Industrial agriculture has been a disaster for poor people, actually

A response to The Breakthrough Institute in Jacobin Magazine.

Noted proponent of the Green Revolution Bill Gates at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011.

Industrial agriculture and the Green Revolution have been a disaster for poor and working people all over the globe. This is a relatively common view among ecologists, food justice advocates, and the broader Left, which is why it was surprising to see a piece in Jacobin promoting the virtues of the United States food system, which is among the most industrialized in the world.

In the piece, the pro-capital, “post-environmentalist” Silicon Valley think tank The Breakthrough Institute attacks would-be reformers of our agricultural system as elitists or violent primitivists hell-bent on starving people. While they neglect to mention the numerous ways in which the industrial agriculture system actively harms the poor, they say the system is unavoidable if we want to avoid mass starvation. They claim the displacement of farmworkers has been a net positive for poor and working people. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As socialists, we must be as concerned with the unequal distribution of pollution in poor communities as the unequal concentration of wealth with the rich. While we address the causes of climate change and the food system’s estimated one-third share of global emissions, we should also reckon with the mission of an industrial agriculture system that is designed to minimize costs by eliminating or underpaying labor as much as possible while externalizing environmental harms. We tend to call the proliferation of this modern agricultural system “The Green Revolution.”

A project of Capital

Historians refer to The Green Revolution as the period of rapid intensification of agricultural production following World War II and extending to the present. This intensification was driven by technological advances in plant breeding that created new high-yield varieties of corn, wheat, rice, and other crops which are reliant on large amounts of synthetic fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, pesticides, and water.

The Green Revolution enabled farmers and large landowners to reduce or eliminate their reliance on farm labor. Farmworkers‒unlike farm machinery and chemical pesticides‒have the tendency to organize to demand better wages or owning their own land and can disrupt production by withholding their labor, as they had during the first half of the 20th Century in places like Jim Crow Alabama.

While the proponents of industrial agriculture talk about feeding the poor or freeing workers from toil, the main benefits of the Green Revolution have been to increase profits for the fossil fuel industry, for seed technology companies that rely on oppressive intellectual property regimes, for large food processing conglomerates like Kellogg’s that exploit their workers, and for the booming kidney dialysis industry which treats the disproportionately poor people who have increasingly acquired diet-related illnesses such as Type II Diabetes.

Seeing the Green Revolution as fundamentally anti-labor and pro-fossil fuel helps to understand why the two large foundations that bankrolled it were the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation was seeded with the profits of Standard Oil (now Chevon, ExxonMobil, Amoco, Marathon OIl, and others) and helped launch the career of Henry Kissinger. The Ford Foundation is an offshoot of the Ford Motor Company and its rabidly anti-union, anti-Semitic founder Henry Ford. Ford Motor Company was the last major auto company to sign a contract with the United Auto Workers and in the early part of the 20th Century manufactured three-quarters of the nation’s tractors. Both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were arms of the largest corporate and anti-communist interests in their time and stood to materially benefit from industrializing agriculture. Rather than a humanitarian endeavor, the Green Revolution was a solution looking for a problem that only fossil fuel companies and tractor salesmen could solve.

In the 21st Century, the Gates Foundation has taken up where the Rockefeller Foundation left off. Bill Gates made his fortune by profiting from and pushing the strictest possible intellectual property laws. When he’s not running Microsoft or consorting with Jeffrey Epstein, Gates is one of the world’s leading proponents of industrial agriculture and the single largest private owner of farmland in the United States. At the 2021 U.N. climate summit, Gates announced an initiative to fund green technology and “climate-smart agriculture,” which will use artificial intelligence and more genetic engineering to increase agricultural yields, or basically the Green Revolution 2.0. As a company that develops agricultural technology, Microsoft stands to be one of the largest beneficiaries of this new Green Revolution.

Industrialization punishes the poor

While the benefits of the Green Revolution have accumulated in the ownership class, its many harmful side effects have been dumped on poor and working people, including:

• The climate crisis: Synthetic fertilizer production releases more greenhouse gasses than any other industrial chemical process.
• Negative health impacts from fracking the natural gas needed for synthetic fertilizer.
• Toxic waste spills from the phosphorus fertilizer industry.
• Concentrating toxic chemical plants in poor communities.
• Fertilizer runoff that contaminates groundwater and creates blue baby syndrome.
• Pesticide poisonings.
• Algae blooms such as red tides that kill fish and poison coastal communities.
• Soil erosion, which is caused by agricultural intensification, could lead to 90 percent of the world’s soil needed for food being degraded by 2050.
• An explosion of diet-related illnesses, such as Type II Diabetes, which are disproportionately harming poor people.
• Decline in populations of pollinators, which are necessary for growing food.
• The draining of groundwater reserves, which could trigger water shortages.
• Increasing zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, that are linked to agricultural intensification.
• The horrors of factory animal farms, which rely on intensive grain production for feed.
• The horrors of the meat packing industry, which has some of the most exploitative and dangerous working conditions of any industry.

Proponents of the Green Revolution have few or no answers to these problems, all of which disproportionately harm the poor. They see them as unfortunate design features and a small price to pay for increased global food security. The argument is that the harms to poor people are unavoidable and are outweighed by the decrease in price and increase in quantity of food. The assumptions are that the commodity grains produced by the Green Revolution have been responsible for decreasing famines and that these grains are mostly fed to human beings. Both are false.

First, famines are often triggered by war or environmental disasters, but they result from improper distribution of food caused by political/economic mismanagement, not the underproduction of food. As Mike Davis wrote in Late Victorian Holocausts, European empires have often inflicted the mismanagement from abroad. While industrial agriculture proponents claim further intensification is needed to feed an estimated 9–10 billion people in 2050, it’s climate change and the environmental devastation wrought by industrial agriculture that are likely to bring about an environmental collapse that could actually trigger famines.

Second, the grains produced by the Green Revolution have gone largely to animal feed and to biofuel production and export. In 2013, only 8 percent of grains grown in the United States were eaten by U.S. residents. In China, at least 40 percent of grains go to animal feed.

A revolution for meat, not bread

Proponents of the Green Revolution respond that people should be allowed to eat as much meat as they want and that any suggestion that limitless meat production is incompatible with ecological limits is elitism. But these concerns about agency of the poor when it comes to dietary choices ring hollow when compared to the amount of toxic pollution generated by industrial agriculture in poor communities. After all, it’s not rich people who live next to fertilizer plants and concentrated animal feeding operations.

Contrary to the bizarre claim recently made by the Breakthrough Institute that the concept of pollution is a way to divide in-groups and out-groups and signify class status, the concept of pollution is actually a useful way to measure toxins in the air, water, and soil that kill people, especially poor people. And make no mistake, industrial agriculture is killing poor people. While it is true that certain forms of food consumption have long been a class signifier, the principal sign of upward mobility is increased meat consumption, not the organic vegetables that conservatives and industrial agriculture proponents associate with chef Alice Waters.

Increasing meat production has been a goal of developing nations, especially in the post-World War II Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. was desperate to compete with consumption levels in the United States and rapidly increased meat production and imported large amounts of grain to facilitate that production throughout the second half of the 20th Century. While western critics have tried to point to the Soviet Union as proof that central planning and collective land ownership are doomed to fail, Nikita Khrushchev’s admiration of the American agricultural system shows that the U.S. v. U.S.S.R. binary is unhelpful. Our systems were long intertwined, most notably when the U.S. sold off its strategic grain reserves to the Soviet Union in 1973, helping to kick off a long period of increased food prices and stagflation in the United States in the ‘70s.

Fighting communism abroad

The Green Revolution cannot be disentangled from the United States’ war on communism. The United States Army wrote openly that food and trade could be key weapons for the Cold War. As William Gaud, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said, “These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violet Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”

The United States exported its system of agriculture around the world not to free workers from labor or to help people have more food, but to increase profits for private enterprise and further develop its portfolio of client states throughout the Global South. And despite the increase in global food yields, nearly 10 percent of people are still deeply food insecure. If the goal of the Green Revolution was to end hunger, it has failed.

As the production of grain and meat has increased, so has the demand for land. In Brazil, for example, wealthy landowners are expelling small-scale farmers and deforesting the Amazon to generate profit for industrial agriculture. Far from being a system that decreases the demand for agricultural land as Breakthrough argues, industrial agriculture has an insatiable appetite for new land to serve as a center for profit making, which is why private equity and finance have become some of the largest owners of agricultural land.

Socialists absolutely need to be concerned with producing high quantities of high quality food for everyone, but we should not fall into the trap of hoping that technology can replace all farm labor. The agricultural technology sector has been trying to replace human farm labor for more than a century. While the financial reliance on technology has contributed to bankrupting multiple generations of farm owners who struggle to pay back loans on expensive equipment, it has done little to improve the lives of farmworkers. Industrial agriculture’s replacement of farmworkers with machines has left rural America hollowed out, with poverty and death rates among rural people now exceeding their urban counterparts. No amount of “rewilding”‒the supposed benefit of intensification put forth by Breakthrough‒is worth that cost.

Farmworkers are still among the lowest paid workers in the country and their immigration status makes them targets of exploitation. In December 2021, yet another investigation found widespread slavery in the U.S. agricultural system, this time in South Georgia. Rather than thinking of modern slavery as a problem for industrial agriculture to solve, we should think of it as a symptom of an industrial food system designed to minimize costs while maximizing revenue.

A socialized food system

It doesn’t have to be this way. Agriculture could provide good, high-paying jobs. We can stop excluding farmworkers from basic labor protections and organize workers across the food system for better pay and conditions. We should wield the power of the state to develop low carbon technology that makes farm work easier. We must transition away from the toxic petrochemical industry that dumps waste in poor communities. We should invest in community cooperative or state-run composting facilities that wean us off fossil fuels and turn agricultural waste into fertilizer. We should develop large, efficient, state-run food distribution and processing centers that support diversified farms and improve regional food security. We should publicly own farmland. And we must redistribute large amounts of wealth to poor and working people so they can spend more on high quality food and housing.

What we should not do is take advice from an organization like the Breakthrough Institute which has a board of directors that includes fossil fuel industry representatives, Big Tech executives, supporters of Third Way, venture capitalists, and far-right journalists. A better food system where people and the environment are prioritized over profit is possible, but it’s going to have to come from us. It’s not going to come from wishful thinking and a doubling down on the system that got us into this mess in the first place.