Normal agribusiness provision of food is one of the most faulty systems in consumer-capitalist society. Consider the following comparisons with home gardening and small farm local food production.
á Agribusiness involves huge
quantities of energy use; in machinery, fertilizers, transport, warehouses, packaging,
ÒmarketingÓ, pesticides, bureaucracies, dealing with
wastes. Much food is transported half way around the world, (Éto where local
fruit trees are being pulled out.)
Energy goes into supermarket floodlighting and refrigeration.
á Agribusiness creates vast waste,
which cannot be recycled (the feedlots are a long way from the fields, the
consumers are on another continent) and thus needs to be dealt with via
energy-intensive systems, and damages ecosystems.
á Artificial fertilizers are applied,
damaging soils and ecosystems; acidification and nitrogen flows are major
global problems, and soil carbon levels are depleted by
ploughing. Nutrients are not
returned to the soils; agriculture is thus Òsoil mining.Ó
á There is large
scale abuse of animals, e.g., in battery egg production, intensive pig
raising.
á Many chemical additives are needed,
e.g., to keep disease levels down in crammed battery hen sheds and piggeries,
to preserve foods for long shelf life, to colour and augment taste.
á Profit is
maximized by growing only the few highest yield varieties, resulting in the
massive loss of plant biodiversity.
á Nutritional quality and taste are of
no concern to agribusiness. Values
that maximize profit include appearance, toughness to survive long
transportation and packaging, and absence of blemishes (meaning specked fruit
canÕt be marketed.) The result is dramatic reduction in quality, evident in
tasteless supermarket fruit and especially tomatoes.
á Conventional food supply involves
huge numbers of expensive people in suits with degrees, sitting at computer
screens, with expertise in finance, personal relations, logistics, engineering,
bio-chemistryÉ Home gardening and
small local farming avoids just about all of that, and enables ordinary people
to be excellent food producers.
á Agribusiness involves borrowed
capital and thus interest payments at all levels. Costs at one level include
interest payments at the previous level, leading to perhaps 40% of the price
paid by
á Agribusiness destroys rural
life. Big corporations undercut
local costs and farmers and rural towns are eliminated, especially in the Third
World.