Globalization of Agriculture, Food Production, and Resources

The Ideology and Reality of Modern Food Production

"Green is good. Buy organic. Down with genetically modified 'franken foods'!" Such environmentalist assertions have the ring of modern truisms. The impetus to recycle and consume responsibly often carries a moral drive, enforced on every street corner — from the shrill wastebaskets proclaiming "for cans and bottles only" to the supermarket aisles that scream "no pesticides used." The modern distaste for technology can be hypocritical as well as hysterical in its intensity. After all, technological innovations such as the CD transmit far better musical sound quality than the LP (DeGregori, 2002, p. 152). More to the point, the modern revolution in food production and shipping has enabled consumers to access enormous amounts of healthy produce, in and out of season, and to eat high-protein, high-calcium foods at great convenience and relatively little cost.

Not all the world's consumers enjoy this bounty, however. Who is to blame for this? Thomas R. DeGregori, a professor of economics and food science, would suggest that African nations in states of privation and hunger — nations that have turned away food simply because it is genetically modified — are victims of the modern environmentalist movement. DeGregori sees this movement as a kind of ideological cult of purity, as well as a dangerous political movement with hints of racism and exclusivism at its ideological core. In his 2002 book The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology, DeGregori argues that supposedly positive assertions such as "buy organic" are quite questionable and have had dangerous worldwide implications. He opens the first chapter by stating that such consumerism is still consumerism, creating the perception that if one simply "buys right," one can change the world (DeGregori, 2002, pp. 9–18). These assertions are not only foolish, he contends, but they create victims of middle-class moral dietary fads and "junk science."

What is so harmful about such ideas, and why is DeGregori so exercised about their far-reaching implications? The American environmentalist or worldwide green movement may seem harmless on its surface. DeGregori's initial point can seem well-taken — even humorous — when portraying individuals who believe they are helping the world by purchasing a more expensive and dubiously labeled tomato, or by placing a glass bottle in the correct recycling receptacle. But what makes this behavior more than an object of satire? What makes the belief that buying organic produce changes or helps the world genuinely dangerous? (DeGregori, 2003, p. 10)

DeGregori's Critique of Organic and Environmental Movements

Specifically in chapters 2 and 4 of The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology, DeGregori demonstrates that first-world consumerist idealism has negative, real-world consequences. Africans have been driven from their land and traditional modalities of food production because of narrow efforts to conserve specific species. Similarly, the American Indian has, because of his or her ostensible status as a "natural" human being, been deprived of real, concrete property and land rights that did exist within their particular cultural context — albeit not in the same fashion as in European culture (DeGregori, 2003, p. 47). The ideology of "naturalness" and purity is neither merely an object of parody nor a life-sustaining ideology, DeGregori asserts; rather, it carries a dark world history of deprivation.

DeGregori grows even more scathing in his later book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate, holding the obsession with "pure" organic farming responsible for the deaths by starvation of millions of people worldwide, particularly in Africa (DeGregori, 2002, p. 95). By denying others access to genetically modified crops, necessary pesticides, and dietary innovations that could end hunger, he argues, environmentalism has caused worldwide damage. DeGregori controversially suggests that the free world market — rather than government regulation — is the solution. If companies were allowed to act freely regarding pesticides and genetic modifications, they could develop foods that were cheaper, more easily shipped, and more easily grown across a diversity of environments.

First-World Idealism and Its Consequences for Developing Nations

DeGregori's assertions become even more pointed when he equates environmentalism with a kind of intellectual, modern colonialism. First-world science has the power to save the third world rather than harm it, the author implies — yet he does so with an underlying paternalism. He states that modern attitudes toward pesticide use in raising produce, and toward commercialized agriculture generally, are luxuries of affluence available only to the developed world, and that they needlessly deprive the developing world of the modern, technological sustenance required to end mass epidemics of hunger (DeGregori, 2002, p. 9).

The rhetorical intensity of DeGregori at times reaches the level of hysterical polemic he himself accuses environmentalists of — essentially charging the green movement with wanting to return humanity to a pre-fire, cave-dwelling existence. When he states that "man had learned to use fire for cooking about 40,000 years ago," and implies that rejecting culinary innovation leads logically to raw foodism, DeGregori presents his readers with a stark either/or choice: one either embraces the ideology of progress or retreats into primitivism, with nothing in between (DeGregori, 2002, p. 123).

Conclusion: Separating Ideology from Evidence

The question of environmentalism as a movement — which has its excesses and moral sanctimony — must be separated from the real and dangerous effects of modern commercial farming. Although DeGregori's criticisms of the movement's ideological tone have some value, and his general assertion that technology has been more of a help than a harm to humanity carries weight, not all technological innovations can be embraced in an uncomplicated fashion. The innovations of the capitalist market and the modern farm industry in particular are designed for profit rather than for the benefit of human consumption and health, and they therefore seem to require precisely the kind of scrutiny that DeGregori's own ideology of unquestioned capitalism and science is unwilling to confer.