volcano eruption and a world-wide dust cloud like the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, much less coping with multiple, sustained regional droughts, heat waves, and flooding disasters. The profit-driven private sector will need incentives, and subsidies, to build and maintain much larger food reserves.
The second element of our new food security strategy should be a massive global effort to expand the number of small biointensive farms. (A recent U.N. study found that three-quarters of all the world’s existing farms are already small -- under 2.5 acres -- and locally-oriented. Large-scale market farms are largely devoted to feeding the developed countries, and their livestock – and their automotive gas tanks with ethanol.) As noted earlier, an initiative to create more biointensive farms would serve in part to diversify our food production system and create an insurance policy. It would spread the risks and help create the capacity to cope with the inevitable shortages that lie ahead. Not least, it could help to feed those who are already suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
Accordingly, it should become a priority for the global community to find the money to create at least 200 million more low-cost, biointensive “mini-farms” around the world over the next decade or so. Yes, it might cost $40 billion, but that’s a fraction of our $700 billion annual defense budget. Total global military spending amounts to about $1.7 trillion a year. To use that old cliché, turning some of our guns into butter would contribute significantly to international security, and it would be money well spent.
The millions of new biointensive farms might employ as many as 500 million people and produce enough food to sustain the farmers and their families, as well as many others. In the context of much higher global food prices, the biointensive system would also become more price competitive with industrial agriculture and could relieve some of the upward price pressures in the global commodities markets. Even urban parks, back yards, and some apartment roof tops can accommodate biointensive growing beds.
A graphic prepared by John Jeavons shows that one acre of farmland can be used either to support one cow, or to produce 40 gallons of ethanol for gas tanks, or to feed as many as 20 people plus food for the soil (compost) using biointensive farming. The choice is up to us.
About Dr. Peter A. Corning
Dr. Peter A. Corning is currently the director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems in Seattle, WA. He was a one-time science writer at Newsweek and a professor for many years in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University. From 2004 to 2017 he was also the co-owner of Synergy Farm on San Juan Island, WA. In addition to some 200 professional papers, he has published seven books. This article was derived from his forthcoming new book, THE SUPERORGANISM: A New Social Contract for a Species in Peril. John Jeavons served as a consultant for this article.
PHOTO CREDITS:
John Jeavons, Director of Ecology Action