The end of styrofoam strawberry: Peter Rosset takes us on a quick world tour of sustainable food production, and finds alternative methods are not just viable, but reaping the benefits - Food & Farming

New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Peter Rosset

WE live in a contradictory moment of human history. On the one hand we find the world's farmers and farmworkers under more pressure than ever, from free trade and neoliberal budget slashing and from privatization policies of all kinds. On the other we increasingly have real and significant examples that a different vision of rural spaces -- based on principles of social justice and ecological sustainability -- can actually work, and can work better than agribusiness-as-usual.

Take the coastal strawberry-producing region of northern California. This is the birthplace of the tasteless, bloated, poisonous strawberry. When one visits conventional strawberry farms the soil is bare of all vegetation and is completely sterilized by annual fumigation with methyl bromide. The raised beds where strawberry plants sprout through holes in plastic sheeting are baked hard enough to break your toe if you kick them. The strawberry you get here tastes like a piece of styrofoam pumped up with sugar-water and pesticides. What is more, overproduction has driven prices down, causing farmers to cut farm-worker wages to an inhuman minimum. Even so, most of the strawberry farmers are losing money.

Enter Jim Cochran, owner of Swanton Berry Farm. More than a decade ago Jim decided to go organic. He was ridiculed and ostracized by his neighbors, who told him that without methyl bromide it simply would not be possible to harvest berries. But he proved that it was more than possible to rebuild the soil with organic matter and control pests without chemicals, establishing himself with a healthy market niche for strawberries that actually taste of something and are good for you.

Then a few years back the United Farm Workers union (UFW) announced a drive to organize the region's miserably paid farmworkers. Most of the growers closed ranks, even going so far as to bring in hired-gun union-busting consultants, and managed to fight off the union. Except for Jim, who welcomed the UFW into his operation, despite being completely ostracized for the second time. Today he is the only grower with a union contract, he pays wages a few dollars per hour above the average, and is the only one to offer healthcare -- for the whole family -- paid vacations and workers' compensation. These are virtually unheard-of benefits for migrant farmworkers. And guess what? Swanton Berry Farm is the only operation among its neighbors that is actually making a profit. The union is thrilled, using the farm as proof that social justice and organic farming make for good business for all.

Moving to the south-east, we come to the island nation of Cuba, subjected for decades to the inhuman US trade embargo. For decades Cuba was the paragon of industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture in the Caribbean, exporting sugar and citrus to the former Soviet bloc and importing food, agrochemicals and machinery in return. When the Soviet Union fell and the US stepped up the embargo, Cuba lost 85 per cent of its trade with other countries and was plunged into an economic and food crisis. But as a new book by Cuban authors details (1), Cuba was able to resist adversity by turning inwards toward self-reliance, substituting organic farming techniques for the no-longer-available imported farm chemicals. Today Cuba produces more food than ever before, with a fraction of the pesticides it once imported, providing an inspiring national case study from which we can all learn.

Moving further to the south we come to Brazil, known for having the second-most inequitable distribution of land in the world. While the owners of giant latifundios leave an average of half their land idle, millions of peasants struggle to survive in temporary agricultural jobs. Enter the Landless Workers' Movement, or MST, arguably the largest and most successful social movement in Latin America. The MST organizes landless families to occupy idle land belonging to absentee landlords, taking advantage of a clause in the Brazilian constitution which makes such land expropriable. Since its founding in 1985, more than 250,000 families have won title to more than six million hectares of land in a veritable 'land reform from below'.

The new farmers created by this process earn on average 3.7 times the minimum wage, while still-landless rural workers get only 0.7 of the minimum. Infant mortality has dropped to half the national average. Beyond such undeniable benefits for MST families, the new small farm communities they create have jump-started depressed local economies. Typical rural towns in the Brazilian countryside have not fared well in recent decades. But when hundreds of new families arrive and turn idle land into productive farms, buying supplies and selling produce in local markets, the economies of these towns get a much-needed shot in the arm, as capital begins to circulate again at the local level.

From an environmental standpoint it is worth noting that over its 10 or more years of existence, the technological approach favored by the MST has evolved from a simple Green Revolution-style model to a firm commitment to agroecology, as they have learned from experience that the input-intensive model just doesn't work for small farmers. What the MST shows us is that true land reform is viable and possible even when policy-makers tell us it isn't.