Hey there,
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
If you’re new to Before The Cutting Board, here’s how it works: The “This Week” section focuses on news and current events. Occasionally, I’ll include a “Food Fights” section that explores some of the interesting debates flying around the food news world.
Without further ado, let’s dig in.
-This Week-
“Crisis in Sri Lanka”
This Life & Thyme profile of Kimbula Kithul CEO Chanchala Gunewardenac overs her experience supporting traditional smallholder cultivation methods while navigating the current upheaval Sri Lanka is facing as a result of placing an abrupt nationwide ban on chemical fertilizers.
Mega-dairies, mega water
Civil Eats released a thorough report on water usage in California’s dairy industry. At 142 million gallons of water per day, California’s dairy cows require more water than the cities of San Diego and San Jose combined. The rise of mega-dairies in the state has come at the expense of both small dairy farmers and the region’s groundwater supply. The communities of color that surround mega-dairies are disproportionately affected by contaminated water and manure-related air pollution.
Progress toward food sovereignty
Also from Civil Eats, a USDA pilot program is allowing Native communities control over the procurement and sourcing process for government-funded food distribution; a starting point for a progress toward food sovereignty and a transition away from food policy that has typically been a “method of control” and displacement.
How Dutch billionaires gained control of New England’s fishing industry
From ProPublica and The New Bedford Light: how lax antitrust rules have enabled companies linked to foreign private equity to take control over most of New England’s fishing industry. In the process, these companies have forced local fisherman out of any vessel ownership prospects.
-Food Fights-
What role does fertilizer play in ‘get big or get out’? Is organic agriculture the answer?
One of the Food Fights topics that I’ve been mulling over for quite some time is the discourse surrounding large scale transitions to organic agriculture. The conversation has been happening for a long time. But, it has recently gotten buzzier in the midst of a conflict involving one of the largest producers of fertilizer in the world. Over the last few weeks, fertilizer prices have finally dropped for the first time since March. Prices, which had risen nearly 30% as of May, had spiked so high that farmers stopped buying fertilizer and product was piling up on docks. For most of the year, the high costs of fertilizer have put pressure on large scale farms across the world that are expected to maintain yields amid already precarious conditions brought about by climate change.
So what does this tell us about how we can evolve our food systems? Well, logically, fertilizer is bad for the earth anyway. It’s an added input for farmers that drives costs up and creates a consistently large flow of money and power to the companies that dominate fertilizer production and own patents. Take phosphate production by Morocco’s OCP or the impacts of potash mining in Brazil. The Civil Eats article in the ‘This Week’ section above breaks down how the confluence of feed crop production to sustain California’s mega-dairies and a reliance on drilling for groundwater has led to fertilizer contaminating the water supply of surrounding communities of color.
On the other hand, some point toward what’s currently happening in Sri Lanka as proof that a large scale conversion to organic agriculture will never be feasible. In President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s 2019 campaign, he proposed a full transition to organic agriculture that would be phased over the course of 10 years. Instead, in April 2021, President Rajapaksa put a complete ban on all importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The ban was partially reversed later in the year, but not before it triggered a shortage of locally-grown food. For farmers who had become dependent upon Sri Lanka’s export-oriented production, the ban was devastating.
Interestingly, as I’ve been thinking about all of this, I’ve been reading through my advanced reader’s copy of Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers in preparation for an author Q&A I’m working on. One of the main storylines throughout the book is how a global economic drive to have our food produced and exported at a mass scale led to the devastation of traditional livelihoods in rural communities - dairy farming communities in the Midwest and indigenous subsistence farming communities in Mexico alike. The book often circles back to how this inherent ‘get big or get out’ mandate that took hold of our food systems left massive rips and tears in our political fabric that created a pathway for our food systems to become so intensely monopolized at the continued expense of livelihoods and our lived environment
I see what I’ve read in Milked as inherently linked to what is happening in Sri Lanka. And that is not that organic agriculture is definitively not feasible at scale. But instead, that political and economic forces have organized our food system in a way that makes any smaller-scale mode of production incompatible with maintaining a livelihood.
There’s a quote from a fisherman in the ProPublica story about foreign investor control in the fish industry that I reread about 5 times: “Tell me how I can catch 50,000 pounds of fish yet I don’t know what my kids are going to have for dinner.”
In Sri Lanka, there wasn’t enough organic fertilizer capacity ready to accommodate the complete absence of synthetic fertilizers. Farmers that were reliant upon chemical fertilizer to produce a certain yield level couldn’t simply switch to organic overnight. And there was no economic cushion provided to protect them from the inevitable loss of lower yields and being locked out of the export economy. Some, like Chanchala Gunewardena, believe that the Sri Lankan government’s desire to be the world’s first organic nation had more to do with consolidating land and money than it had to do with creating better food system outcomes.
There’s probably several lessons to be learned from Sri Lanka, but perhaps the most relevant is that food systems change is not a matter of one, grand sweeping motion or response to a singular problem. When I think of rewiring our thinking about food production, I think about Farm Fresh LA, foodsheds, food sovereignty initiatives, and food recovery and rescue programs that explore how we can rework our supply chain and create more local flows of food. The answer to any given problem will never be simply ‘transitioning to organic’ but there is a necessary place for supporting organic agriculture among a series of steps to foster more localized and equitable food systems.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)