Passage One
Agriculture has fueled the eruption of human civilization. Efficiently raised, affordable crops and livestock feed our growing population, and hunger has largely been eliminated from the developed world as a result. Yet there are reasons to believe that we are beginning to lose control of our great agricultural machine. The security of our food supply is at risk in ways more harmful than anyone had feared.
Orchards in Florida and California are falling to fast- moving diseases with no known cure. And as entomologists Diana Cos-Foster and Dennis van Engelsdorp describe in “Saving the Honey bee, ” a mysterious disease has killed honeybee colonies around the U. S. , threatening an agricultural system that is utterly dependent on bees to pollinate crops. The illness may be in part the result of the stresses imposed on bees by this uniquely modern system.
Now, new evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease. Much has been made in recent years of MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, MRSA infections caused the deaths of nearly 19, 000 Americans. The disease first developed in hospitals. The killer bacterium is an inevitable evolutionary response to the wide-spread use of antibiotics but has since found a home in locker rooms, prisons and child care facilities. Now the bacteria have spread to the farm.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Modem factory farms keep so many animals in such a small space that the animals must be given low doses of antibiotics to shield them from the terrible conditions. The drug-resistant bacteria that emerge have now entered our food supply. The first study to investigate farm-bred MRSA in the U. S. — amazingly, the Food and Drug Administration has shown little interest in testing the nation’ s livestock for this disease—recently found that 49% of pigs and 45% of pig workers in the survey harbored the bacteria.
In April 2008, a high-profile commission of scientists, farmers, doctors and veterinarians recommended that the FDA phase out the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production. The FDA agreed and soon announced that it would ban the use of one widespread antibiotic except for strictly stated medical purposes. But five days before the ban was set to take effect, the agency quietly reversed its position. Although no official reason was given, the opposition of the powerful farm lobby is widely thought to have played a role.
This is just one example of a food production system that protects a narrow set of interests over the nation’ s public health. Simple measures such as the reestablishment of the FDA’ s initial ruling are necessary and important steps. But Congress needs to take a far more comprehensive approach to adjust the country’ s agricultural priorities with its health priorities, to eliminate subsidies that encourage factory farming, and to encourage the growth of polyculture and good old-fashioned crop rotation in the U. S. As the world is quickly learning, a civilization can only be as healthy as its food supply.