intensive than they now are.  Our topsoil will be meticulously protected against erosion or other damage.
Who will own and control productive farmland?  That is hard to know.  It might go back to being held and farmed by owner-operators, but acreages will be smaller than now.
To Breimyer's broad brush-stroke picture of future biomass agriculture, we can add the finer strokes of ecologically sound, regionally appropriate, and often community supported organic farms that will provide a diverse cornucopia of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains.

The right road will not be easy at the start.  There will be social and economic difficulties and dislocations during the transition process to a more equitable and sustainable agriculture.  But when we look down the road of conventional, petrochemical-based agriculture and see where it has taken us, we know that it is time to get off and change direction.  Today we are at the crossroads, and it is time to choose.

 

US Agriculture: Vision and Values
The advent of genetic engineering biotechnology and its applications in livestock and crop production and food processing has raised yet more questions and concerns, especially since the U.S. government has essentially deregulated this new industry to  give U.S.-based multinationals a competitive edge in  the world market.
Through the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Codex Alimentarius, which is drafting international agreements on food quality and safety, the prevailing values and practices of industrial agriculture, notably deficient in humane and environmental ethics, may well become the global norm.  U.S. agribusiness corporations, facing international competition, will understandably resist environmental and farm animal protection legislation so long as it is illegal under WTO rules for the U.S. to protect its own farmers from imports from other countries that have inadequate or no environmental and animal protection legislation.  In the absence of international harmonization of sound environmental and farm animal protection laws and regulations, international agreements and standards for food quality and safety are ethically unacceptable.
Without labelling food as to country of origin and method of production (like organic, free range, or genetically engineered),  U.S. consumers will have no choice in the marketplace and no opportunity to support either U.S. farmers or particular farming methods.  But the U.S. government, under pressure from agribusiness, is resisting attempts by public interest organizations to uphold the consumers' right to know via appropriate food labeling.  The soon-to-be established national organic food label will probably set a lower standard than many U.S. organic farmers have achieved, which will set up unfair competition and actually mislead consumers.
U.S. agribusiness industry should focus more on process, not productivity, which is the end-point of an extremely complex, biodynamic process that does not fit within the narrow paradigm of conventional agricultural economists.
By focusing on process I mean paying attention to the economic and health benefits of maintaining a living soil, which is the primary resource (coupled with pure water, improved air quality and normal solar radiation) of agriculture.  There is much money to be made in helping restore and maintain soil, air and water quality, as well as the quality of livestock and seedstock (without having to resort to genetic engineering).  Let agribusiness find its profits in helping farmers restore agricultural communities rather than selling more products and processes that simply increase farm inputs, lower farmers' profits and increase market profits for the agribusiness petrochemical-pharmaceutical food and feed industry complex.  A science, economy and ethics of remedial agricultural inputs that lead to healthier soils, crops, livestock and food should be on the corporate agenda and the mission of land-grant colleges of agriculture 'food science' and veterinary medicine around the world.
The same must be said for human medicine that needs to establish a closer linkage via nutrition, with remedial innovations in agriculture and in consumer eating habits.  It is absurd that the pharmaceutical and medical industries should continue to profit by selling many products and treatments that    would not be needed if our soils were healthy, our food was safe and nutritious, and our diets and lifestyles tempered by the science and philosophy of biological realism and bioethics.

Industrial Agriculture: Hidden Costs
When we look back down the road that conventional industrial agriculture in America has taken us and ask dispassionately how we got onto it in the fist place, every agricultural economist and agricultural school on the way will recite the answer:  to increase production and efficiency.

Until this past decade, this was the mantra of US  agribusiness and the American agricultural academic establishment.  In the 1950's and 60's they proved 'scientifically' that agricultural productivity could be dramatically increased with more capital intensive inputs from agrochemicals to bigger combine harvesters and other equipment.  The simple formula used to measure efficiency, namely, how many people one modern producer could feed, meant tremendous savings in farm labor.  Farms grew larger, big ones gobbling up small ones.  So-called 'inefficient' farmers sold out, a few held on, but many, seduced into taking out bank loans and who were more adept than others at farming the government for subsidies, got bigger and bigger.  They were no longer farmers but producers of commodities, miners of the soil, firm believers in the mental monoculture of industrial agriculture's horizonless goals of ever increasing productivity and efficiency.  Overproduction became a costly problem.

In the 1980's there was a mass exodus from the land as the vibrant nexus of family farms and rural communities across much of the U.S. disintegrated.  Reagan administration people dismissed this cultural genocide as the price of progress and put it down to "inefficiency and poor management."  Their neo-Darwinian pseudo-scientific view was that such dramatic changes reflected an evolutionary process of increasing agricultural efficiency in accord with the natural law of free market competition and survival of the fittest.

But a few agricultural economists, rural sociologists and others were not so complacent.  The loss of cultural diversity and regional farming wisdom passed on from generation to generation, and the economic and spiritual decline of rural communities were not fully accounted for in the cost accounting of flat-earth ag economists and policy makers.

A full and fair cost accounting of the loss of top soil and soil quality; of water quality and aquifer reserves; of agrochemical contamination of the food chain and risks to consumers; of lost natural biodiversity and wildlife habitat and species and a host of other issues were likewise ignored until the 1990's. At this time the costly public health consequences of factory farms that are the breeding grounds for new epidemic diseases (zoonoses), and the adverse health consequences of high animal fat and protein consumption are being more widely acknowledged.

This decade of environmental, social, and ethical accountability for agriculture has put the U.S. and other industrial countries at a real crossroads.  Agricultural practices and policies must change, but what road to take and who is going to decide?

 

Risks, Benefits and Accountability: the rBGH Example
We might have reached the crossroads a decade sooner and be well on the right road now, but for all the foot-dragging, ideological rigidity, enchantment with new technology, and outright denial of the myriad problems of conventional agriculture.

What I find particularly disturbing has been the US  government's inertia, and the too frequent collusion with agribusiness to fabricate a system of accountability that simply assimilates documented risk communications and full cost-benefit analysis of various agricultural practices and policies and the status quo remains unchanged.  The myth that alternative, organic and other more sustainable agricultural practices would be too costly and not sufficiently productive was spread as the hidden costs or externalities of conventional, industrial agriculture were ignored.

While hearings may be purportedly 'open,' and decisions 'science-based', the government's role in evaluating new products and processes from rBGH to food irradiation, looses credibility and impartiality, because of the politicization of issues and concerns.  Corporate influences via election campaign donations,  grants to universities and development loans via the World Bank and other agencies to developing countries create further barriers to an impartial and ethically based evaluation of agricultural and other industrialized human activities.

The criteria whereby risk assessments and cost benefit analyses are made have been long subject to oversimplification (reductionism) and distortion.  For example, the promised economic benefits to farmers and consumers from injecting cows with rBGH were speculative to the point of distortion.  The U.S. government's evaluation of safety to consumers of dairy products from rBGH-treated cows was oversimplified and the entire new drug approval process demonstrated reductionistic shortcomings.  The  efficacy and consumer safety of rBGH should not have been the only criteria to impartially judge its societal acceptability.  Economic, environmental, agricultural and cow health and welfare questions and concerns should have been included as important criteria for an objective evaluation of the acceptability of this new product of genetic engineering. Some consumer health concerns, like increased insulin-growth factor in milk from treated cows, remain unanswered.  The European Community put a moratorium on approving rBGH precisely because of these concerns.  Ironically, a veterinary staff member of the American Veterinary Medical association confided to me that the rBGH question is a non-issue since the market place would be the ultimate arbitrator:  "If it causes problems and isn't profitable, then farmers won't buy it." Such a laissez-faire attitude and faith in economic determinism is indicative of the kind of ethical and moral vacuum a society manifests when it gets caught in the competitive global market arena of GATT and the WTO.  

Only too often when a product or process proves to cause harm, in accordance with the law of unforeseen consequences, it is then too late to correct the harm that effective risk evaluation and communication could have averted in the first place.  And only too often because of economic justifications and political pressures, the product or process is never recalled, as is the case with many pesticides whose 'emergency' use continues to be approved in the US. Instead, 'risk management' oversight is put in place by government, all at taxpayers' expense.

Another serious potential flaw in all risk determinations, the law of unforeseen consequences notwithstanding, is when background and summation or synergy effects are not fully determined.  For example, the use of some new genetically engineered pesticide could be relatively harmless in 'controlled' laboratory and field tests, but in the real world, where the environment is already seriously contaminated, increasing that burden and attendant risks is unacceptable. 

Furthermore, as with most toxicity studies, it is not possible to determine if the new pesticide, or its breakdown products, might become more toxic when combined with other chemicals already in our food, water, soil, and in our bodies and those of other creatures, including soil microorganisms and beneficial insects and birds.  It is surely not acceptable to arbitrarily lump such consequences into a non-quantified category of possible costs since they should be the substance of ethical debate, and instead tout the benefits of the new product or process.  These are usually highly speculative and depend heavily on market advertising and promotion for their acceptability once regulatory hurdles have been negotiated.

Risk determinations and communication of documented concerns will continue to be contested, denied and ignored so long as money rules over reason, and science is the only truth that supplants rather than complements ethics.  To compensate for capitalism's ethical vacuum, we need ever more laws and regulatory bureaucracies, all at great cost to the public and private (corporate) sectors.  Clearly this is an absurd situation and a clear indication of how dysfunctional Western industrial  society has become.

Farming with Less Harm, Consuming with Conscience
No other society past or present raises and kills so many animals just for their meat.  No other society past or present has adopted such intensive systems of animal production and nonrenewable resource-dependent farming practices.  These have evolved to make meat a dietary staple: and to meet the public expectation and demand for a 'cheap' and plentiful supply of meat.  An agriculture that raises and slaughters billions of animals every year primarily for meat, depends on costly nonrenewable natural resources and precious farmland to raise the feed for these animals to convert into flesh; land that critics now believe should instead be used more economically to feed people directly.  To a hungry world, such conspicuous consumption is a poor model to emulate.
Supporters of intensive animal factory farming claim that  humane reforms would increase costs and put an unfair burden on the poor.  Critics of factory farming are judged as being more concerned about animals than people and against progress.  Both these erroneous beliefs and conclusions need to be dispelled. 

The real costs of factory farming have been well documented, ranging from price supports and subsidies at taxpayers' expense, to the demise of family farms, rural communities, waste of natural resources, public health risks and costs, farm animal stress, disease and suffering.  Coupled with corporate monopoly, these hidden costs have aggravated rather than alleviated poverty and malnutrition nationally and internationally.  The fact is the real costs of factory farming are not accounted for by agribusiness, and its high productivity is neither efficient nor socially or ethically acceptable.  Some of the reasons for reaching this regrettable conclusion will now be detailed.

 

The Harms of Overproduction
In some countries, like Brazil, raising livestock has become a major hedge against inflation, but overproduction cycles depress world market prices, fuel deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation.  Price supports and subsidies to producers, especially in the developed world, encourage overproduction and cause further distortions and inequities in world market prices.  One serious consequence is the 'dumping' of meat, dairy and other agricultural products in other countries that are sold to processors and wholesalers at prices much lower than local farmers can get for their own similar produce.  Import tariffs to help protect local farmers from 'dumping' and from being forced out of business further compounds the problems of agricultural surpluses and subsidized export commodities coming from more industrialized nations.   

While raising tariffs and other forms of 'protectionism' by any country to protect its own farmers is an illegal 'technical barrier' under the GATT convention, local farmers raising food and feed for domestic consumption should have their market protected and fair market prices guaranteed, provided their farming methods are humane, socio-economically just and ecologically sound and sustainable.  And they should not be encouraged to adopt the capital intensive, high-input methods of animal agriculture that have become the bane of the industrial world.

The high-volume productivity of industrial-scale, intensive systems of livestock and poultry production is often touted as being the hallmark and miracle of progress and success.  Poorer 'developing' countries are encouraged to adopt these methods in order to increase agricultural production and 'efficiency'.  Yet ironically, the global industrialization of animal agriculture is now counterproductive in part because it is too successful.  Industrialized countries are now passing on the burden of overproduction and commodity surpluses to the third world while at the same time their industrial agricultural experts, agribusiness agents and development banks are trying to sell intensive livestock and poultry production systems to these countries. This makes no sense in the long-term except to those who manufacture and profit from selling all the 'inputs', from drugs and vaccines to feed and equipment that these animal factories depend upon. 
The legal definition of 'dumping' is to put products on the market for sale at a price below the actual costs of production.  This definition of such unfair and illegal trade needs to be broadened to include all marketing activities that undermine regional self-sufficiency, national sovereignty and local sustainable productivity of the same or similar commodities and services.  The fair market price of agricultural commodities and services should be reflective of all costs, including social and environmental.  On the basis of full cost accountability, more equitable trade policies could then be established, and markets encouraged or protected as the case may be.  With a firm bioethical basis that considers social and environmental as well as economic factors, there will be incentives to promote the most ecologically appropriate farming methods and choice of crops for domestic use and for export.  The scenario of one country or region harming its constituents or its ecology and natural resources by investing in large-scale production of grain, livestock, cotton or some other commodity, and then compounding this harm by 'dumping' such produce on the world market and lowering the fair market price would then be averted. 
The final irony and tragedy of developing countries becoming dependent on imported food commodities and losing their own agricultural self-reliance is the spectre of malnutrition and hunger when there is rapid inflation, and when the world market demand and prices for food commodities like chicken and powdered milk suddenly increase.   When a country's agriculture collapses, social strife is inevitable, and with political and economic instability, crime and violence and even civil war are likely.  The possibility of a recovery of agriculture will become ever more remote as the poor and hungry try to raise their own food.   Lacking the right inputs and resources, if not also knowledge, especially in sustainable and conservation agriculture, irreparable ecological damage to the land and loss of biodiversity are likely consequences.
These socio-economic, environmental and ethical concerns cannot be ignored by GATT or by the World Trade Organization (WTO).  To farm with less harm clearly has international ramifications related to equity and world trade.  The adoption and multiplication of non-sustainable, intensive livestock and poultry systems by industrialized countries directed toward high-volume production for export, needs to be looked at from an ethical as well as an economic perspective, and constraints applied for the good of all.  The same can be said for new genetically-engineered products of agri-biotechnology, like analog cocoa, vanilla and nut oils, the production of which will harm those countries dependent on raising these products naturally for export revenues, needed in part to pay off the interest accrued by too often misguided development loans. 

Ethical and moral imperatives notwithstanding, it would be enlightened self-interest for GATT and the WTO to protect and encourage local agricultural self-sufficiency in poorer countries, since the world market will become increasingly dysfunctional and may well collapse if poverty and socio-economic inequities and strife continue to spread under the compounding pressures of population increase and environmental degradation.    The application of bioethics to world trade, especially in the agricultural sector, will do much to help every nation and region maximize productivity and minimize adverse environmental and socio-economic consequences primarily by encouraging mixed farming systems (including agroforestry and aquaculture) that are most appropriate ecologically and culturally for each bio-geographic region.

 

Harm of Farm Animal Feeds and Wastes
Meat industry defenders counter the argument that importing feed for livestock and poultry from the third world contributes to hunger and poverty by insisting that much of this food comes from crop by-products of cash crops grown for export, such as suger cane, molasses, palm kernel cake, cotton oil seed cake, soya bean cake, rice, and wheat bran, and rice polishings.  In actuality, this market for by-products simply perpetuates unsound agricultural practices in poorer countries, undermines traditional sustainable farming systems and uses up good land that should be used to feed people first.

This aspect of animal agriculture, in enabling farmers to feed far more animals than the land can sustain from local resources alone, is a major support-structure of intensive livestock and poultry production.  But it is ethically, economically and ecologically unacceptable, in part because of the by-product of animal waste that should, but is not and cannot be returned to enrich the land in other regions and countries from which the animal feed originated.  Such animal waste has become a costly environmental management hazard and is a cardinal indicator of bad farming practices and agricultural policy.  Nitrates, phosphates, bacteria, antibiotic and other drug and feed additive residues, such as copper, arsenic and selenium in farm animal excrement, overload and pollute the environment and food chain. A recent government report indicates livestock produce 130 times more waste than the entire human population in the US.   
A related problem is dealing with the enormous volume of another form of animal waste that the meat industry refers to as animal tankage.  The dried and processed residue of 44 billion pounds annually in the US of animal tankage from rendering plants contains the remains of dead, dying diseased and debilitated livestock and poultry, condemned and unusable body parts and even the remains of road-kills and cats and dogs from animal shelters.  Slow, low-heat rendering neither sanitizes nor rids animal tankage of potentially harmful organisms, heavy metals and other hazardous residues.  Farm animals, companion animals and consumers are all put at risk since this by-product of animal agriculture is added to pet foods, livestock and poultry feeds (which may also include animal manure) and is even sold as fertilizer for farm, home and kitchen gardens.  Studies have linked bacterial food poisoning in humans with this industry practice of including animal tankage by-products and poultry manure in farm animals' food. The tragedy of 'mad cow disease' in the UK is principally a product of an increasingly dysfunctional food industry. Obviously if consumers responded wisely by reducing their consumption of meat and other animal produce, the magnitude of these problems would be significantly reduced with great economic savings.

Finding Solutions
Those who believe that farm animals do not play a vital ecological and economic role in sustainable crop production and range management are as wrong as those who claim that intensive livestock and poultry production are bioethically acceptable because they cause no harm.  Now is the time for openness and objectivity and a coming together of all parties and sectors of society involved in the production, marketing and consumption of food to support the development, adoption and market viability of humane and ecological farming practices that enable farmers to farm with less harm.
The industrial factory-scale system that the animal component of modern agriculture has evolved is bioethically unacceptable.  Making the retail price of meat "cheaper" through tax subsidies and price supports, through better vaccines and biotechnology, through irrigation projects and further deforestation and draining of wetlands, makes it even less bioethically acceptable.  So will attempts to improve meat safety inspection, handling and processing, as with irradiation, since a full and fair cost accounting will still show that producing meat as a dietary staple causes far too much harm. 
The question of the rightness or wrongness of meat eating and of killing animals is not the central issue or primary bioethical concern. The primary concern is the need to implement less harmful alternatives to contemporary animal agriculture in the US and in other countries that have factory farms and feedlots. The antidote is in the adoption and public support of less harmful organic and other alternative, sustainable crop and livestock production practices that are humane and ecologically sound.

The ethic of reverential respect for life and for the land is the guiding bioethical principle of a humane, socially just and sustainable agriculture and society.  To question agricultural practices, including new developments in genetic engineering biotechnology that may cause harm, be it to the environment, to sectors of society or to domesticated animals and wildlife, should not be judged as unscientific or as erecting  hurdles to obstruct progress.  Surely the essence of progress is to apply science and the seven golden rules of bioethics (see Table I) in the development and adoption of agricultural and other practices and industries so as to cause the least harm and the greatest good to the entire life community of Earth.  We cannot sacrifice the good of the environment or of rural communities for the short-term good of the economy, for society will suffer, if not this generation, then the next.  Likewise we cannot sacrifice the good of farm animals or of the soil in the name of productivity and labor-substituting technological innovation and marketing, without ultimately harming the economy and the health of the populace.

 

More Humane and Healthier Diets
We humans are a highly adaptable primate species, one feature of our adaptive success being our physiological capacity to be omnivores.  This flexibility in our capacity to utilize a wide range of food sources, from fruits to nuts and meats to maize, is universal with cultural nuances that may have a genetic basis. For most peoples around the world, a primarily plant-based diet, with animal products as supplements or condiments, has been shown to be the keystone for a healthy life, economy and environment.  With rare exceptions, most peoples can eat and digest almost anything that other mammalian species can assimilate (with the notable exception of cellulose); and have developed remarkable ways to preserve and enhance the nutritive value and palatability of a diversity of natural foods.  Cultural/ethnic differences in cuisine reflect biogeographic and seasonal variations in food types and availability.  This ethnic diversity provides a rich cornucopia of culinary delights and is a source of new crops and food products for an increasingly cosmopolitan marketplace.  From this cornucopia, we can select some of the most tried and true diets that have been 'human tested' for countless generations, and that are ecologically sound and sustainable.  One classic example is what is generically termed 'Mediterranean cuisine' that integrates various ethnic foods from this biogeographic region to provide an extremely healthful, relatively low-cost and ecologically sustainable diet.
An animal-based agriculture and a meat-based diet are neither good for the planet nor for one's health.  These views, now being more widely accepted and promoted by health experts in the US confirm the connections between a healthful diet and humane and sustainable agriculture.  The many benefits of farming with less harm and eating with conscience are therefore gaining greater recognition.  Such recognition will do much to encourage traditional and innovative organic farming practices and ethnic foods, and help prevent the loss of biocultural diversity in world agriculture as well as in the kitchen, which is under siege by the promoters of meat and other animal produce as dietary staples.

 

Overproduction and overconsumption of food go hand in hand.  Meat consumption in the U.S. continues to increase.  According to Illinois Agri. News (July 15, 1994, p. C2), the average American consumed 204 pounds of meat in 1993, including 65.4 pounds of beef, 52.3 lbs. of pork, 68.6 lbs. of chicken, and 17.8 lbs. of turkey.

The relatively low cost of food in the U.S. compared to other countries, coupled with increasingly sedentary life-styles, is responsible for an alarming finding, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.  One in three American adults is now seriously overweight and the average body weight is increasing.  This translates into 58 million people being at increased risk from heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other chronic ailments.  And (according to an NBC news report July 19, 1994), overeating has spawned a weight-loss industry that reaps $40 billion per year from American consumers, more than most countries spend on food.  Furthermore, the U.S. food industry spends some $36 billion a year on advertising.   

  The consumer trends in industrial society toward nutritional illiteracy, agricultural amnesia, and culinary catatonia, fostered by the microwaveable frozen meal industry with its prepared and processed convenience foods and relatively meaningless ingredient and daily recommended allowances labeling, are symptomatic of the disintegration of agriculture and culture.  So are the diseases of an overconsumptive and malconsumptive (and malcontent) society that justifies health spas, costly coronary bypasses, and liposuction to remove excess calories, while the rest of the human population that might well aspire to live this way suffers from malnutrition and even starvation due in part to the insatiable appetites of the industrial world.  

 

The first most important step for every caring person to take is to choose a humane diet and eat with conscience.  This bioethical imperative should be on top of every nation's agenda, since having the choice of a humane diet is a vital component in the prevention of animal suffering; in reducing public health costs; in restoring rural communities; and in the preservation and restoration of natural resources. But encouraging people to make this caring and enlightened choice is politically controversial and is still seen as an economic threat by those who have a vested interest in stopping real progress in agriculture.   

Eighteen US agribusiness groups purportedly representing the best interests of farmers, ranchers and farm animals, have publicly attacked The Humane Society of the United States' "Choosing A Humane Diet" project.  They claim that "This campaign for the first time really places The HSUS squarely in the lead of animal rights groups seeking a vegetarian society by using emotionalism to induce the public to both reduce and replace animal products with other foods."  By so doing, these groups seek to discredit the legitimacy of our concerns and to protect their vested interests in maintaining the status quo of factory farms and feedlots.  We are also cast as the enemy of farmers and ranchers.  Yet the real enemy is agribusiness, which has contributed to the loss of over 425,000 family farms over the past decade as animal factories and feedlots have proliferated and put smaller producers out of business.

 

Farming with Compassion
In order to farm compassionately and cause less harm, we must all consume and generally live so as to cause less harm to ourselves and the rest of Earth's creation.  It means a reduction in the production and consumption of meat in those countries where meat is a dietary staple.  It also means refinement in terms of how animals are raised, transported and slaughtered, and replacement of animal protein and fat with cheaper vegetable fats, oils and proteins.  Our human population of a soon-to-double 5.4 billion (of which 1.6 billion are malnourished today) can only increase the current livestock population of some 4.5 billion to maintain the status quo and public demand for meat if it is prepared to accept the loss of biodiversity and nonrenewable resources, and cope with the attendant environmental and economic risks and costs. We have a better chance to predict and prevent these, if we begin to apply bioethics in the public and corporate policy decision-making process and in our collective vision of what kind of future world we are creating this and every day.  And the first principle of bioethics in agriculture is like the good doctor's Hippocratic aphorism: do no harm. 

 

Protecting Nature and Wildlife
An agriculture based primarily on using good land to raise feed for livestock, as in the US, is nonsustainable. This is  being recognized by some conventional agriculturalists.  The conservative Council for Agricultural Science and Technology published a landmark report in 1994 by agronomist Paul E. Waggoner entitled "How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?"  In his introduction Waggoner writes, "Today farmers feed five to six billion people by cultivating about a tenth of the planet's land.  The seemingly irresistible doubling of population and the imperative of producing food will take another tenth of the land, much from Nature, if people keep on eating and farmers keep on farming as they do now.  So farmers work at the junction where population, the human condition, and sparing land for Nature meet."
With this premise, and using the latest data from around the world, Waggoner proceeds to show how 'smart farmers' can harvest more per plot and thus spare some of today's cropland for Nature -- if we help them with changed diets, never-ending research, and encouraging incentives.  Among the points the report makes are:
--Calories and protein equally distributed from present cropland could give a vegetarian diet to ten billion people;
--The global totals of sun on land, CO2 in the air, fertilizer, and even water could produce far more food than ten billion people need;
--By eating different species of crop and more or less vegetarian diets, we can change the number who can be fed from a plot;
--Recent data shows that millions of people do change their diets in response to health, price, and other pressures, and that they are capable of changing their diet even further.

 

Humane Sustainable Agriculture: Bioethical Principles and Criteria
Many of the national agribusiness groups who oppose the humane sustainable agriculture movement today will support it tomorrow when there is a clearer understanding of the bioethics and profitability of farming nonviolently.  Such understanding will lead to a shared vision of a brighter future beyond the short-term goals and imperatives of the world marketplace.

There are many academicians, politicians and others who still believe that factory farms and feedlots help America lead the world in producing meat at the lowest cost, and that to abolish them would hurt the poor who could not afford more humanely- and ecologically-raised, organically-certified meat and poultry.  A broader bioethical perspective would enable them to see that factory farms and feedlots are neither efficient nor sustainable ways of producing food for human consumption and indirectly contribute to world hunger.

The application of bioethics to evaluate developments and current practices in agriculture will facilitate the adoption of humane practices.  All new agricultural products, processes and policies should be subject to rigorous bioethical evaluation prior to approval and adoption in order to promote the "farm-without-harm" ideal, and the goal of sustainability.

In order to avoid the costs and consequences of intensive, animal-based industrial agriculture, we should first and foremost have a soil-based agriculture that utilizes various crops, forages and animal species sustainably within the limits of available renewable local natural resources; and that either enhances or causes no net loss of natural biodiversity.

Maintaining soil and water quality and biodiversity are the basic bioethical criteria for social acceptance of those farming systems that function profitably and sustainably with or without animals.  But until national and international bioethical accord and global harmonization of organic and humane farming standards and practices are achieved, great effort will be needed to protect humane and sustainable agricultural systems and communities from unfair competition and possible annihilation by industrial agriculture.

The core principle of bioethics is ahimsa, meaning non-harmful, non-injurious and non-violent action.  The future of agriculture, therefore, if it is to be sustainable, must be guided not simply by the imperatives of human need and greed, but by this compassionate ethic of ahimsa:  of avoiding harm to other living beings, human and non-human; plant and animal, wild and domesticated, either directly, or indirectly as by damaging this environment.

When we start from the bioethical principle of farming with the least harm, it is obvious that we should consider the suffering of animals used in farming and as suppliers of draft power, manure, blood and bonemeal fertilizer, fat, fiber, protein, skin and other by-products for human use.  If it causes less harm to the ecology of a particular biogeographic region to include some animals in the farming system to make it profitable and sustainable than it would if they were excluded, then their humane incorporation is ethically acceptable. There can be no grounds except sheer greed to justify inhumane husbandry practices.  But this is so often done in the name of efficiency and cost-savings.  An agriculture that accepts cruel treatment of livestock and poultry is unethical and dysfunctional.

The guiding principle of non-violent agriculture -- to farm with less  harm -- is an ideal that we may never attain, but should not therefore discard.  Rather, the degree of humaneness, the quality of life afforded to both farm owners, workers and farm animals, should be the cardinal indicator of sustainable profitability and social acceptability of those farming systems that have integrated animals as essential ecological components.    The major criteria for bioethical evaluation are illustrated in Fig. 2, which demonstrates the interconnectedness of these interdependent criteria, that all converge on economics and full cost accounting.  These bioethical criteria include safety and effectiveness; social justice and equity; farm animal well-being; environmental impact (including harm to wildlife, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity); socio-economic and cultural impact,  especially harm to established sustainable practices and communities; and accord with established organic and other humane sustainable agriculture practices, standards and production claims. To farm with less harm and choosing a humane diet are coins of the same currency that will forge a strong alliance between urban consumers who care, and rural producers who share the vision of a humane and socially just agriculture and society. 

 

Restore the Humus, Recover Humanity
The decline and demise of civilizations is almost invariably linked with the devitalization of the soil and consequent malnutrition.  Today this is compounded by variously denatured, deficient, refined, processed and adulterated foods.  We human beings tend to forget that we are humus beings.  From the earth we are born; to the earth we return and by the earth we are sustained.  Humility, humanity and humus are words that connect and ground us in the reality of our being.  But the limited worldview of egotism separates us from the biological reality of our own being, and so out of ignorance we demean, neglect and abuse the earth.  Caught in the delusional realm of anthropocentrism we fail to realize that when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves.  When the humus is depleted of microorganisms, becomes nutrient deficient and toxic with agrochemicals, so become our crops, farm animals and the food we consume: And so become our bodies and minds. In harming the earth we harm ourselves physically and mentally, and the worldview or mind-set responsible also harms us morally and spiritually.

When we recover our humanity and humility we rediscover the wisdom of living in harmony with the earth.  Through the sacraments of seed and soil, toil and food, our health and well-being and the vitality of the earth are mutually enhanced.  As we enter the deep communion of a mutually enhancing symbiosis with the earth, human purpose and fulfillment gain greater meaning and significance.  And we are secure in the knowledge that we are part of that which is forever being renewed, as the self is forever sustained, transfigured, transformed and reborn.  Through the inter-communion of reverential symbiosis we come to understand and respect, as the laws of Nature, all the relationships and processes that maintain and sustain the life community.  Obedience to these laws enables us to participate in a creative and mutually enhancing way and by so doing develop appropriate technologies that do not cause harm to ourselves and other sentient beings, and which ideally help enhance the life, health and beauty of the Earth.

Our scientific understanding of ecology and evolutionary biology provides a rational, ethical basis for what we regard spiritually as our sacred connections, and shared origins since we are part of the same Creation as all other sentient beings.  This spiritual kinship leads us to acknowledge the intrinsic value and inherently divine aspect of every being.  We neither rob animals of their dignity nor their sanctity and right to be themselves and fulfill their cosmic purpose.
As we humans come to see that most evil in the world comes from our ignorant self-centeredness, we may, with Nature's help, mature into a Creation-centered being. We should reflect on the wisdom of Albert Einstein who surmised that, "The significant problems of the world cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created."

Our pathological anthropocentrism has pervaded our major religious and cultural institutions and caused great harm for millennia.  The recovery of humanity and civilization lies in the  transformation of our consciousness, combining compassion and reason, conscience and science. This will herald a new epoch in human evolution and in the refinement and metamorphosis of the human spirit.  An auspicious beginning is to respect the living soil as a primary life-giver and sustainer, and to farm and to consume accordingly, with less harm and greater care, harmony and veneration.

We will know when we are on the right path again when we farm with less harm; agrochemicals are rarely used; when livestock factories are gone, along with the notion that meat is an ethically acceptable and necessary dietary staple; and when food -- its production, marketing and consumption -- regains those sacramental elements of stewardship, thanksgiving and communion, and is no longer regarded simply as a profitable commodity.

 

 CONCLUSIONS

At the October 1997 Minnesota Conference on "The Soul of Agriculture"--a deliberation on the philosophy, bioethics and criteria for a sustainable agriculture for the next century -- I had an interesting exchange with one of the conferees, a Minnesota farmer. He felt I was being too confronting -- but not wrong -- in advising conferees not to refer to corporate agribusiness' lack of ethics as "greed", but as "corruption":  The corruption of bioethics, of land stewardship and planetary custodianship by the dark side of human nature.
This is fundamentally a corruption of the spirit, for which there is an antidote within easy reach of the honest empath. It does not entail more laws, boycotts, riots, or genetic engineering. Simply thinking about the sacraments of food production, preparation, sharing and consumption is a first step. This means eating with conscience and farming with less harm. It is the first step toward communion with the coinhering divinity of all life that makes all life sacred: the God within.

The new story of a humane, organic, sustainable (socially just) and ecological agriculture (HOSEA) entails more people making their own bread and wine, guaranteeing local farmers an equitable income and a decent lifestyle. As farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka wrote, "The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."

The 'Prophet of Lebanon', Gibran Kalil Gibran, wrote in his (1933) book "The Garden of the Prophet":

 

"Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears the cloth it does not weave, eats a bread    it does not harvest and drinks a wine that flows not from its winepress.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation."

 

Do we not all belong to one nation under one God, a nation that includes those more ancient and venerable than we, and no less sacred -- the old forests, wolves, larks, humpback whales, and all our relations? A nation that, like compassion, is boundless and constitutes the life community of planet Earth?

 

Seafoods and Sustainability
The publicly subsidized fishing industry and food conglomerates are not entirely to blame for the demise of our oceans.  Industrial pollution, human sewage, garbage and agrochemical runoff, livestock wastes and diseases have all taken their toll.
Ironically, some health and nutrition experts are encouraging the public to eat more seafoods instead of high cholesterol and otherwise less healthy beef, pork and chicken, yet seafood stocks are declining.   Furthermore, many seafoods are less safe to eat than high protein organic beans and nuts because the seas in many regions are open sewers.
The World Bank recently published a report documenting the urgent need for developed and developing countries alike to invest in and develop aquaculture and mariculture systems to raise shrimp, tilapia, salmon and other animal protein foods.  This makes sense from a flat-Earth World Bank perspective, since an expanding human population needs protein, and after all, the world's fisheries are all but gone.  But from a whole-Earth perspective, what are these creatures to be fed, from what land, and at whose expense?  What of their wastes, what of their diseases and suffering in confined, intensive, artificial systems?
The first flesh from genetically engineered animals to be approved by the FDA is likely to be from aqua-factory salmon or catfish.  Freshness and safety may be enhanced by irradiation and seafood products made more appealing with approved coloring agents.  But the range of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and other hazardous chemicals this industry has already adopted, like the livestock industry two decades and more before it, is a risk that has been communicated.  Government is responding with more regulations and oversight, at public expense, as this new food enterprise, clearly hazardous to consumers and to the environment, expands.

As Mohandas Gandhi said fifty years ago, "The cattle of the rich steal the bread of the poor", so in these times we witness how the seafood of the rich take the food and the land of the poor.