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Deforestation, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture 17

disrupts traditional agriculture, reducing the rural environment to a rather
barren landscape and, finally, is largely geared to generating profits for
capitalist corporations. Nevertheless, Pinker holds that this is a "reasonable"
price to pay for consigning major famines to the dustbin of history (Pinker 2018:
77).
Industrial agriculture, essentially developed from the end of the
Second World War, was a fundamental departure from earlier forms of
agriculture that had served humans well for thousands of years, despite periodic
famines. Such famines, of course, were often linked to aggravating social and
political factors.
Industrial agriculture has, however, to be understood in terms of the
political economy, namely that of global capitalism. This entails recognizing
that modern agriculture is dominated by a relatively small number of powerful
capitalist corporations and is supported by massive government subsidies as
well as being promoted by the media and by many agro-economists. A number
of myths about industrial agriculture therefore need to be dispelled.
The first myth is that high-tech industrial agriculture, given its high
productivity, is necessary to feed the world's population, both at the present time
and in the foreseeable future. However, the fact is that most of the food currently
produced in the world, around 70 per cent, is produced not by capitalist firms
but by small-scale farmers working on small plots of land. Industrial farming
only produces 30 per cent of the food we currently eat. Yet the myth that
industrial agriculture – agri-business - feeds the world is promoted world-wide!
(Shiva 2015: 14).
Secondly, although around one billion people in the world are starving
or chronically under-nourished, there is in fact enough food produced in the
world to feed everyone. The reason people are starving is not due to the
limitations of traditional agriculture but to the mal-distribution of food under
capitalism, which is geared not to the satisfaction of human need but to profit,
and to the fact that most soya and maize goes to feed livestock or is converted
into biofuel (Shiva 2015: 73). The third myth involves the constant denigration
of smallholder farming as primitive and inefficient, in contrast to the efficiency
and high productivity of industrial agriculture. But, in fact, modem farming is
highly inefficient, both in terms of energy and in terms of land-use. On a
''traditional" farm 1 kcal of energy expended during cultivation yields around 10
kcal of food energy, while high-tech industrial agriculture consumes 10 kcal of
energy (as fossil fuel) to produce 1 kcal of food energy. Thus, smallholder
farming is a hundred times more efficient in terms of energy than industrial
agriculture! (Tudge 2007: 58). It is also evident that peasant smallholder farms
produce more per unit of land than large industrial farms, given the ubiquity of
multiple-cropping systems and the widespread use of nitrogen-fixing legumes