Chapter 56
Does Food Security Equal Conservation Security?
It had to happen. Food security and conservation security inextricably linked in a USDA press release. Security of food equals security of conservation? Is this a good thing?
“President's Agriculture Budget Proposes Increased Funding to Protect the Nation's Food Supply and Conserve Natural Resources,” read Tom Smith from his computer monitor. (Before the internet, the press would rework news releases, but now you get a glimpse directly into the mindset of the agency heads, he thought briefly.)
Smith, a retired neighborhood grocer in East Dubuque , Illinois , couldn't help but wonder if other people were – over computer monitors, and across kitchen tables, and in the coffee shops and cafes around rural America – wondering what he was wondering. He looked out his kitchen window toward the snow covered steeps of Dubuque , Iowa , perched above the frozen Upper Mississippi River . His questions were many.
If you make food only cheap and fast, how do you secure the safety of the food? If you empty the rural landscape of its population, how do you secure the conservation of the empty working lands?
If you build this security of food and conservation on footings of cheap petroleum from despotic nations whose people have little hope of improved lives, how do you sustain it?
If you drive third world corn farmers off their land with your topsoil-mining, so-called “agricultural efficiency,” do you prevent them from crossing your borders to work in your turkey processing plants instead?
Smith shuffled a stack of pages he'd printed out to send to his kids. Here it was, from February 2003, Wendell Berry's essay, “A Citizen's Response To the National Security Strategy of the United States .”
Smith read out loud what Berry wrote, “… the vulnerability of our present food system — dependent as it is on genetically impoverished monocultures, cheap petroleum, cheap long-distance transportation, and cheap farm labor — to many kinds of disruption by "the embittered few," who, in the event of such disruption, would quickly become the embittered many. On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of ‘agribusiness,' which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.”
Tom Smith knew that until September 11, 2001 , “food security” mostly meant having enough to eat, knowing from where the next meal would come. Yet, with the advent of terror as a widespread weapon of the disaffected on that one day, the definition began shifting toward one more commonly called “food safety,” that associated with the subsequent quality of health of the individuals consuming the food.
Any grocer knows that fresh food sells better, but fresh food doesn't stay fresh long. Smith recalled his history that cooling and drying were the first human solutions to the problem of declining freshness. Later, we began salting and brewing and bottling and soon, canning. At that point, a French citizen, Nicholas Appert worked 14 years to win Napoleon's (whose “army marches on its stomach”) 12,000 franc prize, for military food that would not spoil, with pitch-sealed glass jars in 1809. An Englishman, Peter Durand, invented the tin-coated iron can the next year. Yet it was Louis Pasteur, the French scientist, who first understood in 1860 that heat killed the bacteria that made people sick, not vacuum.
So, grocer Smith continued his musings, how does “food security” in 2004 equate to “conservation security”?
Let's see. If fresh food is best, but deteriorates, and deteriorated food is neither safe nor secure, it would make sense to eat food while it's fresh and handled as carefully as possible closest to where it's produced in a sustainable way by people who are happy and healthy on the land. If I can't eat it or sell it fresh, I can still freeze it or dry it or can it, but to be “secure” about what I'm eating, I need to know who grew it and who handled it and how.
Come to think of it, I'm far more concerned about “food safety” as affects my health, than about “food security.” What's going into my food from the farmer and from the air and the water will have much more impact on my health than any bioterrorist.
Then, if I were to reopen my neighborhood grocery store today, Tom Smith thought, what would I do to compete with the “wal-supergroceries”?
“Well,” he said aloud, “I would feature food provided by farmers and growers I know, those who could show me where and how they farmed. And those farmers would have to be supported by a system of agriculture that was more interested in the quality – make that “security” – of the conservation of their lands than in the quantity of their exports.”
As Tom Smith looked again out his window to the frosty hills on the Iowa side of the Mississippi , now glowing pink with another cold sunrise, he picked up the telephone and dialed 202-720-3631.
When the receptionist answered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington , D.C. , he said, “Good morning. I have a message for Secretary Veneman on the Conservation Security Program.”
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Next... Chapter 57.
Thanks for these resources:
The Minnesota Project's Conservation Security Program Web Page
http://www.mnproject.org/csp/index.htm
See “CSP Action Alert, January 29, 2004 .”
http://www.mnproject.org/csp/action-1-29-04.html
See “Proposed Conservation Security Program Rules a Disappointment,” by Loni Kemp, Senior Policy Analyst, The Minnesota Project, 01/09/04
http://www.mnproject.org/csp/news1-9-04.html
The Land Stewardship Project's Conservation Security Program Web Page
http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/programs_csp.html
“CSP: A Tale of Two Farms,” The Land Stewardship Project's CSP Fact Sheet #3
http://www.landstewardshipproject.org/pdf/CSP03.pdf
A Citizen's Response To the National Security Strategy of the United States
By Wendell Berry, The Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle,
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/02/09/3e49354e7f9bd?in_archive=1
The Conservation Security Program of the 2002 Farm Bill as Congress Passed It
See “Text of Legislation” of H.R.2646 that became Public Law 107-171, The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002.
Scroll to: “Title II Subtitle A, Chapter 2 Subchapter A -- Conservation Security Program.”
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:H.R.2646 :
Harkin, Smith Applaud Restoring Full Conservation Security Program Funding
News Release from Senator Tom Harkin, 01/22/04
http://harkin.senate.gov/news.cfm?id=217343
CSP rule far cry from farm bill
by Forrest Laws, Western Farm Press, 12/29/03
http://westernfarmpress.com/ar/farming_column_csp_rule/index.htm
The race to trace food disease; U.S. government tries to catch up
By Andrew Martin, Chicago Tribune, 01/31/04
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0401310255jan31,1,4725165.story?coll=chi-business-hed
USDA Press Release from PRNewswire via Yahoo News, 02/02/04
President's Agriculture Budget Proposes Increased Funding to Protect The Nation's Food Supply and Conserve Natural Resources
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040202/dcm060_1.html
http://www.usda.gov/Newsroom/0055.04.html
White House Press Release, from U.S. Newswire, 02/02/04
President Bush's FY2005 Budget Will Continue Positive Environmental Progress
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=120-02022004
USDA / NRCS Proposed Rule on the Conservation Security Program (CSP) 12/17/03
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/farmbill/2002/pdf/csprule.pdf
Summary of Proposed Rule on the Conservation Security Program (CSP) 12/16/03
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/farmbill/2002/pdf/cspsummary.pdf
Conservation Security Program (CSP) Fact Sheet
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/farmbill/2002/pdf/cspfact.pdf
Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
http://www.fao.org/spfs/
So That They Will Endure For Many Years by Rabbi Zushe Yosef Blech
http://www.kashrut.com/articles/canning/
Slow Food. “In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” Slow Food International Manifesto
http://www.slowfood.com/
http://www.slowfoodusa.org/
John Gabbert writes and edits The Upper Basin Chronicles .
Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to the author via (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 56.
The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary's University of Minnesota .
