Lester Brown was in town the other day. He spoke at a conference sponsored by the West Michigan Strategic Alliance. For those of you who don’t know Mr. Brown, he is the founder of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington D.C. For more than a generation he has identified and studied the critical variables of sustainability. 'Sustainability' was not even a defined concept in the days when he began his work.
Brown is my personal nominee for a Nobel Prize. He has done more than anyone I know of to foresee what sort of basic economic, environmental, and social problems humans will have to contend with in the 21st century; and to comprehend how the challenges interrelate. He remains a reliable and dignified warning voice, speaking up year after year about bad policies and grim facts that others ignore. More recently, he has emerged as one of the world’s most creative idea-men when it comes to analyzing the global trends and proposing workable solutions.
Dive anywhere into Lester Brown’s enormous written product and you will find more cogent factoids than there are corn flakes in Battle Creek. For instance, one of his recent books reports that China loses one thousand square miles of farmland annually to desertification. This is part of the reason why China, which produced all its own grain until just a couple years ago, is now a net importer of cereals and soybeans.
Who Feeds Who
Many dynamics enter the Chinese food equation including not just the decreasing land in cultivation but also the increasing Chinese population, which persists despite a generation of aggressive measures and restrictions on childbearing enforced by the national government.
India is gaining on China in terms of its population. It is expected to surpass the Chinese census in the next fifty years, and become the world’s most populous country. In 2001, India became the second country on the planet to pass the one billion mark in human population.
But India is also a net importer of food grains, and many see its food production capacity on the verge of steep decline. At least 34 other nations currently are experiencing food shortages. Many of them are in Africa, where impacts of desertification and climate change are exacerbated by civil unrest.
The United States and Canada, typically exporters of grain, are in effect devoting a substantial portion of their land surface to support grain importers like China worldwide.
And of course, new mouths to feed, anywhere in the world, translate to a great and growing reliance on productive farmland and fisheries. So are they up to the challenge?
The short answer is that we are not at all sure they are. The climate changes, soil erosion, water shortages, overgrazing, and other trends that are creating desertification in China also are destroying farmland in many other places too.
Meanwhile, Science News has just reported the impending wholesale collapse of the world’s fisheries by the year 2048.
Some reporters, notably John Tierney of the New York Times, dismiss the bad news on fisheries and predict that privatization strategies will produce an abundance of fish by that time. If he’s wrong, and we cannot bank on the world’s oceans to make up the food difference for the next three billion hungry human beings, we will have to rely on farms to produce it.
A Core Identity
Now, let’s look at our own back yard. Ottawa and Kent County are the first and second, respectively, agricultural producers in the state of Michigan. Notable among the foods produced locally are apples, blueberries, dairy products and beef.
One area in which the Chinese and the Indians are both proving especially adept is in the production and export of cash crops such as apples; and gradually the Chinese are investing more in growing fruit. So, suddenly we have seen competition from China for our own fruit-producing industry in West Michigan, including the ridiculous prospect of Chinese apples replacing homegrown products right in our own kitchens.
Apples are an important feature of life in West Michigan, and most people would agree that they are a big contributor to our quality of life in a variety of ways. Apples make money for growers and processors and retailers. They provide a healthy, nutritious, and delicious food for consumers. And they do all this while providing us, free of charge, a picturesque countryside and a variety of natural services including carbon sequestration, soil maintenance, and a variety of pollution controls.
Apples are to Kent County what cherries are to Traverse City: a powerful symbol, an identifying icon, in which we have invested in ways that go beyond money. Iowa may have its corn, but we have our apples. And nowhere does it tell that Eve tempted Adam with an ear of corn, or that a corncob dropped onto Isaac Newton’s head, or that William Tell shot an ear of corn from his son’s head with an arrow.
Growing Wealth
The point I aim to make here is basically that we have an investment in our agriculture that we should work to protect. The soils, lands, and unique microclimatic conditions that characterize Fruit Ridge and all the other West Michigan agricultural lands are part of the natural capital we rely on to have this agricultural industry that benefits us in innumerable ways.
All these characteristics are susceptible to damage or neglect or outright bad stewardship. All are affected in complex ways by global events and trends, be they social, environmental, or economic. We may not understand the processes, but we confront the outcomes day after day, and should never take the future for granted.
Michigan’s farms are threatened by many of the forces that threaten farming worldwide. They should not be compromised away in the confidence that other lands and other places will shoulder the responsibility of growing affordable apples for us.
They should not be fragmented and dismembered in the expectation that an economy of urban sprawl will serve us just as well as an economy of apples.
Rather, they should be the foundation of new vistas of agricultural abundance. Even if we do not yet see it, and even if we cannot yet measure it in dollars, the value of these lands and farms, these soils and local rainfalls, is growing day by day.
Photographs:
The Big Apple at Robinette's Apple Haus has been a tourist attraction for more than 30 years
An apple tree at Robinette's Apple Haus
The Big Apple and two small seeds
Pumpkins at Dietrich Orchard in Spring Lake
Photographs Copyright Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved