Postcolonial Agriculture and the War on Biodiversity

Postcolonial agriculture, as used here, refers to the practices of agricultural production that have replaced indigenous practices, mostly brought by Western cultures, across the world. Some of the hallmarks include monocropping, large-scale machinery, genetic modification, synthetic fertilization and the broad use of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It largely describes a set of extractive practices that is unsustainable. It is turning a robust and resilient biosphere into a rigid and fragile game of jenga. It's quite likely we could have collaborated with nature, but instead we declared war.

These practices are often defended as being necessary to feed the world when, in fact, we never even tried to harness the wisdom and knowledge of original populations to understand what was possible. All of the "technological advancements" in food production over the last 150+ years have created methods of mass destruction accompanied by salves and ointments to temporarily replace some parts of the system we are destroying.

The overall costs of this approach can't be truly measured. We've never tried to valorize a healthy planet because the system's apparent immensity has seemed limitless. And it is just so damned inconvenient to change course because all of our economic and accounting frameworks aren't built to accommodate a different paradigm. Reductionism seems to be the bedfellow of profit-seeking.

Since the first through-rock petroleum well was dug in Titusville, PA in 1859, human beings have excelled at killing things. Our war on biodiversity is being fought on many fronts, some more obvious than others. And while the loss of polar bears would be devastating, the extinction of dung beetles, as one example, would be far more catastrophic.

Plants and phytoplankton form the base of the food chain here on our little Blue Marble. They harvest the energy from the sun and make all other life forms possible. Their symbiotic relationships with insects makes it all work. Our carelessness with chemistry and pharmacology wreaks havoc on this life-support system, our life-support system.?

As we started using the "miracle of chemistry" to solve first-order problems (e.g. glyphosate for weed control in agriculture), we were only concerned with first-order outcomes (e.g. acute toxicity in humans). In the interest of profit, second-order consequences were conveniently ignored. Some of these consequences were known from the outset and criminally suppressed. Some of these consequences continue to reveal themselves as we march forward, armed with our spray bottles and crop-dusters.

"Well, it's better than the alternatives..." is the oft-sung hymn of the glyphosate apologists. Perhaps...if your entire solution set is comprised of chemicals.?But a look at just one example illustrates how dangerous this logic is.

This research, supported by the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease fingers the herbicide glyphosate as a potential super-spreader of malaria through its mechanism of weakening mosquito's immune system to the deadliest form of the disease.?

And lest you think that this is "only" a problem for those less fortunate souls living in far-away places like Africa, think again. Climate change will be bringing this problem to a theater near you. And the more we push GMOs designed to withstand glyphosate in the global South, the more people will die from the effects of these chemicals.?

Here's another great example of second-order consequences.

Building on a large data set collected by Sydney Cameron, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, the scientists discovered what they call “landscape-scale” connections between fungicide usage, pathogen prevalence and declines of endangered United States bumblebees. (Landscape scale refers to the area in which foraging bumblebees live, about 2 kilometers in diameter.)

While fungicides control plant pathogens in crops, the bees pick up their residue when foraging for pollen and nectar. As farms use both insecticides and fungicides, the scientists worry about synergy. “While most fungicides are relatively nontoxic to bees, many are known to interact synergistically with insecticides, greatly increasing their toxicity to the bees,” McArt said.

The use of antibiotics in agriculture parallels the use of pesticides (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides). Initially used to cure for diseases in farm animals caused by feedlot confinement, it was discovered in 1940s that antibiotics were also useful as growth-promoters. The resulting antibiotic resistance in animals and humans was predictable as a second-order consequence. Not unlike herbicide resistance in weeds. Nature has a built-in diversification strategy.

It turns out that some insects can be very efficient at transmitting antibiotic-resistant pathogens to humans. The predictable response...kill the messenger...with insecticides. It's interesting to note that the use of antibiotics in pasture systems is much lower than feedlot/confinement systems. This has to do with difference in the overall health of the animals in these two very different production systems. Fresh air, space, exercise and diet are the main reasons for these differences.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that insecticides are designed to kill insects. And while there certainly are insecticides that target specific insect species, many (if not most) insecticides are nondiscriminatory. It also turns out that many of these compounds may have a toxicity effect on humans.

Is is undeniable that insecticides have saved millions of humans by helping to control vector-borne diseases (e.g. malaria). More than 80,000 chemical substances are now commercially available in agriculture and industry. About 4,600,000 tons of pesticides are applied into the environment every year, and insecticides accounted for the largest portion of total use in the world.

We need to end this war on biodiversity, beginning with laying down the weapons of chemical warfare, before we saw off the tree branch that we are standing on.