World Communion Monday
preached on Sunday, October 7, 2007 by Scott Poethig
Today, we are asked to celebrate the faith we share with Christians all over the world as we engage in the sacrament of communion. As we do this, we will also be celebrating the global nature of our food supply. For in most places in the world, communion is celebrated by eating bread and drinking something resembling wine. Certainly this was the case in the Philippines, where as a child I was served small cubes of sandwich bread and Welch’s grape juice during Communion. The primary components of this communion meal are wheat and grapes. These plants are native to Europe—specifically the Middle East--and are extensively grown primarily in places that were colonized by Europeans. Our communion meal is therefore a statement about the geographic and cultural origin of our faith. If Christ had been born in Japan or China, our communion meal would consist of rice and tea. Of course, almost all the food we eat comes from somewhere else. Every time we sit down to breakfast, lunch, or dinner, we eat food that either originated in some other part of the world, or was actually produced there. Hence the title of this sermon: World Communion Monday.
What I want to do today is give you a few examples of the ways in which the global food system operates. The message I want to get across is that our food system is so globally integrated, and so dominated by large food exporters like the US, that any significant change we make in this country is likely to have far reaching effects. As both the source and the purchasers of a large fraction of the world’s food, what we do makes a difference. Acting locally is, in effect, acting globally.
Let me begin by showing you what a traditional, sustainable, agricultural system looks like, and contrast this with how things are done in the US.....(slides).
Capital-intensive agriculture is already the dominant form throughout much of the world. Most of the rice grown in Southeast Asia consists of high-yielding varieties developed by the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which at it inception received most of its funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. These high-yielding varieties only perform well under conditions of high-fertilization, and require pesticides to keep them from being eaten by bugs. So while the use of these varieties and the high-input methods by which they are grown has made it possible for countries to become self-sufficient in food production, the way they are produced has resulted in significant environmental problems. Of course, this is also true in the US, where irrigation and the use of fertilizers and pesticides have both degraded the land and polluted the water.
The environmental problems associated with modern agricultural methods are only part of the problem. We in North America are especially indebted to the rest of the world for our food supply, because none of the food we eat (with the possible exception of sunflower seeds and buffalo meat) originated here. However, like all immigrants to America, our food has acquired a distinctly American character. Virtually all of the food we eat is produced using genetic stocks and cultivation methods developed at so-called “Ag schools” like Penn State, the U. of California at Davis, or Iowa State University, and by major American companies like Pioneer Hi-bred and Monsanto. Because none of the plants we depend on for our food supply are native to the US, we depend on varieties found in other countries for the genes we need to improve these crops. In the past, these varieties were made freely available to anyone who wanted them. But this is no longer the case. Countries now appreciate that one of their most important resources is their biodiversity, and they work hard to extract as much economic benefit from this biodiversity as possible by restricting how it can be used. This new appreciation for the value of biodiversity has come about primarily because less developed countries of the world have watched as the developed world has taken this biodiversity for free, used it to improve a crop, and then patented the result. The ability to genetically engineer plants by introducing foreign genes through molecular methods (that is the method for making GMOs) has had a particularly chilling effect on the free exchange of material. For it is now possible to add a single gene to basmati rice from India, or jasmine rice from Thailand and call the resulting strain your own. All the genes contributed to these distinctive strains of rice by generations of farmers who carefully selected unusually fragrant plants have no economic value in this brave new world. So, in my view, the reason to be concerned about GM plants and animals is not that they will somehow kill us or destroy the environment, but that they will simply increase the dominance of a western, capital-intensive form of agriculture, where most of the benefit is realized by the people that have the most money.
The global origin of our food supply links countries in sometimes unexpected ways. For example, most of the tortillas in Mexico are actually made with corn imported from the US because American corn is cheaper than corn grown locally. One of the reasons corn is cheaper in the US than it is in Mexico is that the US government spends 19 billion dollars a year paying American farmers to grow as much of it as possible. Thus, the cheap food policy that has been pursued by the US for several decades has actually discouraged corn production Mexico, and has made Mexico dependent on US corn. When the US government recently decided to encourage the use of corn-derived ethanol as a biofuel, the price of corn increased dramatically. The first country to feel the effects of this price increase was Mexico, resulting in some friction between the US and Mexican governments. My colleague, Dan Janzen, told me that on a recent trip to Brazil, he drove past hundreds of miles of soybean fields, all of which are dedicated to the production of soybeans for export to China. As he put it, China is renting land in Brazil to meet its food needs. In effect, this is equivalent to exporting environmental degradation because agricultural land in Brazil was once rain forest.
Sustainable agriculture is more that simply growing food on a small-scale, with minimal inputs, and distributing it locally in order to minimize energy usage. This is certainly desirable, but our global food system is here to stay. It is not only essential to the economies of many countries, but also enriches our lives by providing us with an incredible variety of food; for me, there is no greater joy than being able to buy Philippine mangos in Philadelphia. The challenge is to find ways of making this complex system sustainable. To do this, we not only have to make our own system sustainable, but find ways to encourage other countries to do the same. This is not going to be an easy task, particularly for a country that introduced industrialized agriculture to the world, and has done its best to make the world safe for GM corn and soybeans. But let me suggest a place to start. In 1954 the US enacted a law, PL480, that stipulated that 3/4 of the food aid we provide to countries in crisis must be used to purchase food produced by American farmers. As far as I know, we are the only country in the world that imposes this sort of restriction. Certainly, we would do more to encourage local agricultural development if we allowed this money to be used to purchase food locally, from farmers in the region receiving the aid. I suspect that removing this restriction in our aid program would do more to encourage international agricultural development than anything else we may be doing to support this goal. And just think what might happen if we said that our aid money had to be used to purchase food produced by sustainable food production systems. The thought boggles the mind.
Dr. Poethig is Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on genetic regulation of plant morphogenesis, the formation and differentiation of tissues and organs in plants. He teaches courses on plant development, genetic systems, and teaching biology. He has published articles in a number of scholarly journals and sits on the editorial boards of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, The Plant Journal and Evolution and Development. He was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
© 2007 by R. Scott Poethig. All rights reserved. Please consult the author at tabernacle@tabunited.org if you wish to use the text presented here, in whole or in part.
