Yet Hope Grows in Nebraska

What we did not discuss, when I met with the farmers, was the glimmer of hope offered by the Slow Food movement, known by some as the food revolution. But the Slow Food movement has taken hold in Nebraska.

When I visited Lincoln in 2004 to give a talk at the university there, I had not heard of John Ellis and his Centerville Farmers Market—a store that he opened with other local farmers. It is stocked almost entirely with food that represents fifty farmers from within fifty miles of Lincoln. It was a brand-new, revolutionary idea when he first sold his farm and equipment to start it up. I read about John Ellis in Brian Halweil's Eat Here. The venture epitomizes the resilience of the human spirit—in this case linked to the resilience of nature.

John started his store even though he was well aware that there was a Wal-Mart Supercenter on the other side of town, with twenty-eight aisles of food. He believed that customers would buy from the Centerville Farmers Market because they wanted locally grown food. And in the Wal- Mart he knew that almost all the food had traveled thousands of miles to get there. Even a lettuce farmer just outside Lincoln must, if he wants to sell to Wal-Mart, send his produce 225 miles to North Platte to be inspected (each lettuce must comply with strict regulations concerning quality control and appearance). After which it is sent 225 miles back to be sold in the store in Lincoln.

In North Platte, the regional distribution center for Wal- Mart comprises a series of sprawling, hangar-sized warehouses containing the giant freezers, ripening rooms, and packing stations for all the "fresh" food—vegetables, fruit,meat, milk, and so on—that will be sold in the giant supermarkets throughout the whole of the American Great Plains region. How can John Ellis hope to compete? Only by helping to raise the awareness of the ordinary people, the consumers. And he, and others like him, are working hard to do just that. At the back of his store is a "commercial kitchen" where farmers can mingle with shoppers, where chefs demonstrate how to create mouthwatering dishes from the local produce. The walls of the store are devoted to paintings and drawings from local schools creating an art gallery where children can learn about food.

John Ellis is not the only one. Many other such stores are springing up. And more and more farmers markets are appearing in Lincoln and surrounding areas. Farmers are banding together, so that more people can be supplied with a greater variety of produce. There is growing support among politicians and voters for measures such as conservation easements and tax credits that will protect the farmers and their land—measures that also help to preserve the beauty and biodiversity of the countryside. Many farmers markets have become venues for social gatherings, music, and exchange of news, adding to their popularity. People get to know the farmers who grow their food, and sense that these farmers will be more responsible in their production methods.

Within the city limits of Lincoln is Shadowbrook, a thirty-six-hectare certified organic farm that serves seventy families. Community gardens are springing up, here as in so many places around the world, where city people can find the inner peace that comes from working with the soil, marveling at the growth of life that they have planted, hearing the song of birds and the humming of the honeybees. The harvests from these community gardens, and those of the farmers growing for their local communities, are truly liar- vests for hope. And the more people who support these efforts, who use their hard-earned dollars to buy produce from farmers markets, and their political power to vote for measures to protect the source of this produce, the more crop diversity will return to the despoiled land. Nebraska is even growing grapes and making its own wine today.

On the last evening of my stay there was one of the most amazing sunsets I have ever seen. Palest shell pink turning an unreal crimson, then purple, then fiery red. Tom, my sister, and I sat on a rise overlooking the river and watched and listened as the cranes came in, skein after skein. Their wild voices filled the air, a great volume of sound drowning out the trucks on the interstate. There was still enough food, still enough water, to sustain this ancient migration. Somehow, together, we must ensure that our grandchildren are not denied the opportunity to marvel, in their turn, at one of nature's most spectacular scenes. The last glow of the sunset was still smoldering against the almost dark sky as we walked back to the cabin, silent with the magic of the evening. The pale stubble of the corn harvest stretched away from the river into the distance; the dark shape of a center pivot loomed against the sky; a truck thundered along the highway. And the cranes were still calling.

Eat Local, Eat Seasonal

"It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato."

The whole idea eating local foods becomes especially alluring if we think in terms of seasonal foods. Start by refusing the tasteless, bloated, and artificially dyed grocery store strawberries that have been picked far away—unripe so as to travel better—in anticipation of the mouthwatering local ones that will be ripe late June and early July. They will be especially delectable if they are organic and free of the chemical pesticides and fertilizers that concentrate in the flesh of thin-skinned fruits like strawberries. I can no longer eat any other kind of strawberry.

When I was young we had no option but to eat those things that were in season. We waited eagerly for the first green beans or the first brussels sprouts, vegetables that came just once a year. We couldn't grow much in the sandy soil of Bournemouth, but we did grow runner beans and some other vegetables. In the summer my grandmother Danny made gooseberry fool, rhubarb and apple pies, and blackberry and apple pies with custard, and blackcurrant jelly. Uncle Eric used to make chutney with green tomatoes—his own special secret recipe. In the autumn Danny bottled fruit and made jam. We could never lay out appl_es to dry because of the salt sea air of Bournemouth, but I used to taste them when I went to stay with friends. They became more and more wrinkled but sweeter as autumn gradually changed to the long, dark days of winter. Today, fewer and fewer people lay in stock for winter days—for now foods are packaged and shipped from all around the globe so that customers can buy just what they want, just when they want it. Only when we decide to return to eating more local foods shall we regain our appreciation for the gifts of the different seasons and once again live in harmony with nature's cycles. Then, even as we grieve the last, now tough and stringy runner beans, we shall be eagerly anticipating the first of autumn's plums that are soon to be ready for the picking.

Nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow, an esteemed pioneer in the local foods movement, tells the story of walking out of her front gate one snowy February day in her upstate New York home. On the ground, peeking through the snow, she saw a bright orange-red object. The color was so out of place in the winter landscape that she leaned down for a closer look. There she found a nectarine with one bite taken out of it. "I thought of how it probably came from a foreign country," she said, "and was picked unripe, then put into a refrigerated shipment, and ripened artificially as it was hauled all the way up to New York state where someone bought it at a supermarket, bit into it, and of course finding it tasteless, mushy, and disgusting, just thoughtlessly tossed it away. In that one nectarine I saw all the waste and senselessness of our travel-dependent food supply." If only that person had simply waited until local fruits ripened on the trees—there is nothing quite like biting intothe sweet flesh of a fresh, utterly ripe nectarine. So succulent that the juice is sure to run down your chin.

Changing the World one Hard Hat at a Time

"Hope cuisine, not haute cuisine."

Barre, Vermont, is a small, working-class town and the center of the state's granite industry—a place known for quarries and tombstone carving. Here on Main Street, in a small fifteen-foot-wide building that has been feeding residents for over seventy years, is one of the most revolutionary and progressive businesses in the nation—the Farmers Diner. In this tiny diner with its green vinyl booths and white Formica countertops, we find proof that a more hopeful harvest is already under way.

The Farmers Diner is the brainchild of owner and organic farmer Tod Murphy, who one day wondered if it would be possible to create a restaurant with good old American diner food at good old affordable prices but have most of the food come from local and sustainable sources. He took over the landmark diner in 2002 and since then has turned it into a prototype for a national franchise that may someday put Mc- Donald's and Starbucks to the test. More than a meal, the Farmers Diner represents the cutting edge of the local foods movement. So far, the Farmers Diner is spending 70 cents out of every dollar on products from farmers and small-scale producers who live and work within seventy miles of Barre. You'll find milk shakes, burgers, and omelets on the menu, but the burgers and milk will come from local grass-fed cows, the omelets from the eggs of free-range and small-flock hens. And if the season is right, you're likely to find a few surprises, such as a slice of green zebra heirloom tomato under your burger bun or a dish of local organic strawberry ice cream.

The way Tod Murphy sees it, he's building a bridge between the sustainable local foods movement and the everyday customer who may not be able to afford a meal at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in California, but would still appreciate the riches of local, seasonal fare. (In fact, the diner's tomatoes are grown by one of the farmers who used to supply organic tomatoes for Chez Panisse.) Many of the residents who first started coming to the diner in 2002 didn't really care much about local sustainable. foods, they just wanted good, reasonably priced diner fare. While customers have come to appreciate the local connection, it is the food that keeps them coming back.

Murphy speaks fondly of his regulars, such as the elder Vermont ladies who come from the assisted living retirement housing two blocks down from the diner. "They almost wept when they tasted our sauerkraut," he said. "It's not cooked, it's just chopped cabbage with sea salt, and for a lot of these ladies over seventy this is the sauerkraut they remember from when they were little girls." They have the same reaction to the diner's beet salad made of four different varieties of local, organic beets. "For many elder customers, the resurgence in local fresh food gives them a chance to remember and retaste the food from childhood, before industry got in the way," said Murphy. "And hopefully the desire and the commitment to pay what is needed to taste it again."

Sometimes it's not until customers start reading the menu and place mats, profiling all the local farmers who brought them their breakfast, lunch, or dinners, that they are even aware that the diner offers local riches. The customer literature explains that the diner only sells animal products that have been raised without antibiotics and hormones, and all livestock has access to the outdoors and pasture as a principal part of their feed ration, thus explainin_gwhy the butter is bright yellow. "That's the way butter is when the cow is outside eating fresh grass, not chained up in a barn," said Murphy. The literature also gives the history of the diner's hamburger, how it made a seventy-mil_e route from farm to plate instead of the almost 2,000-mile journey of most industrial beef.

Tod Murphy may be an organic farmer with an idealistic vision, but he is also a savvy entrepreneur. It certainly hasn't escaped his attention that just about every food and travel magazine now includes a favorable feature about local foods. He also noted that food trends, such as gourmet coffee, seem to first appeal to consumers in the top upper 10 percent income bracket, but eventually become popular among the middle class. He sees the local foods movement eventually becoming a mainstream mandate.

His vision is to create a national franchise of Farmers Diners—with about five to ten diners working with a central pod of local suppliers. So far his sights are on a pod in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, another one in the Hudson Valley/New York City area, and eventually moving on to the San Francisco Bay area and Portland, Oregon. According to Murphy, each pod will help eighty to 200 local farms become secure in their economic viability. For now he's seeking investors while he continues to infiltrate the working class of Vermont. He likes to recount the time a crew of construction workers came into the diner for some hamburgers. They had come to Barre from another part of the state to work on a local gas station.

"One day at a quarter to twelve in walks a whole crew of construction guys looking for burgers," Murphy recalled. "They have Dallas Cowboys stickers on their hard hats, and they immediately take over two booths with their cement^- covered boots sticking out in the aisles."

When the burgers were served, one of the guys declared, "This is the best hamburger I've had since I was a kid inMontana. This has got to be Black Angus from Colorado or Montana or Wyoming."

But his friend said, "What the hell are you talking about? Can't you read the menu? It's from right around here—in Starksboro, Vermont."

The other guy got mad. "No way did this come from Vermont. I'm telling you I grew up in the West and this is Western beef." For a while it looked like a fight might break out.

This story especially delights Murphy. "These guys didn't come into the diner because we offered local food. They came in to get hamburgers and get back to the job. But suddenly they are having a discussion about local food. You now have a guy sitting there thinking holy smoke this tastes different and better than anything else because it's local and you got another guy who's now got emotionally involved in defending the position that this is local. This is what the victory for our side really looks like."

Another encouraging trend is Burgerville, a chain of thirty-nine fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest that was dubbed "America's Freshest Fast Food" by Gourmet magazine. Their menu is nearly identical to Mc- Donald's, but the mini-chain buys the bulk of its ingredients from farmers in Oregon and Washington. Some of its big sellers are local Tillamook dairy products. This may not be remarkable for a restaurant that features local sustainable foods—but what is remarkable is that McDonald's is catching on. Drive by the Seattle McDonald's that serves the Space Needle tourists, and you'll see a brightly lit sign, boldly advertising its exciting new menu item—local Tillamook ice cream.

Saving Family Farms

In poor urban areas, in both the industrial and developing world, families typically have to spend more than half their income on food, since they cannot buy in bulk. And often the areas where they live are underserved. In the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C., the people were without a single supermarket for years, just fast food outlets and convenience stores. When a farmers market, with produce from urban gardens, was established it gave them their first reliable source of fresh food in years. In Havana, the U.S. embargo, followed by the Soviet collapse, forced the government to step in to help the residents, and today about 90 percent of the city's fresh produce is grown in its own urban farms and gardens.

Urban farms protect watersheds that supply city water and they enable people to reestablish their contact with the land as well as grow their own food. They also provide a use for food waste that would otherwise end up in landfills. And, very importantly, they provide meaningful work. Halweil describes the imaginative project of Wally Satzewich, onetime cabdriver, and his wife, Gail. Between them they manage twenty residential garden plots in Saskatoon. They either pay rent or barter a food basket in lieu of rent. They farm organically, frequently rotating crops to minimize damage by insect pests. They have built up a twenty- member CSA and they also supply some of the best known restaurants. Moreover, they make enough money to live comfortably: From one of his plots he earned $3,900 in one season. Wally is enthusiastic, sharing his project on his Web site. How hopeful it feels, thinking of all these people, all over the world, rolling up their sleeves and reconnecting with the soil. It makes me smile.

SAVING FAMILY FARMS

Every time we buy locally grown food we are supporting the beleaguered small family farmers, like Joel Salatin and Mike and Heidi Peroni. Each year more than 8,000 square miles of U.S. iand is swallowed up by the vast suburban sprawl of strip malls, convenience stores, and housing developments—land that is often ideal for agriculture. Farmlands that don't get developed are often taken over by large corporate farms. Conservationists worldwide are starting to believe that preserving sustainable, local farms is almost as important as protecting our wild lands.

Of course the obvious benefit of preserving family farms is that they give us access to diverse, nutritious, and regional foods. But local sustainable farms also support the healthy characteristics of our communities. In rural areas where the family farms are protected and still producing, we often find higher employment and more thriving local businesses, schools, parks, churches, and community organizations, according to the Institute for Food and Development Policy. But when there is a dearth of local farms, rural communities tend to die off or struggle to survive.

Brian Halweil, a leading voice in the local foods movement in addition to being the author of Eat Here, speaks of rural "food deserts" where isolated households have not only lost their community services, they don't even have access to grocery stores or farmers markets because corporate grocers don't find it profitable to serve these poor outposts, and local farms have been lost to industrialization. Many of these households wind up feeding their families the highly processed food at convenience stores placed beside highway gas stations.

Saving Family Farms (what we can do?)

There are many ways in which individuals, or groups of individuals, can make a difference.

Save Land

Recently I came across a story about a group of enlightened people in the town of Scrabble, in West Virginia, and their efforts to save their vanishing farmlands. As the town is only a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington, D.C., the farmland is prime real estate—perfect for developers.

The group began its efforts when a local 300-acre farm was offered for sale. It would be purchased by a developer and turned into two-acre plots, without respect or appreciation for the community and environmental assets around which they were developing. As a result, town residents banded together and cashed their stocks and retirement accounts, and mortgaged their homes in an effort to buy the farm themselves.

In a few weeks they had raised $700,000 but, although this was a remarkable feat, it was still less than the amount offered by the developer. However, although they did not secure that particular farm for their town, they are not giving up. They are now prepared and, with a financial network in place, are ready to fight to save other local farms as they are put on the market. And then, with the kind of options for farmers described in this chapter, the farms may actually be revitalized and help feed the residents of the town with locally grown, healthy food.

Buy from Local Farmers

Somewhere near you there are family farmers who are trying to do right by the earth—who are trying to feed their families as well as their community with integrity and respect. Aside from eating less meat, buying your food from a local farmer who is a good steward of the earth is one of the most effective contributions you can make to the health of the planet. The more we invest in these farms the more we build the world we want to live in. And the more likely we are to pass on the kind of world our children and grandchildren deserve to inherit.

Shop at Farmers Markets

Farmers markets are one of the most ideal sources of local, sustainable foods. You'll discover that almost all freshly picked vegetables from local farms taste phenomenally better than produce that's traveled thousands of miles before reaching your local supermarket. Be sure to ask stall operators what's the best and freshest produce. Farmers markets can be found in cities all across the U.S. The USDA has a complete listing of markets in all fifty states at their Web site (see Resources).

Become a Shareholder in a Farm

A share in a CSA costs about $300 to $500 for a twenty-four- to twenty-six-week growing season. In return, you receive weekly boxes of fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables. Many CSA programs accept monthly payments, and you may be able to buy a half-share rather than a whole share. (See the Resources section for a Web site that can help you locate a CSA near you.)

Join a Food Co-op

A food cooperative is a member-owned business that provides groceries and other products to its members, usually at a discount. Many of the products lining the shelves of coops are organic and much of the produce comes from local family farms. To find a co-op near you, check out Web sites such as Cooperative Grocer (www.cooperativegrocer.coop) and Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org). Joining a co-op is usually easy, typically requiring you to pay some dues.

Farmers markets, CSAs, and co-ops are probably the purest expression of the original vision of the organic movement because they offer direct contact with local growers and also offer direct support of their efforts: Detractors say that the commitment to eating local, sustainable foods is nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky utopian dream. But Joan Gussow, author of This Organic Life and one of the people who helped write the USDA organic certification standards, puts it this way: "I've often been told my vision for a food supply that is mostly based on local farmers markets and CSAs is completely unrealistic. But I believe that the current practice of food distribution is even more unrealistic, considering that we're running out of petroleum, and we will eventually be unable to ship our food all over the place."

An Organic Wave Worldwide Part 3

WHAT YOU CAN DO

When we buy local sustainable foods we support a new food paradigm where local communities reap the benefits of trade, rather than a few multinational corporations. This doesn't mean we have to stop all food trade or no longer buy special foods from other regions of the world. But it does mean shifting our priorities so that we create a staple of local foods wherever possible. This way, food is only imported in places where local resources can't sustain the community.

Buy Fair-Trade and Organic Imports

It is important, when we buy food from other countries, particularly from the developing world, that we make sure the product was grown and harvested in an environmentally and socially ethical way—which means buying fair trade and organic as much as possible. When any of us eats from local, organic food sources, we are less likely to contribute to the exploitation of another country's people or precious natural resources. Not every region or community can or should produce all its food. But it doesn't make sense for poor, underdeveloped areas of the world to grow cash crops for other countries when their own people go hungry. Nor does it make sense for wealthy countries to import cash crops when they are already growing the same kinds of foods in abundance.

Drink Ethical Coffee

If you are a daily coffee drinker, like I am, then every morning you can do something to reduce your chemical exposure, support safe farming practices, and protect our tropical forests. For instance, by purchasing shade-grown coffee, you invest in a crop that was grown by a farmer under the umbrella of a rain forest—protecting the jungles and even migratory birds of the world. If it's not shade-grown, your coffee could very well be grown on a clear-cut, factory-style plantation, completely dependent on agrochemicals.

Shade-grown coffee requires less and sometimes no chemical fertilizers because the plants that are part of the forest's complex ecosystem naturally add nutrients to the soil. Even water irrigation isn't necessary because the canopy of trees provides enough shade to slow the water loss from evaporation. In Peru, a farmer who grows coffee in the shade of a forest can earn 30 percent of his income from other sales, such as firewood, fruits, and medicinal plants— all natural features of the shade system. If you want complete assurance no agrochemicals were used on the crops, then certified organic is the way to go.

Fair-trade coffee means that you invested in a system that pays growers a "fair price" for the coffee painstakingly grown. Shockingly, companies that don't practice fair trade pay the average coffee grower less than $3 a day. Imagine— each day farmers have to feed their families, educate their children, and maintain their homes and business with the same amount of money that the average Americans pays for a latte. If everyone were to insist on only drinking ethical coffee, we would help rural farmers retain their dignity as well as ownership of their land (keeping it out of corporate control). We would reduce the amount of chemicals polluting the planet. We'd protect the future of migratory birds. And we could preserve almost 25 million acres of rain forest a year.

One cup at a time we can help reverse the trend of forest destruction. Forests and woodlands can and will grow back in most cases—not immediately and not exactly as they were before—but nature is resilient and eternally creative. So each time you buy a bag of beans or sip a cup of coffee you can fully enjoy its roasted, aromatic pleasures, knowing that you are protecting the world's tropical farmers and their precious landscapes.

An Organic Wave Worldwide Part 2

HELPING WOMEN TO TAKE CARE OF THE EARTH

In Tanzania, the Jane Goodall Institute has originated the TACARE (Ta(ke) Care) project in thirty-three villages around Gombe National Park. This has hugely improved the lives of more than 150,000 people by introducing fuel- efficient stoves for cooking, tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable for the very steep rocky slopes bordering Lake Tanganyika, and ways to prevent or deal with soil erosion. All of our methods are, of course, based on organic, sustainable land use.

TACARE has established nine small microcredit banks (based on the Grameen Bank model) so that now small groups of women can start their own environmentally sustainable projects. Bright schoolgirls can apply for scholarships to enable them to go on to secondary school. And TACARE also offers women's reproductive health counseling, including family planning information and HIV-AIDS education. There is an emphasis on educating girls and women partly because, traditionally, their lives have been unacceptably harsh, but especially because it has been shown, all around the world, that as women's education increases, family size drops.

All the TACARE villages can now collect their supply of firewood from their own woodlots where fast growing species have been planted close by. And when they stop hacking at the tree stumps growing on the bare mountain slopes a new tree springs from the seemingly dead wood—within five years it will be twenty to thirty feet high. Now "TACARE forests" have sprung up around many of the villages. We are now taking the first steps to replicate TACARE in other parts of Africa.

IT ALL BEGINS AND ENDS WITH SOIL

More than 90 percent of the world's food comes from the soil. If you take into consideration that the food animals are sustained by plants, then everything we eat originates in the soil. Thus it is disturbing to learn from a recent U.N. report that each year more than 10 million hectares (25 mil- lion acres) of topsoil are swept away from cropland by rain and wind. Three hundred million hectares, an area that could potentially produce enough to feed the whole of Europe, have become so degraded that they cannot be used for agriculture, at least in the foreseeable future. "Farming," as Dr. Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph said, "has produced an agricultural scar on the planet affecting one third of suitable soils."

This degradation is largely due to the clearing of woodland and forest for growing crops and gathering firewood to feed mushrooming human populations in the developing countries. In Ivory Coast, West Africa, for example, the loss of topsoil before clearing the trees was about .03 tons per hectare per year; after deforestation it was some ninety tons per hectare per year. India is losing some six billion tons of topsoil per year, again mostly due to deforestation. China, about the same size as the United States, and with three times as many people, has only one eighth as much good farmland. And this precious land, in many places, is turning into desert ever more quickly. The process has been going on for hundreds of years, but has intensified in the past fifty years, as population growth has led to the attempted cultivation of increasingly marginal land. There the thin soil soon dries up and blows away. The amount of land available for food production per capita dropped by half between 1950 and 1990, and since then, despite major efforts, the problem has only intensified. It often results in major dust storms: There were twenty-three in the 1990s. And in 2001 a dust cloud blew off China so massive that it briefly darkened the sky over North America.

And now China's farming problems are compounded as new urban and industrial developments radiate out from the cities. Farmers are losing their land, so that the percentage of the country suitable for agriculture is continually decreasing. In view of this, it is clearly desperately important to regenerate as much despoiled farmland as possible, as soon as possible. It is no longer appropriate for people, however rich or poor, to continue to destroy the planet's future. Yet it is easy to understand how this happens. In many places population growth has led to more people living in an area than the land can support, and as they struggle to scratch a livelihood they cut down more and ever more trees, often in places unsuitable for cultivation. This was the situation in the once forested hills outside Gombe National Park. By the early 1980s virtually all the trees outside the park were gone and cultivated fields stretched up toward the hilltops and to the boundaries of the park. During the wet season each heavy rain washed precious topsoil into the valleys and often directly into Lake Tanganyika. Once the trees from the higher slopes had gone, there were often flash floods. I visited one tiny lakeshore village where half the houses had been washed away and fifteen people killed during such a flash flood. The people around Gombe, like so many across Africa, were too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Some moved away, leaving family and friends to try their luck in the less crowded areas to the south. The others continued, desperately, to try to coax food from the increasingly barren land.

One of TACARE's most exciting projects helps people repair overused land, and to reclaim farms that were abandoned after deforestation, overuse, and erosion left them seemingly dead. Two demonstration farms, now lush, green, and with many trees, serve as models, and are popular with local farmers, who arrive in large numbers to learn new techniques. This fantastic ability to regenerate quickly is typical of many kinds of trees in the tropics, and there are methods of building up soil even in the most arid places, provided there is some rain.

As we have seen, the corporate-dominated, global food markets have a tendency to create plantations and industrial farms that degrade and pollute precious resources, such as the topsoil, water, and forests. Community projects such as TACARE can create a vast landscape of worldwide farmers who won't be bought out or compromised by the dangling carrot of immediate cash. Instead, the main incentive will be creating sustainable farms that best serve the farmers and their families, the land, and the consumers who are nourished from them.

LOCAL FOOD FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Projects like these give us great hope. They restore degraded soil and safely increase crop yields all over the world. But one of the most inspiring outcomes of the growing interest in global, organic agriculture is that it emphasizes the importance of local food economies. Some skeptics might dismiss the local foods movement as a bourgeois food trend, serving those who have the resources and leisure time to eat delicious organic meals. But eating foods from local, sustainable sources is far more than a luxurious choice. It is our global mandate. Currently, 38 percent of the earth's land area is cropland or pasture and that amount is only increasing as the human population continues to grow. Some predict our supply of food will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades to accommodate the planet's population growth. The use of toxic synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics in animal feed, food irradiation, and genetically modified organisms to increase food production has been justified, in part, by the rationale that without these products the world will not be able to feed itself. This is not the case—and even if it was, would a plentiful supply of contaminated food be the solution?

An OrganicWave Worldwide Part 1

"Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it."

-CHIEF SEATTLE

Why should we be concerned about what is happening around the world? Don't we have enough problems at home without worrying about Africa or India or China? Unfortunately, as corporate globalization stretches its grasp ever further across the face of the earth, we find that the demands of the urban elite seriously and negatively impact the poor in developing countries. As when the Brazilian rain forest is destroyed in order that cheap hamburgers can be sold on the American market. Or when large areas of traditional farmland in Africa are sold to foreign companies to grow coffee or tea, the sale of which is unlikely to benefit those who live in the area.

Looked at from another perspective, the government subsidies for farmers growing corn in America, which result in flooding the U.S. market and lowering prices to the extent that small-scale farmers are going out of business, also means that cheap grain is available for famine relief overseas. And while this may be of the utmost importance—inmany cases saving thousands of lives—there can also be a downside in that local farmers in famine-stricken areas will be unable to sell their crops. Which may be devastating.

Finally, the amount of food shipped between countries has quadrupled since the 1960s, but this hasn't been a boon for the small local farmers in either the exporting or importing countries. Instead, it's perpetuated a situation where people in wealthier nations are consuming more and ever more of the food resources of poorer nations. We now have a global corporate structure where less developed nations are struggling with overpopulation, poverty, and hunger while they deplete their land and natural resources to feed people in other, wealthier parts of the world, and to put foreign exchange into the often corrupt pockets of government officials. And the small family farmers in the importing countries cannot compete with cheaper imported produce. Moreover, while the children in poorer parts of the world are often starving, even dying of hunger, the children of the developed world face an epidemic of obesity. Clearly something must be done.

SUSTAINING HOPE

All around the world we find hopeful examples of successful sustainable farming operations in poor, rural communities. And when we say sustainable, we mean, of course, the deep organic farming we've discussed, where the soil is nurtured through composting, biological pest control, and rotation of crops and livestock without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. One such project linked farmers from the impoverished Makuyu community in Kenya with the Kenya Institute of Organic Farming. Before this partnership was established, the Makuyu farmers were using agrochemicals on depleted soil, and were struggling to grow enough food to feed their families. After learning sustainable, organic methods—similar to their old, traditional way of farming—they found that vegetable crop yields not only increased by 60 percent, they actually had a surplus of food.

But the good news didn't end there. The farmers decided to start a local food co-op, so they could sell surplus food and put the profits back into the community. As a result, the Makuyu co-op was able to buy dairy goats, beehives, rabbits, and poultry for community members as well as plant 20,000 trees, including 2,000 mangoes, to help revitalize areas that had been deforested. Meanwhile, the mood of the community shifted from despair to optimism. The Makuyu organic farmers have since gone on to teach other farmers in the region how to farm sustainably.

This is not an isolated example. Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex and author of The Living Land: Agriculture, Food and Community Regeneration in Rural Europe, researched communities all over the world where farmers are replacing synthetic farm chemicals with sustainable, organic methods. He found that those who are no longer dependent on expensive imported farm chemicals can increase their yields while lowering their production costs. And because sustainable farming is often labor-intensive, it provides more employment for local and regional communities.

Pretty writes about projects that affect some 45,000 farmers in Guatemala and Honduras who now use organic farming and have tripled their corn yields. By also diversifying their upland farms, they created more local business and wealth, which helped spur a remigration back from the cities. He also reports that a million wetland rice farmers in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam changed their farming methods to nonchemical sustainable agriculture, and increased their yields by about 10 percent.

But there is danger here. Increased food yield must be balanced by an optimization of the population in a givenarea. However carefully farmed, no land can produce enough food, by any method whatsoever, to keep pace with human population growth as it exists today in many parts of the world. When the number of people living in a given area is too great for the carrying capacity of that area they will try to move to new places. In many cases this is already impossible—there are simply too many people. If they are wealthy and can buy food from elsewhere, then they are depleting the natural resources in other areas. If we do not impose limits on our population growth, life as we know it, on this planet, will no longer be possible. Even if we could, theoretically, feed many more times the number of people than those on the planet today, how many of us would like to live on a planet where villages, towns, and cities meet and merge in one great urban sprawl across the face of the globe?