Under the sweep of industrial agriculture, farmers' skills and biodiversity are being erased
Before answering the question about Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto, Masini (Stefano Masini) first opened a magazine and showed me one photo after another: on a vast, boundless pasture, cattle looked as tiny as ants; tens of thousands of turkeys pressed one against another in a huge poultry shed; workers wrapped head-to-toe and airtight sorted and packed salads beside a conveyor belt in a factory building; and trucks tipped cranberries into a large pool on an automated loading and unloading rack.
"These photos look like they were taken on Mars, completely different from Italy's agricultural model. For us, food is connected to terroir, animals and plants, preserving difference and variation from place to place," Masini said. He serves as director of the environment and consumption department at Coldiretti, an association of small and medium-sized farmers, and teaches agricultural and food law at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
The industrial logic of big farming is incompatible with agriculture
What Masini showed was part of the "Big Farming" series by renowned photographer George Steinmetz. "The marriage of Bayer and Monsanto follows the logic of big farming, representing further concentration of agriculture: beyond horizontal expansion of scale, there is also vertical integration from seeds and pesticides to services, with the goal of creating a single gigantic organization that dominates the market. This is looking for answers in an old prescription." The poet Xu Zhimo once said that "numbers make beauty," but the images of giant, domineering agricultural production are shocking, if not nauseating. Food companies understand this, so packaging always features honest, back-to-basics photos of farmers carrying hoes or farm women cooking, and no one puts on images of airplanes spraying pesticides or rows of migrant workers harvesting in the fields. "It is hard to call this kind of production model 'agriculture,' because the standardization and simplification of the industrial model are incompatible with agriculture," Masini said. "When it comes to food, what we want is not one hamburger, but dishes that come from a certain place, are produced in a specific season, and are cooked in different ways; if it is wine, then it comes from different grapes, not one bottle of wine, but hundreds of kinds of wine." In grammatical terms, agriculture and food are both plural, not singular. Industrialized agriculture strangles biodiversity and dissolves farmers' knowledge and skills. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn said: "Revolution is a change in worldview." The Green Revolution of the 1960s clearly changed humanity's view of the word agriculture. "A hundred years ago, agriculture meant cooperation between farmers and weather and soil, using manure or plant-based organic fertilizer, managing water sources and choosing suitable seeds. Now seeds plus chemical agents ignore these differences and are applied anywhere, but whether economically, socially or environmentally, this model cannot develop sustainably," Masini pointed out. Industrialized agriculture pursues formulaic, uniform maximum output, "but in the natural world, purity and uniformity mean fragility; the natural world is diverse, and therefore the agriculture related to it is also a hundred flowers blooming. By contrast, industrialized agriculture has strangled biodiversity," Masini said. In addition to the threat to ecology, industrialized agriculture also de-skills farmers, making them like workers repeating monotonous motions on an assembly line. Following the instructions to assemble IKEA pre-cut boards into a wardrobe, although you work with your hands and take part in the production process, "you still do not know how to design, cut and make a wardrobe yourself, so you cannot be called a carpenter; you are still a layman." Selling seeds together with agricultural chemicals and other chemical products as a "package" increases corporate profits, and also "dissolves farmers' knowledge, so they cannot distinguish when to use the chemical agents bought together with the seeds. Farmers' dependence gives big manufacturers room for exploitation and also alienates farmers from the market; farmers simply do not know and do not care who the consumers are," Masini continued. "What they produce is 'commodities,' not 'food,' and it has lost its connection to what consumers want to eat." Exposing the false science of big agriculture - agrochemical companies, food companies, wholesalers, chain stores and supermarkets have stretched the modern "food chain" longer, information has become increasingly opaque, and there is a difficult-to-cross gulf between farmers and consumers, who even blame each other. "I think if consumers knew the truth, they would not accept this model." "The model of multinational agrochemical giants is that the less information there is, the more they can sell at lower prices and dominate the market," however, cheap goods do not include external costs, and behind low prices someone is always paying the price, "such as health problems like obesity, exploited workers, environmental pollution, threats to ecology, and the impact of carbon emissions on climate change." Compared with smallholder and family farming techniques, which have historical ties to local areas but progress slowly, agrochemical giants claim that technologies developed in laboratories are more scientific and help increase yields and solve hunger. However, the side effects of products often emerge years later, such as glyphosate, the herbicide paired with genetically modified seeds; widespread residues have been detected in both the environment and the human body, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization has stated that it is 'probably carcinogenic'. "This shows that what these agrochemical giants advocate is false science; we need to adhere to the precautionary principle," Masini said. The United States and Canada encountered obstacles in negotiating a free trade agreement in Europe. "From Germany, France and Belgium to Italy, the voices of opposition are very loud, which shows everyone has noticed the agricultural problems involved," Masini pointed out. When the United States promoted the "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) in Asia, it also strongly pushed the "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership" (TTIP) in Europe. However, Greenpeace revealed that on agriculture and food safety issues, the U.S. side pressured the EU to lower standards, triggering resentment and criticism from civic groups. It is not anti-globalization, but opposition to the uniformity that erases local characteristics, Masini stressed. "We are not opposed to globalization; even in the Roman Empire era, there was cross-border trade in agricultural products. The problem is that current globalization wants uniformity and homogenization, does not care about local differences, erases product characteristics, and does not care about producers." The United States, Canada, Argentina and Brazil in Central and South America, and even the rising latecomer China, have all taken the path of large-scale production, and Italy faces enormous competitive pressure. "Our problem is that too many people like Made in Italy food, but production is limited, and there are too many counterfeit goods in the global market; there must be clear labeling so consumers know the place of origin and the producer." Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto and mergers among other agrochemical giants make the market more concentrated and the forces more powerful. Masini believes the impact on Africa and Asia is greater. "Italy is already on another train. In plant breeding, connecting small farmers with markets, making information more transparent, and so on, we still need to keep working hard, but the direction is already determined, and it is different from the Monsanto model." Small shrimp against big whales, Masini remains confident: "We have already won the battle against GMOs, which was unimaginable ten years ago. Facing new challenges, we are not afraid either; a little utopian imagination is always needed." In the biblical story, the shepherd boy David alone skillfully used a sling to defeat the giant Goliath; if tens of thousands of David-like farmers unite as one, they may also outwit the agrochemical giants.