"Let's highlight the invisible damage caused by agriculture".
Species are disappearing, but the causes of their destruction are "invisible", argues the author of this article. On the occasion of International Biodiversity Day, he invites us to open our eyes wide.
Jacques Tassin is an ecologist at the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche pour le développement, corresponding member of the Académie d'agriculture de France, and author of AgriculTerre. Refonder l'agriculture au service de tous (ed. Odile Jacob, 2024).
Agriculture seems to unfold in the light. It lets its colorful panoramas unfold behind the glass of the TGV that takes us from one urban center to another. At 54% of the metropolitan area, agriculture is by far the most important economic activity shaping our landscapes. At first glance, it seems transparent and legible, immediately revealed to the eyes that scrutinize it.
Yet all we see of it is an archipelago of iceberg tips. The media only tell us about it through the filter of the very power games that malign it. It doesn't even interest thinkers of the living world, who are more attracted by the great wilderness or free evolution, in keeping with an Anglo-Saxon vision of the world.
It seems destined only to be skimmed over.
Yet it is here, at the heart of this invisibility of agriculture, that one of the great dramas of our time is played out. But it is also there, in counterpoint, that the great rhizome of tomorrow is already spreading out, in a lace of underground struggles aspiring to the triple restoration of a pact with the living, a human solidarity and a viable management of our world.
Cultivating the invisible
By its very nature, agriculture is rooted in invisibility.
The soil, often presented as a matrix and the very object of agricultural art, is an opportune opacity. Far from view, it has been insidiously transmuted by the dominant Western agricultural model into a soil-bin, where effluents are buried, pesticide residues are presumed to degrade, and excess nitrate or phosphate sprays are supposed to be lost. This mecca of biodiversity, the foundation of all microbiological components of life, the primary site of decomposition and regeneration, the place where all roots take root, remains one of the hidden faces of contemporary agricultural realities, that of a reduction to a support-drain.
The progressive retreat of drinking water catchment points is part of the same invisibility. Between 1997 and 2013, almost 10% of drinking water catchments in France were abandoned due to excess pollutants of agricultural origin. High-quality, almost pure drinking water is sometimes drawn from fossil water tables 80 meters underground to water corn in summer, an ecologically aberrant crop since its water requirements peak when it is least available. In summer, agriculture accounts for 85% of our country's total water consumption.
In terms of atmospheric emissions, we also fail to see that agriculture is responsible for 90% of ammonia emissions, a gas whose warming power is 300 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, and that it alone is responsible for 24% of total greenhouse gas emissions. The main reason for this is excessive livestock farming and meat consumption, including hidden meat in fast-food outlets, since animal feed alone takes up almost 85% of France's usable agricultural land.
According to a recent study by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), the real cost of a household food basket would have to be doubled or tripled if we were to take into account the effects of producing the contents of this basket on human health and the environment. If we consider only the average household expenditure, the share of food in consumption fell from 50% in 1940 to 15% in 2000. But if we factor in the hidden costs, we see that this rate has actually remained unchanged. Short-termism and productivist reductionism make do with this invisibility, since it is now up to communities - and therefore citizens - to absorb these hidden costs, rather than agribusiness, which declines to take them on.
The impoverishment of the living part of agriculture
Of course, agriculture, even according to the dominant Western agricultural model, remains a culture of the living. In this sense, and with a minimum of cynicism, we could even claim that it is invariably organic, since it is based on the expression and valorization of bios (Greek for life). The legitimacy of agriculture lies in its very function of producing organic goods for food, produced by the living, according to the extraordinarily diverse, disproportionately complex, unexpected and uncertain, but always creative and resilient, life we struggle so hard to understand.
Yet it is from this very life that industrial agriculture turns away.
Agro-biodiversity is the foundation of agricultural resilience. Yet the race for elite varieties, derived from a North American approach based on the cloning of exceptional individuals - to the detriment of all adaptive genetic variability - has steadily eroded it. It is the result of a uniform, hegemonic model to which agricultural fields and landscapes have been forced to conform.
What 400 to 500 generations of farmers had patiently perfected since the rise of the Neolithic, to the point of empirically creating 150,000 varieties of rice in Asia, just a few decades of the dominant Western agricultural model have destroyed with frightening condescension. In France, 85% of domesticated plant and animal varieties have disappeared over the same period, and the decline is as high as 96% for apple trees, largely replaced by Golden Delicious, Granny Smith or Idared varieties, all from the USA.
It's also true that fields are not pleasure gardens, nor are agricultural landscapes recreational havens created and maintained for urban dwellers - despite those who call for poppies to brighten up cereal plains... But the decline in biodiversity within rural landscapes has repercussions far beyond its spatial limits.
The depletion of soil microbial abundance, for example, reduces soil porosity and, consequently, its capacity to infiltrate rainwater, which then runs off and swells rivers in autumn. The continued removal of hedgerows, meanwhile, results in increased nitrate and phosphate leaching, responsible for eutrophication of waters, which in turn leads to outbreaks of algae and aquatic plants, making waterways unnavigable, sometimes far from farmland.
In just twenty years, the firm will have replaced the farm.
In a major paradox, agricultural production is no longer really agricultural. It essentially involves capturing energy from fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent from solar energy or biological metabolism, via photosynthesis and respiration. It is essentially extractive in nature, and in this respect is something of a conjurer's trick. To obtain one calorie of food, we need to expend 5 to 10 calories derived from the use of fossil fuels. You'd think we wouldn't notice at all.
Since the beginning of the XXᵉ century, thanks to petrochemicals from Texas, biological and ecological processes have been replaced, at low cost, by inputs. Pesticides replaced biological regulation, the immune effects of certain symbioses operating in the soil, and the beneficial effects of spatial heterogeneity, laminated by the gigantism of agricultural machinery and the obsessive search for universal production models. Synthetic fertilizers, including nitrogen products, have themselves supplanted organic inputs and the valorization of leguminous symbioses. Since the 1960s, nitrogen spraying has increased tenfold worldwide.
The peasantry has silently disappeared
What have we managed to thwart from this amazing feat of prestidigitation?
Almost nothing, alas. Under the steamroller of North American agribusiness, the peasantry has silently disappeared. Farmers don't make much noise, except when agro-industry mobilizes them against supermarkets or to denounce those undesirable environmental restrictions that don't leave its hands free enough for its liking. Rural decline operates too far from the cities to spread faithful echoes. In ten years' time, half of today's farmers will have retired, and the remaining farms will take advantage of these departures to expand a little further, at the rate of 25% every ten years. And in just twenty years' time, the firm will have replaced the farm.
The thinking of Adam Smith, who proposed in 1776, with the publication of The Wealth of Nations, to replace the recognition of the individual and the common by a culture of individualism and individual profit, will have completely penetrated and covered what was once our French countryside.
The rural world will then be completely entrusted to industry, in line with the same Anglo-Saxon thinking that separates wilderness on the one hand, and industrial space on the other, a sort of living desert where birds no longer sing, insects no longer fly, except on the outskirts, with the exception of the most resilient among them, the very ones we see resisting urban expansion and proving able to cope with anything.
The invisibilization of the feminine
But it gets worse. According to the FAO, in developing countries, 70% of food is produced by women. Yet the rural world is still ruled by men, who are adept at maintaining glaring imbalances. Women's agricultural incomes remain lower than men's, with a 30% gap in France, for example, according to 2016 data, while in some countries, particularly in the South, women are responsible for up to 80% of food production [1].
It is also women who are the first to mend the social fabric, wherever snags have multiplied and fabrics of solidarity have been damaged, for example by setting up community cafés, re-establishing ways of helping one another, or creating associations for encounters and exchanges. They are also the ones who re-establish a sensitive and attentive view of the living world, from the perspective of care and support, and who learn to deal with non-humans, to learn what it is to know in order to establish judicious alliances with them.
Last but not least, they represented the great divinities at the origin of agriculture, with Demeter and her daughter Persephone at the forefront. According to archaeologist Jacques Cauvain, the Neolithic boom coincided with a revolution in symbols that gave greater prominence to women. It's highly likely that this was the result of women's increased care and attention to the living, some 10,000 years ago.
But who would dare to admit today, in a rural world dominated by overplayed masculinity, and thanks to a media relay in which only men are given microphones and appear photographed, high-booted and bust puffed, at the side of a huge tractor, that agriculture is the result of a feminine disposition?
Who would venture to claim that women, provided we recognize their flexibility and creativity in the agricultural world, are particularly well placed to re-establish the alliance between anthroposphere and biosphere that our world so desperately needs?
Who, at the end of the day, would agree to make the fundamentally sensitive, living, feminine part of the agricultural gesture invisible?
Comments
Post a Comment