Tony Weis is a political ecologist and a Professor at Western University in Ontario Canada. In 2007 he wrote a book called The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming. I attended a lecture at GTLLI where he spoke. His lecture was broken down into four parts.

• global context
• the Canadian context
• the nature of industrial production
• alternatives

Global Context

In Jamaica, about 1% of the land owners are in control of half the land. The larger plantations grow sugar or bananas. There is a lot of food that is imported into Jamaica that is not expensive. This affects the local Jamaican small-farm farmers. Farming is the biggest occupation in the world. About 84% or the world’s farms are less than 5 acres in size. In the tropics there are several products grown, such as sugar, bananas, coffee, tea, cacao, palm oil and so on.

About half the world’s agricultural trade originates from the temperate bread basket. That includes, the USA, Canada, part of Europe and southern South America. This temperate bread basket has less than 1% of the world’s farmers. The USA, for example grows a lot of corn and soy. Increasingly, countries like Jamaica are dependent on importing these cheap grains from the temperate bread basket.

Global hunger and malnutrition is most intense in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and also in rural areas. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has a category called Low Income Food Deficit Countries (LIFDCs). They are net food importers. Therefore they are vulnerable to food price fluctuations.

On a world scale, there are extreme disparities of meat consumption. There has been a large increase in meat consumption from about 23kg of meat per person in 1960. In 2021, the average person consumes 45.4kg of meat. That’s about double. The big drivers are in countries like China and other fast-industrializing countries. In Canada we consume about 100kg of meat per year and in the USA it is about 120kg per year. About half the world’s pigs live in China. We’ll call this the meatification of diets.

About 30% of the world’s arable land (any land capable of being railed and used to cultivate crops) is now devoted to producing feed crops devoted to going to concentrated animal populations like pigs, poultry and to a lesser extent others like beef and dairy. Oilseed crops are a seed or crop (such as flaxseed) grown mainly for oil. Canola is an oilseed. These feed crops include oilseeds and coarse grains.

The FAO estimates there is enough food to feed about 11 to 12 billion people. However, we have a rising phenomenon of malnourished obese people. What really is the quality of our food? The Global Nutrition Report 2016: From Promise to Impact: Ending Malnutrition by 2030 says that 44% of countries have “very serious levels” of both obesity and undernourishment. One third of people have some for of malnourishment, including pervasive micronutrient deficiencies (vitamin A, iron and zinc). Non-communicable (not transmissible by direct contact) diseases are partly caused by poor diets. The World Obesity Federation says that we are heading toward having 4 billion overweight or obese by 2035.

The Canadian Context

In 2023, 23% of Canadians are living in food insecure households. Food Banks Canada said that in 2023 there were about 2 million monthly visits to food banks. That’s an increase of 79% since 2019. This is a story of poverty and inequality, not a lack of food production in Canada..

Climate change is already affecting agriculture inequality. Very high temperatures make agriculture very very difficult. Agriculture is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture commands more land than any other human activity by far. Agriculture is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss, which in turn is a grave threat to agriculture.

What is the mammalian biomass distribution on earth? We have people, livestock and wild. Humans are about 36%. Livestock are about 60% and wild animals are only 4%. These number came out in 2018. What about birds? The biomass of poultry birds is about two and a half times the size of all of the wild birds combined.

What about the outputs of agriculture? The big four crops take up about half of the arable land. Thirty discrete crops are almost all of the arable land. The big three livestock species (pigs, poultry and cattle) are about 90% of meat production volume. In a large supermarket you can find about 50,000 discrete food items. That’s a big number, but the inputs to that are few.

In the USA, the biggest 10% of farms gets about three quarters of all American subsidies. This is the “get big or get out” movement.

Have your heard of “hog hotels”? These are multi-story building that are farming pigs. They have breeding, growing and slaughtering functions that allow them to process one million pigs per year in one building.

In Canada, over the last 100 years, there has been about a four-fold decline in the number of farms. The average farm size has grown about four-fold. The get big or get out pressure is in Canada as well. Virtually all pigs and poultry in Canada are grown indoors, not outdoors. In Canada, less than 1% of the people are farm operators. Only about 8% of farmers are under 35 years old. The average age of farm operators in Canada is 56 and it has been steadily declining over the last 20 years, at least.

In Canada, we have a heavy reliance on temporary farm labourers. Many are from Mexico and Jamaica. The employers of these workers range from great to awful.

The Nature of Industrial Production

We have oceans of monocultures (for example corn grown on huge farms) and islands of concentrated animals. We grow wheat in Canada that is primarily food for humans and we grow other crops for animal feed that include maze soybean and canola. A lot of our beef is started on grass but finished on feed lots.

To increase productivity in the production of food, we need economies of scale. Get big. We also can reduce the number of different crops we grow. It’s more simple to manage. Plants are ready for harvest at the same time. When we do this we get more output, but at a cost and risk. What cost and what risk?

Robbing the soil is an expression you may have heard of. Are we mining the soil? To counteract the effects, we use fertilizer. What about fertilizer, which is nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, also known as NPK. Nitrogen is the biggest part of NPK. To produce the nitrogen we use natural gas and coal. Phosphate and potassium are mined. Since 1961, global fertilizer use has grown by more than a factor of six.

Another problem is pests. Monocultures (decreased biodiversity) causes the pest problems to grow. Insecticides, herbicides and fungicides are also added to control pests. Since the 1950’s, the use of the chemicals has grown by a factor of ten. Another problem is the decline of pollinator populations. This is a severe problem for some crops, such as almonds. Not all pollinators are insects, however. The most important insect pollinator is the bee. Pollination services is an industry that provides insects to a location for pollination purposes. They are delivered to areas on trucks. Now we have a challenge with the health of the bees, feeding the bees with corn feed and we get mites. Also, antibiotics become an issue.

Irrigation demand increases with large monocultures. Seeds are thirstier. The soil dries out when it is exposed when it is tilled. We have become more reliant on aquifers. An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing material, consisting of permeable or fractured rock, or of unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, or silt). Aquifers are being depleted.

These large-scale productions require more transportation. In Canada, there have been huge increases in both agricultural exports and imports. Shipping takes energy. “Food miles” is a common term used today. Below are some of the issues with large monocultures in agriculture.

• soil mining – fertilizer (energy inputs and algae bloom outputs in Lake Erie)
• pest problems – chemicals
• decline of pollinator populations
• drier soils and thirstier seeds – irrigation (water and energy)
• perishability & distance – trucking, energy consumption

About one quarter of all fossil energy put into agriculture can be attributed to fertilizer alone, according to the National Farmer’s Union of Canada. Potash includes various mined and manufactured salts that contain potassium in water-soluble form. Canada is the world’s largest producer of potash. The world has lots of potash, but not so much phosphorus. This could be a problem in about 50 to 100 years. So fertilizer is just masking the problem of soil degradation.

Th UN FAO says globally about 75 billion tons of soil are lost each year. Right now, about 33% of all soil is moderately to highly degraded due to erosion, nutrient depletion, acidification, salinization, compaction and chemical pollution.

In the high plains of the USA has a very large aquifer called the Ogallala Aquifer. It’s an underground lake. It will probably be drained within the century. About 25% of all American agriculture is irrigated by this aquifer. The global water crisis leaves half of the world food production at risk in the next 25 years.

In the USA, about three quarters of all antibiotics are fed to livestock. Another problem is antimicrobial resistance.

John Deere is the biggest farm equipment manufacturer in the world. It is also mining data. It has sensors embedded in tractors. The data is sent to the cloud and sold back to farmers. We’ll call this agro-machinery. Other “upstream” players are fertilizer, breeding and genetics, seeds and chemicals, pharmaceuticals, feed. With each of these there are fewer and fewer companies that provide these services.

Downstream are grain and oilseeds, livestock packing and slaughter, process foods and beverages, large-scale retail, and fast food. A lot of the control in agriculture is upstream and downstream. This is the “Cost-price squeeze”. This puts pressure on farms to get big or get out.

Alternatives

It should be noted that there is a positive side to this. Let’s compare the small farm to the big farm. Small farms are more labour-instensive. They are much more biodiverse. Let’s think about the net nutritional output of a small farm against a big farm. There are examples of small farms that are producing more net nutritional output per land area. More nutrition per acre, with fewer inputs and less harmful outputs (like pollution). So, there is a way to do things differently.

No till seeding is a possibility.

Have a look at the information on agroecology and soil regeneration. The Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO) supports farmers to build resilient ecological farms and grow a strong knowledge-sharing community.