His first major work, and seemingly that which brought him worldwide fame, was with the Brazilian government. He helped to figure out how to make the soils of Brazil's Cerrado region productive. Basically the Cerrado is a vast savanna in the central part of Brazil. It enjoys lots of rainfall year-round, but was viewed as a wasteland because its soils are naturally acidic and contain levels of aluminum that are toxic to many crops. However, Sanchez and a team of scientists added a mix of lime and rock phosphate to the soil, which made it hospitable for crop plants, in particular soybean. This permitted the large-scale and ongoing conversion of the Cerrado brushlands to soybean cultivation. Today soybeans in Brazil occupy an area equivalent to something like the entire Prairie Midwest of the US, and under the Cerrado's favorable rain regime, farmers can harvest up to three crops of soy in one year. This photo is from one of Blairo Maggi's empire of farms in Brazil. There are 31 combines harvesting soy, and it looks like there are a number of tractors seeding the next crop of soy directly behind the harvesters!
However, the Brazil soy explosion hasn't been all sunshine. First off, it has made Brazil into a major competitor for US soy, and both US and Brazilian soy feed into a world food system in which industrial crops for animals are planted more than food crops for people. Brazil has always had a shameful level of social inequality, and the government's push in the 1970s to favor large, industrial farmers over small food producers only exacerbated the gap between rich and poor. Large farmers were given favorable interest rates on loans to buy equipment. In fact, I've heard that sometimes the rates even dipped into the negative, so industrial farmers were getting paid by the government to expand and buy more machinery! Meanwhile, small farmers had little land, and to this day are often pushed off the land they have by large oligarchs. Today soybean farming occupies huge amounts of land in Brazil Sanchez's work to open up the Cerrado did not cause any of this in and of itself, but it helped the process along.
I don't know if Sanchez would be as focused on the negative social effects of soybean farming in the Cerrado as I am, but I know he is very sensitive to issues of deforestation. The opening of the Cerrado entailed a lot of deforestation. The Cerrado was never a dense rainforest, but it was a savanna with abundant trees and bushes. To prepare Cerrado land for soybean cultivation, it is necessary to raze all that natural vegetation. This is usually done by connecting a very long, heavy chain between two tractors, which then drive in parallel along either edge of the field to be cleared. The chain uproots any bushes it meets as it drags along the ground.
Many Brazilians I've met, especially those with an interest in soybean production, write off the environmental destruction of the Cerrado. They regard the natural habitat as worthless brushland, saying it doesn't have any value compared to the majestic Amazon. But there are a few problems here. First off, the Cerrado ecosystem is home to more large mammals and in higher densities than is the Amazon. In the Cerrado you can find tapirs, capybaras (the world's largest rodent at over a hundred pounds!), jaguars, anteaters. Also, today's scorn towards the Cerrado recalls the destruction of the Mata Atlantica ecosystem. The Mata Atlantica was the rainforest originally stretching along almost the entirety of Brazil's coastline. It was regarded by early colonists as an unproductive wasteland, and was systematically destroyed over hundreds of years. Today Brazilians bemoan the loss of the Mata Atlantica and its unique flora and fauna, and are trying to recover this unique ecosystem, even as they destroy the Cerrado. Lastly, the opening of the Cerrado to agriculture doesn't stop at the borders of the Amazon rainforest. The same factors of soil amendments and mechanization that allowed cultivation in the Cerrado also open up the Amazon to industrial monocropping.
The second major thing that stands out in Sanchez's biography is his work with agroforestry. In particular, I am most familiar with his work on a system whereby farmers plant a strip of leguminous trees every few meters in their fields. These trees capture nitrogen from the air and channel it into their leaves. By cutting the branches of these trees and shaking the leaves onto the crops growing in between forest strips, farmers in resource-poor areas can get great crop yields and improve their soil over the long term. I believe this work is what won Sanchez the World Food Prize in 2002.
Not to get into dimestore psychology, but reading Sanchez's biography in the context of his lecture about how to prevent deforestation set me thinking about some seeming contradictions. How can Sanchez reconcile his having contributed to one of the greatest, most rapid deforestations in history, with his trying to preserve rainforest? I ask myself if his current advocacy of agroforestry and attempts to halt deforestation are somehow a penance for mistakes he felt he made in his youth. Granted, one could say (and most of his bios do) that there has been a consistent theme of improving tropical soil fertility and productivity throughout his career, but in one context he's opening up virgin habitat for industrial farming, and in the other he's trying to recuperate abused soil by partial reforestation.
This contradiction between Sanchez's past and present seems to echo Jeffrey Sachs's career. In the 80s Sachs was known as Dr. Shock, prescribing economic shock treatment to halt hyperinflation in Bolivia, Poland, and other developing countries. The social dismemberment and increased poverty resulting from these economic shocks, and the neoliberal policies that surrounded and followed them, wrought havoc on the countries treated in this fashion. In the new millenium, Sachs has become more associated with poverty-focused policies and international aid. I have read interviews in which he tries to gloss over or avoid the ugly side of his economic advice from the 80s. Again, Sachs presents his own life story as a unified, coherent narrative of fighting poverty, first through macroeconomic shock treatments, then through international aid projects. But there seems to be a real disjunct from one part of his career to the other.
If my reading is correct, and both Sanchez and Sachs started with status quo, industrial capitalist thinking, whose flaws led them to adjust their philosophies and their approach, then that's a good thing. It is not often that public figures learn from mistakes and alter their course; it takes a lot of guts to change. But I'm sort of distressed by the lack of a frank, open admission of error on the part of both Sachs and Sanchez. If what they did in the past had some flaws, it's important to acknowledge them, so as to better consider and articulate their present attitudes. If on the other hand these great figures on the international development scene maintain a stubborn, embarrassed silence about the ugly side of their past work, then it is likely that they'll replicate not only mistakes from the past, but they will be less likely to face up to problems in the present.
Or maybe Sachs and Sanchez don't see any incoherence between their past and present pursuits. Maybe they don't consider that the forces favored by neoliberal, industrial, status quo thinking are necessarily opposed to the fight against poverty and environmental degradation. Indeed, I think this is part of their appeal--they can voice progressive concerns without seeming too alternative or left-wing, and this allows them to spread their message of economic development for the poor even to mainstream or conservative audiences. But if the Earth Institute types can't see that backwards neoliberal economic and agrarian policies are a profound cause of much poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation, then I fear that all their proposals of Millenium Villages and agroforests will merely be quaint window-dressing to accompany the ascent of the powerful at the expense of the poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment