In my neighbourhood of southwest Virginia, backyard gardens are as common as satellite dishes. Now is the time of year for husking corn and breaking beans. Jars bobble quietly in water-bath canners on our stoves: tomatoes, allspice pickles, whatever the garden has overproduced today.

I face this work each year with satisfaction, but not without self-consciousness. I come from a line of folks with some dirt on our jeans who’ve watched the long exodus from the land that seems inevitable to our species. My generation has absorbed an implicit hierarchy of values in which working the soil is poor people’s toil.

On the other side of the world, an influential woman gave me an opposite perspective on leaving behind the labour and culture of food: that it’s impossible.

Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, is an elegant scientist in her silk sari. Trained as a physicist, she is best known for her work for farmers’ rights. The soil of her country, India, is home to one-quarter of all the world’s farmers. Increasingly they grow commodities for export rather than traditional, locally adapted foods for their own communities. This strategy was laid out by the technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when “green” was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest of us for cleaner work.

It sounds good unless you’re that one guy on a tractor in Nebraska and the price of soybeans won’t quite refuel your tank and pay for your fertiliser. Elsewhere, it’s worse. In India, Shiva says, 1,50,000 farmers have committed suicide after being bankrupted by costly chemicals in a cycle of debt created by ties to corporate agriculture.

Vandana’s research has shown that returning to more traditional multi-crop food farms can offer them higher, more consistent incomes than modern single-crop fields of export commodities. She identifies the extinction of traditional seed varieties as the principal threat to food security here; to name an important example, South Asian farmers once grew about 50,000 varieties of rice, a number that has dropped to around 5,000 as a globalised seeds-and-chemicals industry displaces tradition.

The institute, Navdanya, is a small, green Eden framed against the startling blue backdrop of the Himalayas. Sixteen years earlier, Vandana and her acolytes had bought this piece of ruined land, which neighbouring farmers predicted would never grow anything at all, and built the soil with compost and careful crop rotation to its present lushness.

After a tour through the fields, we took off our shoes to enter the seed bank room: oilseeds, mustard greens, wheats and barleys, 380 varieties of rice. Other farmers nationwide are building different seed banks of locally appropriate varieties, all replanted in the fields each year as a living catalogue. “This is the basis of Indian farmers’ sovereignty,” Vandana said.

Industrial farming — however destructive to the land and our nutrition — has held out as its main selling point the allure of freedom: Two per cent of the population would be able to feed everyone. The rest could do as we pleased. Shiva sees through that promise: “Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanised food system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of the life-giving work of farming on the land.
The analyses we have done show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 per cent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not “save” anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service”.

Surprise: There is no free lunch. No animal can really escape the work of feeding itself. We’re just the only one with fancy clothes and big enough brains to make up a story like that: Hooray, we are far from the soil, and that has set us free.

Washington Post