Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [53]
A Fatal Blindness
After reading this account of the resource costs of our current production system, you probably are amazed that more people are not aware and alarmed. I am continually amazed. Again and again I have to learn this lesson: often those with the most information concerning our society’s basic problems are those so schooled in defending the status quo that they are blind to the implications of what they know.
As I was preparing this chapter I came across a book that read as if designed to be the definitive rebuttal to Diet for a Small Planet. Three noted livestock economists conclude that “total resource use in this [livestock] production has decreased dramatically.”70 To arrive here, they had, of course, to ignore such hidden costs as I’ve just outlined—the fossil fuel used, the water consumed (including groundwater that is irreplaceable), the topsoil eroded, and the domestic fertilizer depleted as we attempt to make up for our soil’s declining fertility. They also ignore feedlot pollution and hidden tax subsidies. All this I would have expected. What really shocked me was their attempt to prove that we are producing more meat using less resources. Their evidence? A decline in labor used and a dramatic drop in acres devoted to feed grains between 1944 and about 1960, while meat production rose. What they fail to tell us is that about one-third of our total cropland was released from feed-grain production between 1930 and 1955 by the rapid replacement of grain-consuming draft animals by fuel-consuming tractors. Thus, much of the decline in feed-grain acres had nothing to do with increased efficiency of meat production. Just as appalling, these economists ignore the fact that livestock eat more than feed grains. Since 1960 there has been a spectacular rise in soybean use as animal feed. Tripling since 1960, acres in soybeans now exceed two-thirds of total acres in feed grains.71 (Almost half of those acres are used to feed domestic livestock,* the rest for export.) Soybeans are not even mentioned by these economists as a resource in livestock production.
While it is useful to keep these gross oversights in mind for the next time we feel cowed by an “authority” questioning our facts, they sidetrack us a bit from the basic argument used by such defenders of the status quo. Most economists defend our current meat production system by arguing that feeding grain to livestock is the cheapest way to produce meat. The fatal blindness in this argument is attention only to price. As we have seen, the price of our grain is an illusion. It results from the powerlessness of farmers to pass on their costs of production and the fact that so many of the costs of production—topsoil and groundwater, for example—carry no price at all.
In writing this chapter I came to realize more clearly than ever that our production system is ultimately self-destructive because it is self-deceptive; it can’t incorporate the many costs I’ve outlined here. It can’t look to the future. And it blinds those closest to it from even seeing what is happening. Thus, the task of opening our eyes lies more heavily with the rest of us—those less committed to protecting the status quo. As awakening stewards of this small planet, we have a lot to learn—and fast.
But now, let’s turn abroad. If the food-producing resources of our country—one blessed with exceptional agricultural wealth—are threatened, what does this production system mean for countries much less well endowed?
* Water: The Nature, Uses and Future of Our Most Precious and Abused Resource (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
* Some of this production is exported, but not the major share, since close to half of the irrigated land