Our Decrepit Food Factories

MICHAEL POLLAN, December 16, NY Times Magazine

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.

The second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)

“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”

We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

John Bellamy Foster, November 28, Monthly Review

Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Writing in Capital in 1867 on England's ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx stated: "For a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil." Marx was drawing here on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig. In the introduction to the seventh (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology Liebig had argued that "Great Britain robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility" and singled out Britain's systematic robbing of Ireland's soil as a prime example. For Liebig a system of production that took more from nature than it put back could be referred to as a "robbery system," a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist agriculture.1

Following Liebig and other analysts of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fiber sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land, these nutrients ended up polluting the urban centers, with disastrous results for human health. Meanwhile, faced with an increasingly impoverished soil, Britain, as Liebig pointed out, imported bones from Napoleonic battlefields and from Roman catacombs together with guano from Peru in a desperate attempt to restore nutrients to the fields. (Later on the invention of synthetic fertilizers was to help close the nutrient gap, but this was to lead to additional environmental problems, such as nitrogen runoff.)

In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig,2 describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as "an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism." Indeed, "capitalist production," Marx explained, "only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the worker." This rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic "restoration" of the metabolism between humanity and nature "as a regulative law of social organization." But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs of future generations. "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together," Marx stated, "are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]."3

Marx's ecological discussions, coupled with those of Engels, therefore went well beyond the general understanding of his time. Today the ecological issues that Marx and Engels addressed (albeit sometimes only in passing) read like a litany of many of our most pressing environmental problems: the division of town and country, the degradation of the soil, rural isolation and desolation, overcrowding in cities, urban wastes, industrial pollution, waste recycling in industry, the decline in nutrition and health, the crippling of workers, the squandering of natural resources (including fossil fuel in the form of coal), deforestation, floods, desertification, water shortages, regional climate change, conservation of energy, the dependence of species on changing environments, historically-conditioned overpopulation tendencies, and famine.

Marx saw the materialist conception of history as related to the materialist conception of nature, the science of history as related to the science of nature. He filled his natural science notebooks with studies of geology, chemistry, agronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He attended the lectures at the Royal Institution in London of the Irish-born physicist John Tyndall. Marx was fascinated by Tyndall's experiments on radiant heat, including the differentiation of the sun's rays.4 It is even possible that he was in the audience in the early 1860s when Tyndall presented results of his experiments demonstrating for the first time that water vapor and carbon dioxide were associated with a greenhouse effect that helped to retain heat within the planet's atmosphere. (No one at that time of course suspected that the greenhouse effect interacting with carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuels might lead to human-generated global climate change -- a hypothesis not introduced until 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.)

Today the dialectical understanding with regard to nature-society interactions that Marx and Engels embraced is increasingly forced on us all, as a result of an accelerating global ecological crisis, symbolized above all by global warming. Recent research in environmental sociology has applied Marx's theory of metabolic rift to contemporary ecological problems such as the fertilizer treadmill, the dying oceans, and climate change. Writing on the social causes of the contemporary "carbon rift," stemming from the rapid burning up of fossil fuels, Brett Clark and Richard York have demonstrated that there is no magic cure for this problem outside of changes in fundamental social relations. Technology is unlikely to alleviate the problem substantially since gains in efficiency, according to what is known as the "Jevons Paradox" (named after William Stanley Jevons who wrote The Coal Question in 1865), lead invariably under capitalism to the expansion of production, the accompanying increases in the throughput of natural resources and energy, and more strains on the biosphere. "Technological development," Clark and York therefore conclude, "cannot assist in mending the carbon rift until it is freed from the dictates of capital relations."5

The only genuine, i.e. sustainable, solution to the global environmental rift requires, in Marx's words, a society of "associated producers" who can "govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."6 The goals of human freedom and ecological sustainability are thus inseparable and necessitate for their advancement the building of a socialism for the 21st century.


Notes

1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 860; John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 164. See also Erland Mårald, "Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," Environment and History, vol. 8 (2002), 65-84.

2 As indicated in the editor's notes to the Penguin/Vintage edition of Capital, vol. 3: "Liebig is referred to several times in both this volume and Volume 1, and it seems that Marx took from Liebig the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) that he applied there, suitably transformed, to the analysis of the labour process (Chapter 7)." In Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 878.

3 Foster, Marx's Ecology, 155-70. See also Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, "Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx's Critique of Political Economy," Theory & Society, vol. 35 (2006), 109-56.

4 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4; Y. M. Uranovsky, "Marxism and Natural Science," in Nikolai Bukharin, et. al., Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), p. 140. In 1865 Engels reported that a chemist that he had just met -- probably Carl Schorlemmer, who was to become one Engels and Marx's closest friends, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first individual in England to occupy a chair in organic chemistry -- had explained to him Tyndall's "sunbeam experiment." See W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976), vol. 1, p. 262.

5 Brett Clark and Richard York, "Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift," Theory & Society, vol. 34 (2005), p. 419. For further work on the metabolic rift and global ecological crisis see Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, "The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology," Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4 (2005), pp. 422-44; Philip Mancus, "Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions," Rural Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2007).

6 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 959.

John Bellamy Foster John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, author of Marx’s Ecology and Ecology Against Capitalism, and editor of Monthly Review.

Healing the Rift: Metabolic Restoration in Cuban Agriculture

Rebecca Clauson, May 2007, Monthly Review

As John Bellamy Foster explained in “The Ecology of Destruction” (Monthly Review, February 2007), Marx explored the ecological contradictions of capitalist society as they were revealed in the nineteenth century with the help of the two concepts of metabolic rift and metabolic restoration. The metabolic rift describes how the logic of accumulation severs basic processes of natural reproduction leading to the deterioration of ecological sustainability. Moreover, “by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism,” Marx went on to argue, “it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulating law of social reproduction”—a restoration, however, that can only be fully achieved outside of capitalist relations of production.1
Recent developments in Cuban agroecology offer concrete examples of how the rift can be healed, not simply with different techniques but with a transformation of the socio-metabolic relations of food production. Numerous scholars have described the scientific achievements of Cuban organic agriculture. However, the success of Cuban organic agriculture and the potential for it to influence other Latin American and Caribbean nations must be understood not simply as the application of new agricultural technology, but rather as an example of social transformation in its entirety. As Richard Levins notes, “To understand Cuban agricultural development it is first necessary to look at it closely in the richness of detail....Then we have to step back and squint to capture the truly novel pathway of development as a whole that Cuba is pioneering.”2
‘Land is the Treasure, Labor is the Key’
Marx’s concept of metabolism is rooted in his understanding of the labor process. Labor is a process by which humans mediate, regulate, and control the material exchange between themselves and nature. Land, the earth (and the ecological cycles that define it), and labor, which is the metabolic relation between human beings and nature, constitute the two original sources of all wealth. During a trip to Cuba with a group of agricultural researchers late last year I watched a horse-drawn cart transport organic produce from an urban garden of raised beds to the community stand nearby. I noticed a phrase painted on the wall of a storage building: “La tierra es un tesora y el trabajo es su llave,” land is the treasure, labor is the key. Witnessing a cooperatively run farm grow and deliver organic produce for its community provided a visual representation of Marx’s concept of metabolism. Land, providing the essential raw materials, is treated as a “treasure,” one that must not be exploited for short-term gain, but rather replenished through rational and planned application of ecological principles to agriculture (agroecology). And labor, being the physical embodiment of a “key,” can access the land’s rich qualities to provide healthy subsistence food, equally distributed to the local community.
Marx has two meanings for the term metabolism. One referred to the regulatory processes that govern the complex interchange between humans and nature, specifically with regard to nutrient cycles. The second holds a wider, social meaning describing the institutional norms governing the division of labor and distribution of wealth. The analysis of the metabolic rift addresses both of these meanings. In the ecological sense, Marx notes that capitalist agriculture ceases to be “self-sustaining” since it can “no longer find the natural conditions of its own production within itself.”3 Rather, nutrients must be acquired through long distance trade and separate industries outside of the agricultural sphere. This creates a rift in the natural cycles of soil fertility and waste accumulation.
In the wider, social meaning of metabolism, a rift is created between humanity and the natural world due to the relation of wage labor and capital. Private property in the earth’s resources, the division between mental/manual labor, and the antagonistic split between town and country illustrate the metabolic rift on a social level. In capitalism the rift is manifest in many ways, such as the primacy of corporate speculation in real estate, the loss of autonomy of subsistence farmers to the knowledge of “expert” technicians, and the demographic transition from rural farms to urban centers.
‘This is Beautiful Work’
In Cuba I was fortunate to speak with many of the farmers who worked on the organiponicos. I was frustrated that my elementary Spanish did not allow for a sophisticated conversation, but I was able to formulate a basic question. “Do you like this work?” I asked a farmer who had been showing me around the urban plots. Without hesitation, the farmer warmly replied, “Este es trabajo bonito,” this is beautiful work. Through further translation and site visits to four provinces throughout Cuba, I learned how the transformation of food production serves a practical function in Cuba; it supplies nutritious calories without the use of petroleum products, an essential ingredient in most global agribusiness food production.
The Cuban agricultural model reconnects the natural cycle of nutrients, and grounds human labor in the countryside with productive labor in the cities. The transformation of socio-metabolic relations allows biodiversity to act as a resource for food production, such as providing habitat for beneficial insects, rather than a challenge to overcome. New models of ownership and distribution allow for participatory decision making at all levels of cultivation, harvest, and consumption. A new type of labor relationship is introduced, one in which indigenous farmers interact with trained agronomists to best fit a crop to the natural environment, climate, and geography. And in opposition to the skeptics who question whether this model “can only happen in Castro’s Cuba,” farmers described the recent experiences of traveling to other Latin American and Caribbean nations to disseminate this new model of food production.
Reestablishing the Spatial Relations of Nutrient Cycles
Cuban agriculture has been lauded for its application of rational science to achieve organic agriculture.4 Accolades have come from international organizations such as those that voted to give the Cuban Grupo de Agricultura Organica the Alternative Nobel Prize for “developing organic farming methods.” The success lies partly in discovery of new methods, but also in transmitting the new information for local implementation. The 280 successful Centers for Production of Entomophages and Entomopathogens (CREEs) are a testament to the potential for rational organization of a national program for biological pest control by production of organisms that attack insect pests of crops.5 State-sponsored research that develops natural pesticides and bio-fertilizers is crucial to creating an alternative to conventional agriculture; however, it is not the fulcrum upon which metabolic restoration pivots. In order to understand the healing of the metabolic rift in relation to ecological processes, one must understand the spatial reorganization of nutrient cycling.
The ecological understanding of metabolic rift is premised on the spatial relations of physical processes regulating nutrient cycling. The separation of people from the land (rural to urban migration) creates a rift in the metabolism of nature-society relations since nutrients are transported away from the productive crops and farms where they originated, and accumulate as waste products in distant population centers. To replenish the biostructure of the depleted soil, capitalist agriculturalists must obtain nutrients through appropriation (i.e., the historic guano trade) or artificial industrial production (i.e., contemporary synthetic nitrogen) to be continuously applied to farmland. This system of food production severs the natural process of nutrient cycling, and introduces new ecological contradictions associated with the energy requirements for long distance trade in fertilizers while at the same time nutrients accumulate in the sewage of the cities. In a similar manner, the separation of agricultural animals from the cropland that produces their feeds creates a metabolic rift by interrupting the material exchange between grain feeds/livestock and livestock manure/grain feeds. As Foster and Magdoff note, “This breakdown of the physical connection between the animals and the land producing their feeds has worsened the depletion of nutrients and organic matter from soils producing crops.”6 The resulting consequence is the intensification of fertilizer application required to grow grains to meet an increasing demand for concentrated livestock production. The separation of humans, livestock, and crops breaks the return flow of nutrients to the land.
Cuban agriculture over the past thirteen years has worked to reestablish the spatial relationships between nutrient cycles and material exchanges. A key principle of Cuba’s agroecology is the “optimization of local resources and promotion of within-farm synergisms through plant-animal combinations.”7 The improved spatial integration of plants, animals, and humans can reduce the need for long-distance trade and replenish the fertility of the soil through nearby nutrient sources. Local socioeconomic circumstance and biophysical constraints dictate the type of spatial arrangement of nutrient cycles that are possible. During my visits to Cuban farms I witnessed how farming practices can sustainably cycle nutrients from either local sources or from on-site synergisms. Local resources are used to promote nutrient cycling, with methods for on-site integrations. Each of these methods attempts to fundamentally alter the spatial relations of nutrient cycling and waste assimilation in food production.
Worms, Cows, and Sugarcane
The essential factor required by all farmers for successful food production is nutrient-rich soil. Before the Special Period, Cuba relied on imported, synthetic fertilizers to achieve agricultural productivity. Today, organized systems that unite human labor, animal and crop by-products, and natural decomposition provide the essential nutrients for sustainable food production. The pathway that leads to replenished fertility and health of the soil does not require long distance trade or intensive energy inputs, rather it relies on the functions of biodiversity and ecological efficiency.
During a visit to a cooperatively run farm in East Havana, a farmer knelt down beside one of many long, rectangular concrete rows that served as high-density housing for the California red worm. He scooped his palm beneath the dark rich top layer of soil to reveal a small sample of the 10,000–50,000 worms that inhabited that particular square meter of biomass. In commercial-scale production, the worms can produce 2,500 to 3,500 cubic meters of humus from 9,000 cubic meters of organic material (a cubic meter is approximately the same volume as a cubic yard).8 Vermiculture, the method of using worm casings for soil fertilizer, is carried out on the farm so that workers can monitor daily the temperature and moisture of the worm habitat, and apply the nutrient-rich supplement to the crops at the correct time. Vermiculture in itself is not a revolutionary technique, however in Cuba it represents the final stage in an integrated process that reorganizes the use of local products to grow food.
The farmer explained how the worms can produce humus faster by using animal waste rather than vegetable waste, so he routinely obtains cow manure from a nearby farm. The cow manure is itself a product of local nutrient recycling, considering the feed inputs used to nourish the cows are the by-products of local crops. Although Cuban research centers realized decades ago that cattle could be well nourished by forage grasses, legumes, and crop residues, the prevalence and accessibility of cheap, imported cattle grain from Soviet nations left the benefits unexamined before the Special Period. A change in the material conditions of feed availability, however, allowed for closer inspection of the most sustainable uses of local resources. Cuban researchers learned that by-products from the sugarcane fields provided biological enrichment to cattle diets, and began using these “waste products” as the primary supplements for cattle feed.9 By-products from the sugarcane harvests include bagasse, molasses, and cachaza, as well as fresh cane residues such as the tops of cane stalks. Sugarcane as cattle fodder offers alternative solutions for both metabolizable energy and for protein supply. As two researchers into Cuban agroecology state: “The experiences of various countries over the last 15 years have demonstrated an economic advantage to using sugarcane as the main energy source for cattle feeding in beef and milk production. These systems are of special relevance for tropical countries during the dry season, the optimum season for the sugarcane harvest, and in turn, the most critical one for pasture and forage availability.”10
As the farmer conveyed this cascading path of nutrients from sugarcane fields to cattle troughs, from cow manure to worm bins, from worm casings to organic agriculture plots, I began to see how the nutrients within this one province of Cuba were connected through the metabolic actions of the plants and animals. This particular flow of nutrients (sugarcane, cow, worm, crop) delivered to local organic farms is not standard across all of Cuba because other regions have different resources available that can be substituted. For example, in Matanzas—the primary citrus producing province in central Cuba—orange rinds are fermented into silage to serve as cattle feed.11 Substituting local resources based on availability minimizes transportation energy expenditures and makes ecologically efficient use of nearby nutrients, thereby altering the spatial relationships of conventional agriculture’s fertilizer and waste disposal systems.
Another Pasture is Possible
As we drove down the lane to the “Indio Hatuey” Experiment Station I noticed a fenced and forested landscape on both sides of the road. My naïve assumption that this was some kind of a wood fiber plantation reflects the narrow range of delineated possibilities I’ve been trained to identify as either forest or pasture. Specialized production that produces a particular landscape is the standard model for intensive agriculture, and it represents one in which metabolic interactions between species are intentionally and intensively denied. The artistic sign at the entrance of the Pasture and Forage Experimental Station depicting cattle grazing in trees and tall grasses, surrounded by a symbolic beaker of science, was my first introduction to the sustainable silvopastoral systems.
“Welcome on behalf of the workers,” said Mildrey Soca Perez, the director of research at the station. The presentation began with a description of the holistic and interdisciplinary objectives of this experimental station, followed by a discussion of the ecological efficiency associated with livestock-crop integration. Before the Special Period, Cuba relied on an intensive production model for cattle grazing to secure milk and protein for the population. The Special Period triggered a search for alternative means of livestock production using local resources. Knowledge was reconstructed from small farmers who had preserved traditional mixed systems of land use. The spatial reorganization of crop growth and livestock production yielded mutual benefits of nutrient fertilization and waste assimilation. In hindsight, Cuban researchers from the Pasture and Forage Institute recognize that “the separation of crop and livestock production that took place was wasteful of energy and nutrients.”12 As the cows emerged from the forest trees and the researcher described the energy transfers between cows, tree leaves, and grasses, I began to see the ways in which this integration was another concrete example of restoring the rift that had occurred between constituent elements of our food production systems.
The Indio Hatuey farm raises cattle in fields planted with the tree Leucaena leucocephala.Cows eat the leaves and branches of this short and heavily forked tree, and workers regularly prune the trees so that the branches are accessible to the cattle. The cows also graze on the grasses in the trees’ understory. Leucaena trees fix nitrogen, thereby replenishing the soil that nourishes the grasses.
In addition, the cow manure helps boost the soil fertility for the trees and grasses. The utilization of organic compost on specialized monoculture systems and/or on large-scale production units has high transport and application costs, and specific labor and equipment requirements. Cuban researchers have found, however, that “when the scale of the system is kept smaller, and the degree of integration high, using these techniques is much easier, and in fact becomes a functional necessity of the system, while guaranteeing nutrient recycling.”13
The leucaena trees provide shade for the cows, thereby reducing heat stress and increasing productivity. To ensure ample photosynthesis for the grasses, the trees are planted in rows extending East-West to maximize the sunlight reaching the ground. The leucaena tree roots prevent erosion by maintaining the integrity of the soil structure, and special attention is given to the cow-tree ratio to ensure that soil compaction does not result. The researchers at Indio Hatuey station found that this system of grazing resulted in 3,000–5,000 liters milk/hectare/year with increased quality in terms of fat and protein content. In addition, the silvopastoral methods reduced the fluctuations of milk production between the rainy and dry seasons and increased the reproduction rates of the cows.
Silvopastoral methods do not only apply to cattle grazing and milk production, as these types of integrated systems are being researched for sheep, goats, pigs, and rabbits. The Indio Hatuey station also conducts research on grazing horses in orange orchards. The horses clear weeds from the orchard floor, reducing the need for herbicides, and provide manure fertilizer to maintain soil fertility. From an economic viewpoint, the orange/horse integrated system yielded a profit that was 388 Cuban pesos/hectare/year higher than the orange monoculture without animals.14 In each of these cases, the spatial relations of food production are researched and managed to maximize nutrient cycling and adapt the production system to biogeochemical features of the landscape.
On-farm experience in integrated livestock production is demonstrating the potential and viability of widespread conversion to crop/livestock systems. This transformation has implications that go beyond the technological-productive sphere. Rather, these changes directly or indirectly influence the economic, social, and cultural conditions of the small-farming families by reinforcing their ability to sustain themselves through local production. The Cuban farmers and researchers who explained the processes of local and on-site nutrient cycling helped me to see the many hands of workers that allowed this process to continue. New labor relationships, new decision-making structures, and new land and food distribution patterns not only allow for Cubans to subsist on healthier food in an ecologically sustainable manner. These structural changes have fundamentally altered society’s metabolism.
Reestablishing the Labor Relations of Food Production Systems
As noted, Marx used the concept of metabolic regulation in a wider, social meaning to “describe the complex, dynamic, interdependent set of needs and relations brought into being and constantly reproduced in alienated form under capitalism.”15 The needs and relations of social metabolism are regulated by the institutional norms governing the division of labor and distribution of wealth. The limitation of human freedom caused by the social metabolic rift provided Marx with a concrete way of expressing the notion of the alienation of nature. This second meaning of metabolism goes beyond the physical laws of nutrient exchanges and addresses the transformation in labor relations and property tenure that must accompany ecological changes if long-term sustainability is to result.
Cuba’s conventional agriculture, dependent on fossil fuels and mechanization, was carried out on large state-owned farms that controlled 63 percent of the arable land. By the end of the 1980s, state-owned sugar plantations covered three times more farmland than did food crops, making it necessary for Cuba to import 60 percent of its food, all from the Soviet bloc. The severe food crisis resulting from the Soviet collapse and the stringent U.S. economic blockade took a physical toll on the Cuban population, as the average Cuban lost twenty pounds and undernourishment jumped from less than 5 percent to over 20 percent during the 1990s.16 The agrarian reforms, which transformed land tenure and distribution outlets, were the key to recovering from the food crisis.
In September 1993, the Cuban government restructured the state farms as cooperatives owned and managed by the workers. The new programs transformed 41.2 percent of state farm land into 2,007 new cooperatives, with membership totaling 122,000 people.17 The cooperative owns the crops, and members are compensated based on productivity rather than a wage contract. In addition to being monetarily paid, the associated producers agree to provide meals to workers and personal gardening space for growing and harvesting family provisions. This change in land tenure has not only allowed for better application of organic farming methods, it has reconnected the worker to the land. This reconnection occurs both figuratively, as seen in the worker’s description of the farming job as “trabajo bonito,” but also geographically. The design of Cuba’s agricultural systems is taking into account the need to stabilize rural populations and reverse the rural-urban migration. Cuban agronomists at the Pasture and Forage Research Institute understand that this can only be achieved by rearranging productive structures and investing in developing rural areas, giving farming a more economical and social foundation.18
In addition to the cooperatively owned farms, the Cuban government has turned over approximately 170,000 hectares of land to private farmers. This reflects Marx’s view that “a rational agriculture needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers.”19 The government retains title to the land, however private farmers receive free rent indefinitely, as well as subsidized equipment. Many Cuban families are now viewing farming as an opportunity and have left the cities to become farmers. The National Association of Small Producers states that membership has expanded by 35,000 from 1997 to 2000. The new farmers tend to be adults with young families (many with college education), early retirees, or workers with a farming background.20
Expanding labor opportunities in rural agriculture only addresses one side of Cuba’s food production system. The emphasis placed on urban organic gardening transcends the town/country divide using a different strategy—introducing food production systems in abandoned city spaces. The organiponicos’ productive raised beds offer organic produce to surrounding neighborhoods from what were once garbage dumps, parking lots, and demolished buildings. Today, urban gardens produce 60 percent of the vegetables Cubans consume.
The urban agriculture movement began informally based on the need of urban dwellers to meet basic food requirements. The Cuban government recognized the potential for urban agriculture and created the Urban Agriculture Department to facilitate the movement. The state formalized the growers’ claims upon vacant lots and legalized the rights to sell their produce. All urban residents can claim up to one–third of an acre of vacant land, as long as they abide by the rules of all organic farming methods. By the beginning of 2000, more than 190,000 people had applied for and received these personal lots for use in organic farming. In total, 322,000 Cubans are involved in urban agriculture. The Urban Agriculture Department has acted to support and promote urban agriculture by opening neighborhood agricultural extension services where growers can bring their produce to receive technical assistance with pest and disease diagnosis, soil testing, etc.21
The transfer of technical agricultural knowledge from agronomists to food producers represents one side of the equation for successful sustainable agriculture. The Cuban model of agriculture recognizes that the artificial divide between mental and manual labor limits the range of opportunities for productive food systems. The goals of a participatory democracy for agricultural decision making have been incorporated into the new farming model, and this is made possible by the new ownership patterns. For example, the smaller cooperative farms are offered assistance by People’s Councils, located in all fifteen provinces of Cuba.22 The People’s Councils are comprised of local food producers and technicians that work together to advise the area’s farmers on best practices suited for that area. The trained agronomists work with the farmers in site-specific locations to determine the most appropriate techniques.
Farmers’ knowledge is also incorporated into agricultural conferences and academic proceedings. Fernando Macaya, the Director of the Cuban Association of Technicians for Agriculture and Forestry (ACTAF), spoke of a Provincial Meeting of Urban Agriculturists he attended in November 2006. Of 105 research papers delivered, 53 were presented by food producers, 34 from research technicians, and 12 from academic professors—61 of the presenters were women. The inclusion of experiential knowledge with experimental data leads to the application of rational science, equally accessible to all members of society. Younger generations are invited to participate in agricultural clubs in school, and teachers are encouraged to promote ecological classrooms. The most recent ACTAF-funded project brought puppet shows to elementary schools, addressing how to grow and use various medicinal herbs.23 Bridging the artificial divide between mental and manual labor is possible with new labor relationships.
The rift in the social metabolism can be overcome by melding the town/country boundaries (changing land tenure), as well as intersecting the roles of mental and manual labor (changing the division of labor). These two actions involve transformation of food production. But there is another relevant feature of the social metabolism of agriculture—the distribution of the harvest’s “wealth.” A key theme of Cuba’s sustainable agriculture is diversification of channels of food distribution. Rather than allowing one central authority to control all food distribution, flexibility is built into the distribution process to meet the populations’ varying needs. To help people cope with persistent food availability problems, a ration card is maintained which guarantees every Cuban a minimum amount of food. The diets of children, pregnant women, and the elderly are closely monitored, and intentionally low meal prices are offered at schools and workplaces, with free meals at hospitals.
Neighborhood markets sell produce from organiponicos at well below the cost of the larger community markets, providing fresh vegetables for those who cannot afford the higher prices. By the beginning of 2000, there were 505 vegetable stands in Cuban cities, with prices 50–70 percent lower than at farmers markets.24 The private farmers markets were opened in 1994 to allow outlets for increased production and greater diversity in produce. The private farmers markets provide producers with another means to distribute goods once basic necessities of the population have been met. Even though the private farmers markets operate on principles of supply and demand, governmental controls are in place to deter price gouging and collusion.
Attention is given to identifying low-income groups, and social assistance programs are created to address their food access. Marcos Nieto, of the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture, describes how “planning takes into account geographic patterns of distribution of the population, especially with regards to areas of high population density, or limited access, or poor soils, etc.”25
Sovereign Agriculture in Latin America?
The rift in social metabolism of food production under capitalism is aggravated by private ownership of land, the strict division between mental and manual labor, and the unjust distribution of the fruits of labor. Cuba’s model of agriculture systematically transcends these alienating conditions, reconnecting farmers to the land through cooperative production, participatory decision making, and diversified distribution. Can this vision for ecological sustainability and social equality extend beyond the island of Cuba?
Cuban farmers are traveling to Latin American and Caribbean nations to assist farmers in setting up similar types of food production systems. Indeed, Cuba’s fastest growing export is currently ideas. Cuba hosts many visiting farmers and agricultural technicians from throughout the Americas and elsewhere. Cuban agronomists are currently teaching agroecological farming methods to Haitian farmers, as well as assisting Venezuela with their burgeoning urban agriculture movement.
It is not only Cuban farmers that are dispersing these ideas. Peasant movements throughout Latin America are returning to traditional agrarian practices and demanding land redistribution that allows for subsistence food production. The Latin America School of Agroecology was created in August 2005 in Parana, Brazil. Founded by a partnership between two peasant movements—the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra, MST) and Via Campesina—the school focuses on bringing the principles of agroecology to rural communities throughout Latin America. According to the coordinator of the MST, Robert Baggio, the school will construct a new matrix based on agroecology. This new matrix, he explained, will be geared to small-scale production and the domestic market, respecting the environment and contributing to the construction of sovereign agriculture (http://www.landaction.org).
In this spread of metabolic restoration, we get a glimpse of Marx’s vision of a future society of associated producers. In volume 3 of Capital, Marx wrote: “Freedom in this sphere can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”26
The psychological barriers that often prevent this vision from seeming possible are based on a myopic view—that of agribusiness as usual: where cows do not graze in forests and crops do not grow from worms; where farmers do not do science and workers do not eat their harvests; and where the metabolic rift in ecological and social systems becomes intensified with the ever-increasing quest for profit accumulation. Cuba’s agriculture shows that the potential for metabolic restoration is real, and it can happen now. The advance of these ideas through the rest of Latin America provides hope for future transformations.
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 637–38.
2. Richard Levins, “The Unique Pathway of Cuban Development,” in Fernando Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2002), 280.
3. Karl Marx. Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 527.
4. See Peter Rosset, “Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick Buttel, eds., Hungry for Profit (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); and Sinan Koont, “Food Security in Cuba,” Monthly Review 55, no. 8 (January 2004): 11–20.
5. Funes, et. al, eds., Sustainable Agriculture.
6. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, “Liebig, Marx, and the Depletion of Soil Fertility,” in Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel, eds., Hungry for Profit, 53.
7. Miguel Altieri, “The Principles and Strategies of Agroecology in Cuba,” in Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture, xiii.
8. Eolia Treto, et. al., “Advances in Organic Soil Management,” in Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture, 164–89.
9. Marta Monzote, Eulogia Munoz, and Fernance Funez-Monzote, “The Integration of Crop and Livestock,” in Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture, 190–211.
10. Rafael Suarez Rivacoba and Rafael B. Morin, “Sugarcane and Sustainability in Cuba,” in Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture, 255.
11. Mildrey Soca Perez, personal communication, December 1, 2006.
12. Monzote, et. al., “The Integration of Crop and Livestock,” 190.
13. Monzote, et. al., “The Integration of Crop and Livestock,” 205.
14. Monzote, et. al., “The Integration of Crop and Livestock,” 200.
15. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 158.
16. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Bank, and World Resources Institute, World Resources 2000–2001—People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life (UNDP, 2000).
17. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2006), 59.
18. Monzote, et al., “The Integration of Crop and Livestock,” 207.
19. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), 216.
20. Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, 60.
21. Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, 61.
22. Juan Leon, personal communication, November 27, 2006.
23. Fernando Macaya, personal communication, November 27, 2006.
24. Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, 61.
25. Marcos Nieto and Ricardo Delgada, “Cuban Agriculture and Food Security,” in Funes, et al., eds., Sustainable Agriculture.
26. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 959.