The industrial model of agriculture requires farmers to buy, every season, seeds – which they cannot save, exchange, or replant – as well as related products like fertilizers and pesticides. Many even need to sign contracts.

To pay for these purchases, farmers take out loans. But if harvests don’t deliver enough to cover costs, or don’t sell at a high enough price, that loan becomes debt; a debt that continues to grow as farmers borrow again the following season.

There are many factors that can deepen the cycle of debt. It happens:

• When our increasingly unpredictable climate doesn’t co-operate.
• When purchased seeds – which are adapted to grow well only in favourable environments – fail to produce promised yields because farmers only have access to marginal lands.
• When crops depend on expensive herbicides and pesticides to survive.
• When soils become hooked on pricey petroleum-based fertilizers that kill soil nutrients.
• When international markets and trade agreements slash the value of what farmers worked so hard to produce.

These risks are more extreme in the global South, but farmers all over the world are facing problems from being dependent on this model that limits choice and independence.

And the Alternative is?
What if we were to take the enormous funds now invested in the current industrial agricultural model and pour them into more sustainable, diverse, flexible, local, farmer-driven systems and research that respects their know-how?

That idea – the approach that USC has been promoting for more than 20 years – is steadily gaining support among some very big players. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently argued that organic production could feed the world’s growing population. And the widely ignored International Agricultural Assessment of Scientific Knowledge and Technology for Development – funded by the UN and The World Bank – reports that the world can no longer sustain “business as usual.” It calls for an investment in more ecologically safe, locally-driven, and farmer-led agricultural food production systems to feed the world.

Hungry for More?

• How do farmers sell directly to customers? One system is called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Check out these resources for a CSA near you, and support local family farms.

• Fair Trade seeks to change the terms of trade for the products we buy – to ensure the farmers and artisans behind those products get a better deal.