Going to the Roots
Fixing a Broken Agriculture
By STAN COX

The ecological destruction in progress all around us grows out of the human economy’s unvarying tendency to overproduce what is profitable while at the same time underproducing what is needed. There is no better example of that than American agriculture [1]. Efforts to bring agriculture into line with ecological reality fall into two classes. Some efforts can be started today and will help get humanity through mid-century. Others (which also must be accelerated, and soon) will take longer to complete but will be necessary to sustain agriculture to the end of the century and beyond.

In the short run: go to the roots of the economy
The energy content of food produced for residents of the United States has risen from 3200 calories per person per day in the 1970s to almost 4000 today [2], approaching double the average daily requirement. Much of that is wasted. For many such reasons, shrinking the economic “throughput” of agriculture and associated industries can be a much more straightforward process than in other areas of human society, and it need not mean that anyone need go undernourished.

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