Planet

Foodwatch, stop pesticides with the blackmail of hunger

October 1, 2022

We publish-with full content concurrence-a commentary by Matthias Wolfschmidt, strategic director of Foodwatch International. (1)

When was the last time you were afraid of hunger? Not just eating a little less to lose a few pounds or noticing that the refrigerator is empty. Real hunger. Experiencing real hunger was a daily reality for 828 million people in 2021. In 2020, 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in the EU have not had to experience this level of hunger. However, whenever regulations threaten the EU’s current agribusiness model, the agricultural industry plays the “hunger card.” It activates our primary fears of not having enough and plants the seed of fear that, without their intervention, our future will be a food crisis.

Playing the hunger game

The EU’s highly subsidized agricultural system is heralded as one of the most efficient on the planet, well positioned in the global market. It is the promised land where so much milk (and meat and alcohol) flows that we can export more than any other region in the world.

We are told that we all owe this abundance to a thriving agrochemical industry. That they are constantly working to enable ever-higher yields and reduce toxicity. We should be grateful to them for feeding us and the rest of the world.

This is the fairy tale told for decades by the pesticide industry. She is echoed by the feed industry, the meat and dairy industry, retailers and food processors, all of whom benefit from the constant supply of low-cost products guaranteed by overproduction. Even the remaining farmers herald the success of “modern agriculture,” fearing that they will lose the race if they reduce the intensity of their farming methods.

Where agricultural policy decisions are made, there is an army of paid lobbyists, orthodox politicians, members of various ministerial bureaucracies, sponsored scientists, and agricultural magazines willing to repeat the same messages over and over again: Europe feeds the world, and without our pesticides and fertilizers there will be a food crisis.

Funding the myth

The EU food production system is characterized by a constant flow of cheap supplies from outside the EU: fossil fuels, nonrenewable fertilizers, raw materials and even agricultural labor (fruit and vegetable pickers).

The now nearly omnipotent supermarket chains benefit enormously. Because of their immense purchasing power, they decide what is produced, the price, the quality and in what manner.

Reality Bites

There is more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone on the planet. Only 23 percent of the world’s available agricultural land is used for direct human consumption, contributing 82 percent of the calories needed. The remaining 77 percent of agricultural land (arable and pasture) is used for feed (and agrofuel) production and ultimately provides only 18 percent of humanity’s caloric intake.

The EU feeds about 7 billion farm animals a year. Nearly 80 percent of all agricultural production resources in the EU are used to feed farm animals. The resources (feed, water, medicine) to maintain this large amount of animal biomass are immense.

In the EU, 80 million tons of food waste is generated annually, with an estimated value of 143 billion euros. Excluded are quantities that remain in the field due to cosmetic defects, lack of labor for harvesting, or too low producer prices. Nor does it include the millions upon millions of sick farm animals that die on factory farms and do not even reach slaughterhouses and supermarket shelves.

Despite the abundance of food and even wasteful overproduction, there is an obsession with crop maximization. Pesticide reduction is currently the subject of heated debate, and decades-old pseudo-arguments are raised that never seem to go away. However, this message should be discarded for what it is: a myth fueled by an industry to increase profits. It has nothing to do with feeding people.

Don’t change the rules!

For decades, the discourse on crop protection has focused almost exclusively on chemical pest control. Most conventional farmers have been systematically indoctrinated that this is the only way to produce what is needed. Reducing or regulating pesticides, it is argued, would cause yield shocks. High crop yield at all costs is still the main goal of many farmers.

The EU’s current agricultural system is in a “pesticide freeze” situation. So far, most farmers have been forced to use pesticides. Current policies do not address the economic drivers of pesticide use and do not promote much-needed changes in international trade, climate policy, rural development and food policy. The political influence of powerful corporations and interest groups prevents any progress. In a recent study on pesticide pollution in water, the term “institutional blockade” is used to refer to the cementing power of certain interest groups in combination with regulatory ignorance, apathetic behavior and lack of political will on the part of state actors.

Game finished

Complete elimination of pesticide-controlled agriculture is possible and feasible within 15 years with a crop-by-crop approach, as foodwatch demonstrated in the recently published report “Locked in Pesticides.”

The prerequisite to successfully ending the era of synthetic chemical agriculture, however, is to recognize and stop the hunger-fear game that the pesticide industry and their co-profiteering agribusiness teammates have been playing for more than 70 years. Synthetic chemical pesticides are clearly not the solution. They are at the heart of the problems of today’s agricultural system, which is completely dependent on fossil energy.

The card game of hunger is a vicious bluff. New rules have expired. It is time to tell the pesticide industry, “Game Over.”