Ripe for change: agriculture's tipping point.

• Author: Cummings, Claire Hope

Now, in the midst of so much unnecessary human and ecological destruction, we are facing the necessity of a new start in agriculture. --Wendell Berry The story of agriculture is usually told as an epic struggle between people and nature. Ten thousand years into this narrative, it looks to some as if people have the upper hand. After all, food production is keeping up with population growth. But others say that this productivity comes at too high a cost. Industrial agriculture is laying waste to soil, water, forests, wildlife, and the life ways of traditional farming communities.

Conventional and sustainable agriculture have long debated the question: what kind of agriculture works best for both people and nature? Then suddenly, as in any good drama, while the forces of good and evil are having it out, something happens to raise the stakes. Now, lumbering onto center stage comes a real monster, global warming, and the conflict shifts from being about how we feed ourselves to whether we survive at all.

We find ourselves at a dramatic point in human history. Agriculture, the largest industry on Earth, is exhausting the planet's biological support systems. Two billion hectares of soil (more than the area of the United States and Canada combined) have been degraded. In India, this damage has cut agricultural productivity by almost US$2.4 billion a year. In Africa, three-quarters of arable land is severely degraded, worsening the hunger crisis there. The annual cost of soil erosion worldwide is estimated to be more than US$400 billion. Similarly, water quality and availability are in peril. The 450 million kilograms of pesticides that U.S. farmers use every year have now contaminated almost all of the nation's streams and rivers, and the fish living in them, with chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects.

And yet, as serious as this environmental predicament is, it will be energy issues that determine the fate of agriculture. Industrial agriculture uses at least 15 percent of all energy consumed in developed countries. So when oil production peaks, fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture will face a day of reckoning. And that inevitability raises a fundamental question: do we wait for some widespread disaster to happen and let panic determine our social policy? Or do we begin now to engage in purposeful social change?

Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" analysis provides a useful way to examine the dynamics of such dramatic social transformations...