The Useful Idiot
Where I keep warning you about the resurgence of lazy land sparing rhetoric
Ben Phalan, one of the leading proponents of the land sparing hypothesis defended the concept against its many critics in a scientific paper in 2018. This line near the end always caught my eye:
Critics of land sparing worry that the model could provide ammunition to boosters of industrialised, corporate agriculture, but there is scant (if any) evidence for this.
Times have changed.
Land sparing is the clear engine of Michael Grunwald’s1 Factory Farms Are Our Best Hope for Feeding the Planet, a patronizing apologia for productivism and industrial agriculture.
I knew then that Phalan’s brushing-off of the possible cooptation of the land sparing rhetoric was too convenient. Would agri-business PR firms and ecomodernist boosters really just leave land sparing to the ecology journals?
Thanks to the land sparing concept, there is now a ubiquitous din of agribusiness claims that they, once vilified for environmental destruction are actually the heroes of the green transition. Grunwald’s braggadocious opinion is a chief example of how a lazy land sparing rhetoric is the pillar of an effort that tries to make industrialized extractivism green.
The food system is not algebra
Grunwald deploys a naïve version of the “land sparing” hypothesis in its base form. The author writes:
“The more grain their farms can grow for the world, the less new farmland will need to be wrestled away from Mother Nature on the other side of the planet.”
The trick of Grunwald’s essay is to say yes, I know about all of the bads of industrial agriculture, but as long as agriculture continues to degrade habitats, its worth being a pragmatic realist2 and look to make as much food on as little land. The whole opinion piece just falls apart if the land sparing hypothesis is false. And it is.
The food system is not an algebra problem where the aggregate amount of available calories determines global land use. The reasons why people get fed (or not) and why forests get cut down are driven by politics and power, not yields.
If one cares so much about Mother Nature (whatever that is) then there are whole list of policy actions to devote one’s life towards. Out of such a list, I would put working hand in glove with factory farming at the bottom. But yields!
The rest of the article is full of half-truths, straw man arguments about the critiques of industrial farming, and a whiff of romanticizing the environmental benefits of eradication of Indigenous Americans—Grunwald cites the forest transition theory to say that the climate good times where when mass genocide from colonization allowed forest to return and climate to cool.
The biggest secondary flaw is the reliance on the “feed the world” framing, another seductive idea that makes no sense if you think about it even a little. Where is the global stomach? This and other flaws in the essay are worth engaging with, but the reason there is all of this junk in there is because of the land sparing rhetoric. With such a false bedrock assumption, the author must stretch the limits of the agricultural imagination.
Land sparers feel their oats
Don’t offer an alibi for ecocide
The land sparing hypothesis is the lipstick on the industrial pig—an arrogant falsehood that rapacious firms use to justify gobbling up land, displacing people, and poisoning the water. Equating efficiency and productivity with sustainability is perhaps the last veneer of legitimacy that industrial agriculture enjoys. As the scientific evidence piles up against the wisdom of the Green Revolution, factory style farming is poised to lose this last defense against meaningful reform. If we can collectively see past the empty sentiment of land sparing, a rich diversity of alternatives to the factory model could destabilize the chokehold of agri-business boosters. Unfortunately, thinkers like Grunwald are happy to do their work for them.
Grunwald has a food book coming out and I’m sure it will be a well-meaning venture into food solutions with heavy reliance on the land sparing idea. Instead, I’d suggest reading Gregory Thaler’s Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World, a six year investigation into what happens when non-profits and tropical governments try to make land sparing official forest policy. Thaler’s evaluation of those who see cheerleading industrialized productivity as the key to sustainability? He says they are offering “An alibi for ecocide.”
I don’t think Grunwald is an idiot. From a distance, they seem like a well-meaning good-faith person. But the expression is too apt not to use here. Consider the “useful idiot” as the land sparing concept.
The New York Times should rename itself The Pragmatic Realist.