V.2 Beyond Monoculture The Cost of Monocultures Modern Agriculture & the Economy The arguments for monoculture farming usually center on economics. The primary line of reasoning is that a single crop allows for greater economy of scale and higher efficiency in growth and processing. Contrary to this reasoning, however, there are also many economic disadvantages of monoculture farming. Even on the level of basic economic logic, when growing only one crop, there is always the risk that the particular crop will fail or that there will be an oversupply on the market. While it is true that large-scale monocultures offer a certain kind of efficiency gain in terms of crop production, they also cause major efficiency losses: • through disconnected energy and material cycles. through greater demand for costly chemical inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers.1 as a result of sub-optimal crop density: it is actually possible to produce twice as much food per area than even the most concentrated grain field when using an intercropped and vertically stacked system. • as a result of inefficient use of space and time: a single crop with a single life cycle experiences non-productive or fallow periods. These could easily be filled in with other productive elements rather than leaving that space or time unused. in terms of supply chain length and the demand for transport. Rather than supplying local communities with a diversity of food, large scale monocultures are attuned to supplying the global market with a particular commodity. This approach has resulted in the enormous growth in the number of “food miles” associated with every meal. It also reduces the earnings received by food producers, as every additional link in the chain between them and the consumer cuts into profit margins. • • Modern Agriculture & the Environment Modern agricultural practices have also resulted in some critical global problems: • Roughly 70% of the world’s terrestrial surface is at least partly devoted to agricultural uses,2 with 40% dedicated purely to crops and • 1 7% of crops were lost to pests at the start of industrial agriculture (1948) compared to around 13% now. This has occurred despite a 20-fold increase in chemical pest control measures. From: Hawken, P Lovins, A., and Lovins, H.L, ., (1999), “Natural capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution”, New York: Little, Brown, and Company. 2 Esty, Daniel C., M.A. Levy, C.H. Kim, A. de Sherbinin, T. Srebotnjak, and V. Mara. 2008. 2008 Environmental Performance Index. New Haven: Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. 12 Pagina 11
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