'Tolerated Cultivation' on the US airbase in Okinawa

You’ll need to click on the photo to see it, but at the end of this dirt road is a barbwire fence, where the Kadena Air Base has been nudged back by farmers growing sweet potato, peppers, tomatoes and a range of plants I couldn’t recognise. Farmers like Shoko Ahagon, the Gandhi of Okinawa, kept cutting away at the fences between them and the best land on the island. And, in the end, they’ve carved out a little land – not nearly enough – on which they farm. These are Okinawa’s ‘tolerated cultivators’.

I write this having heard that the Gill Tract occupation has been called off, and the police called in. In forcing the University of California at Berkeley’s administration to begin a public conversation about the land, the occupation has already begun a long-overdue discussion over what a public university is for. In the Berkeley hills, finding a flat piece of land with great soil is hard enough. Farmland is for farming. But, being far away and unable to plant my share, I joined many activists and writers, corralled by the excellent Christopher Cook, to sign this statement:

As dedicated food writers, authors, activists, and academics, we wish to convey our strong dismay with UC Berkeley’s actions to oust Occupy the Farm at the Gill Tract–and we urge the administration to embrace the community farm that has been created there instead of policing it.

This is public land being stewarded by a land-grant institution. We urge the administration and campus police to drop all charges against the farmers and protesters, and to engage in good-faith negotiations to ensure that the Gill Tract is reserved for community-based agricultural use to be governed as a form of commons in conjunction with the farmers and local community.

The Gill Tract farmers are rooted in the Albany community, and supported by hard-working volunteers. Their vision of using the space to teach children agro-ecology, feed those in need in the community and train future farmers in organic farming is an admirable use of the land and can be realized without affecting the UC negatively. In fact, UC should welcome this stewardship as an instance of community-based education and sustainable land use.

Christopher Cook, Author of Diet for a Dead Planet

Bill McKibben, Author of Eaarth

Frances Moore Lappé, Author of Diet for a Small Planet

Raj Patel, Author of Stuffed and Starved

Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology, UC Berkeley

Y. Armando Nieto, Executive Director, California Food and Justice Coalition

Anna Lappé, Author of Diet for a Hot Planet

Michele Simon, President of Eat Drink Politics, Author of Appetite for Profit

David Bacon, Author of Illegal People

Organic Consumers Association

Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First, Author of Food Rebellions, Crisis and the Hunger for Justice

Gail Wadsworth, Executive Director of California Institute for Rural Studies

Dave Murphy, Founder / Executive Director, Food Democracy Now!

Pesticide Watch Education Fund

Mark Winne, Author of Closing the Food Gap

Jim & Megan Gerritsen, Owners, Wood Prairie Farm, Bridgewater, Maine

Tom Philpott, Mother Jones writer and Maverick Farms co-founder

Jan Poppendieck, Author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America

Jason Mark, Co-manager, Alemany Farm and co-author of Building the Green Economy

The Cornucopia Institute, Cornucopia, Wisconsin

Lisa Stokke, Associate Director, Food Democracy Now!

Peter Rosset, Researcher, Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico (CECCAM)

Chef Jenny Huston, Founder & Executive Chef at Farm to Table Food Services

Ashley Schaeffer, Rainforest Action Network

Marilyn Borchardt, Food First, Oakland, CA

Judy Wicks, Founder, White Dog Cafe, Philadelphia

Jeff Conant, Author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health

Global Justice Ecology Project, Vermont

Melinda Hemmelgarn, Freelance writer and Food Sleuth Radio host

Tanya Kerssen, Writer and activist

Erin Middleton, California Food and Justice Coalition

Deetje Boler, Every Voice producer

UPDATE:
To take action on Okinawa, visit CloseTheBase.
To take action on Berkeley, visit TakeBackTheTract.

Last year, the US Korea Free Trade Agreement was passed. This year, making the Korea deal look piddly, the Trans Pacific Partnership is expanding. The TPP began in 2006 as a hardcore trade agreement between the most trade-dependent countries around the Pacific: Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Brunei joined the negotiations near their conclusion, rounding out the ‘Pacific 4′. Their zeal to reduce tariffs, harmonise standards, and prevent subsidies goes far beyond the ambitions of the World Trade Organization. And now six other countries want in: the US, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Peru, and Vietnam.

In part, the reason that news about trade agreements doesn’t hit front pages is because, er, it’s news about trade agreements. Not the stuff of which editors’ dreams are made. But just because the agreements don’t make the front pages, doesn’t mean that people haven’t heard the news. There have been protests against the TPP across the Asia-Pacific region. And at the protests, people are connecting the dots. Like here in Okinawa, Japan.

Today, I visited a rally commemorating the 40th anniversary of this small Pacific Island being transferred from the US to Japan. Although Japan runs the prefecture, there’s a rather large US base still here. And there were plenty of people ready to make the connection between an oppressive base, and an oppressive trade agreement.

Okina Gaja is a 22 year old representative from JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives- the national association of agricultural cooperatives). He doesn’t like the Trans Pacific Partnership because farmers will be hit to the tune of $20 billion in rice alone [ref in Japanese]. What he really wants is some autonomy in setting the agenda of the island on which he lives. The TPP will prevent that. And the US base will too. “I want the US base out of Okinawa because without that, Okinawan economic independence is impossible.”

Okina Gaja, Japan Agriculture representative and opponent of the TPP

If Gaja and the farmers he works with are to win their autonomy, they’ll have to defeat some of Japan’s most powerful interests. At the moment, Japan has signalled that it’s ready to join the negotiations currently underway in Dallas. The country’s export industry is very excited by the TPP, and it’s worth understanding precisely why their enthusiasm has nothing to do with trade tariffs.

Remember that according to the economics textbooks, free trade agreements reduce the tariffs, the border taxes, that countries charge one another, thus making everyone better off. The tax that Japanese cars pay on entering the US is 2.5%. Getting rid of the tariff will do little to address the Japanese car industry’s bigger problem: the exchange rate. The Yen has appreciated against the dollar by 50% in the past five years, which makes Japanese cars that much more expensive in the US. But what the TPP does do is make social protections, the kinds that workers like but bosses would rather snip away, less tenable. It’ll be easier under the TPP for companies to challenge environmental and health safeguards, and financial regulations, among many other protections they’ll be able to shrug. The bone of contention for the US car industry is the thicket of fiddly and difficult domestic regulations that mean most foreign cars are not allowed to be sold here. The TPP will make the economic roads in Japan safer for US companies to sell their SUVs here, thus making the actual roads in Japan more dangerous.

Hirofumi Ochiai is a 43 years old bus driver with the Odakyu company’s Bus Workers Union. He experienced first-hand the force of neoliberal economic policies under the Prime Ministership of Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s, when bus subsidies for rural transport networks were cut, and workers’ conditions deteriorated. The result: on the most lucrative inter-city bus routes, fares fell. But crashes went up, and services deteriorated on routes that mattered, but weren’t profitable.

So Ochiai came on the march with his fellow drivers to help join the dots.

Stop the restart of the nuclear plants! Oppose TPP! Stop the increase of consumer tax! Everyone unite!

Ochiai has incredibly articulate analysis. Deregulation, he says, is always organized by the privileged. Workers always lose, and the rich always win. It’s the same with war. Workers become soldiers while the privileged stay where they are. So, in solidarity with the workers inside the US bases on Okinawa, he’s outside asking that they be freed to fight their fights back home in the US, and so that he can fight the same fight here in Japan.

Ochiai asked to know more about the solidarity work going on in the US and elsewhere. So, for his benefit and mine, some links. First, here’s Public Citizen’s TPP action page, on which they’re asking for some of the most egregious intellectual property provisions being discussed at the moment to be shown the light of day. There’s even a petition to stop the TPP. And you can find out more about how to Close the Base, thanks to the good folk at IPS.

Watch this space over the next few days for more from Japan, including more on bases, farming, nuclear power and some of the best food on the planet.

Tom Philpott, skillfully as ever, has sliced through the study, its silences and its implications. Headline: sure, if you look at the narrowest possible metrics, conventional’s better, but the whole point of organic is that you don’t just look at the narrowest possible metric.

As I’ll be arguing in a forthcoming, loooong, article in the Journal of Peasant Studies, the problem here is one we’ve seen in other comparisons between organic and conventional. Organic-industrial isn’t terribly far from industrial conventional. What this study, and others like it ignore are cases that don’t just try to compete on industrial agriculture’s terms, but on completely different ones. Agroecological farming, for instance, is more resilient to climate change, and can outperform conventional agriculture in real-world smallholder settings. In any case, the model of massive fossil-fuel dependent farms based on inefficient, insecure and unsanitary processing and distribution sysetms is flawed from the ground up. Reducing pesticide use at one end of the grinder, while keeping everything else the same, is hardly progress. Headline: A more organic cesspool is still a cesspool.

So what would progress look like? Eric Holt-Gimenez, together with Miguel Altieri, Hans Herren and Stephen Gliessman have ideas, and I’m reposting here the fine words you’ll find at Food First.

We already grow enough food for 10 billion people… and still can’t end hunger

A new a study* from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. Researchers found that on average, conventional systems out-yielded organic farms by 25%—mostly for grains, and depending on conditions.

Embracing the current conventional wisdom, the authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts.”

Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.

In reality, the bulk of industrially produced grain crops goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the 1 billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people.

But what about the contentious “yield gap” between conventional and organic farming?

Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yield gap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organic agriculture have assumed. In fact, for many crops and in many instances, it is minimal. With new advances in seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial organic farms to diversified farming systems that have been shown to “overyield”, this yield gap will close even further.

Rodale, the longest-running side-by-side study comparing conventional chemical agriculture with organic methods (now 47 years) found organic yields match conventional in good years and outperform them under drought conditions and environmental distress—a critical property as climate change increasingly serves up extreme weather conditions. Moreover, agroecological practices (basically, farming like a diversified ecosystem) render a higher resistance to extreme climate events which translate into lower vulnerability and higher long-term farm sustainability.

The Nature article examined yields in terms of tons per acre and did not address efficiency ( i.e. yields per units of water or energy) nor environmental externalities (i.e. the environmental costs of production in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, etc) and fails to mention that conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1.

The higher performance of conventional over organic methods may hold between what are essentially both mono-cultural commodity farms. This misleading comparison sets organic agriculture as a straw man to be knocked down by its conventional counterpart. While it is rarely acknowledged, half the food in the world is produced by 1.5 billion farmers working small plots for which monocultures of any kind are unsustainable. Non-commercial poly-cultures are better for balancing diets and reducing risk, and can thrive without agrochemicals. Agroecological methods that emphasize rich crop diversity in time and space conserve soils and water and have proven to produce the most rapid, recognizable and sustainable results. In areas in which soils have already been degraded by conventional agriculture’s chemical “packages”, agroecological methods can increase productivity by 100-300%.

This is why the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food released a report advocating for structural reforms and a shift to agroecology (De Schutter 2010). It is why the 400 experts commissioned for the 4-year International Assessment on Agriculture, Science and Knowledge for Development (IAASTD 2008) also concluded that agroecology and locally-based food economies (rather than the global market) where the best strategies for combating poverty and hunger.

Raising productivity for resource-poor farmers is one piece of ending hunger, but how this is done—and whether these farmers can gain access to more land—will make a big difference in combating poverty and ensuring sustainable livelihoods. The conventional methods already employed for decades by poor farmers have a poor track record in this regard.

Can conventional agriculture provide the yields we need to feed 10 billion people by 2050? Given climate change, the answer is an unsustainable “maybe.” The question is, at what social and environmental cost? To end hunger we must end poverty and inequality. For this challenge, agroecological approaches and structural reforms that ensure that resource-poor farmers have the land and resources they need for sustainable livelihoods are the best way forward.

About the authors

Eric Holt-Giménez, PhD, Executive Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy, aka Food First. Eric is the editor of the 2011 book, Food Movements Unite! Strategies to transform our food systems, the author of the 2009 book, Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice.

Miguel Altieri, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, Professor in MCINS – ESPM Organisms and the Environment. He is an internationally-recognized entomologist studying biological control agro-ecology.

Hans Herren, PhD, President of the Millenium Insititute. Hans is an internationally recognized scientist, was appointed MI’s president in May 2005. Prior to joining MI, he was director-general of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. He also served as director of the Africa Biological Control Center of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in Benin.

Stephen Gliessman, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor in Environmental Studies, founder and director of Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA). He is an internationally-recognized Agro-ecologist.