En honor a Richard Levins

BRANCHING PATHWAYS OF DEVELOPMENT

Presentation to the symposium “Sustainability in the Balance” at Tufts University School of Nutrition April 11, 2006

Richard Levin,Harvard School of Public Health , Boston, Massachusetts, USA  and Cuban Institute of Ecology and Systematics, Boyeros, Ciudad Havana, Cuba

«Agriculture is one aspect of the crisis. Simply stated, people are hungry and world capacity to produce is being undermined, but the undermining is covered up by dumping in more fertilizers and chemicals and expanding horizontally into less and less suitable areas. Consider for a moment the simple fact of hunger. Is it that they are doing their best but their best isn’t enough? But in that case how come farmers are being forced to abandon farming? How come coffee, tea, and drugs dominate the world trade in agricultural products? How come crops are often grown in unsuitable habitats or that wheat production was increased in India at the expense of chickpeas?  Why does Mexico import corn? How come precious water in Rajistan is used to grow chili peppers, lowering the water table, and the Sahel exported fresh flowers to Europe during the drought of the 1970’s? Or maybe science doesn’t understand enough to produce sufficient food? But in that case why does so much research go into marketing or inventing marketable commodities to sell farmers as inputs, and so little into finding gentler technologies?

But if we consider an alternative hypothesis it begins to make sense: agriculture is not in the business of feeding people but of producing marketable commodities. The distinction between commodities and utilities is fundamental to our understanding of the dynamics of capitalism»

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