Ethics in agriculture

our ethics are largely shaped by our culture. Society tells us what is good and bad, right and
wrong by facilitating, rewarding, or punishing certain behavior. Although an individual
ultimately has choice, the scope of that choice is limited by our cultural boundaries.
Specifically, our recent agricultural ethics have been largely defined by consumer demand for
inexpensive food and the drive to maximize economic profit. The resulting ethics encourage
industrial farming practices. Practices that, among other things, eliminate a soils ability to
produce food without massive chemical and oil inputs while simultaneously exacerbating issues
of top soil loss (Cox, Hug, & Bruzelius, 2011), toxin coated food (Pesticide Action Network,
2013), climate change (Lin, 2011), water pollution (Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, 1996), oceanic dead zones (Environmental Working Group, n.d.), and farm
worker health and safety (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012).
We are also in a new, technology based era and agriculture has changed dramatically. When the
majority of farm work was done by hand, irrigated by gravity systems, and planted with seeds
saved from the previous year it was much more difficult to do damage that nature could not
quickly mend. Now that we have surpassed those limitations with massive tractors, transgenic
seeds, deep wells for irrigation, and a plethora of highly toxic chemical sprays, an ecological,
agricultural ethic is even more imperative. We are capable of causing much greater detrimental
effect, and our culture has not yet evolved the necessary accompanying ethics to manage these
abilities responsibly. Thats where the new farming movement comes in.
http://www.agrowingculture.org/2013/03/ethics-in-agriculture-the-necessaryfoundation-of-the-new-farming-movement-draft/
History of agriculture

Although Indians taught the colonists to plant fish with their corn,
fertilization of other crops was not a common practice. The native fertility of
the relatively acid and nutrient-poor eastern soils was rapidly exhausted, and
pioneering families commonly abandoned their farms and moved on to
homestead the still fertile virgin lands to the west. By 1850 one traveller
wrote, "Eastern Virginia appeared to have suffered the ravages of a great
war or an attack by another horseman of the Apocalypse. I traveled for 50
miles on horseback and could find nothing but abandoned farms and
plantations with buildings in decay and fields overgrown with nettles and
brush. Mother Nature is reclaiming that which for 200 years has been giving
food and clothing to man."

Agricultural Revolution. The mid-1800s began an era of great change in

American agriculture, influenced by the British agricultural revolution, which
brought advances in cultivation methods, breeding of improved crop
varieties, and use of fertilizers and crop rotations to maintain soil
productivity. Crop fertilization was introduced to the American colonies in the
1850s when ships were used to import guano, the droppings from seabirds
living on islands off the coast of Peru. A vigorous market soon developed for
soil amendments such as guano, manure, crushed bone, and lime; and by
1860 seven factories had been established in the United States to
manufacture mixed chemical fertilizers.

The use of pesticides also began in the mid 1800s, when it was discovered that
dusting of grape plants with sulfur provided a cure for powdery mildew. Soon
afterwards, an arsenic-containing compound called Paris green was introduced for
control of the Colorado potato beetle, an insect native to the eastern slopes of the
Rocky Mountains, which became a serious agricultural pest because of its appetite
for domestic potatoes grown by pioneers. Chemical control of agricultural pests
expanded rapidly after these initial discoveries, and by 1893 there were 42
patented insecticides offered by several manufacturers.
The benefits of irrigation were discovered in the 1840s, when Mormons in Utah
softened their crusty soils by damming a creek, and prospectors in California
discovered that water diverted to gold mining sluices produced lush plant growth in
the desert. Congress passed several laws in the next few decades to assist western
states in developing extensive and costly irrigation systems.
http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-grw85.aspx

establishment of modern agri-products/genetic engineering

Ever since, farmers have bred, crossed, and selected plant varieties that were
productive and useful. These age-old techniques can now be complemented,
supplemented, and perhaps supplanted by an assortment of molecular "tools" that
allow for the deletion or insertion of a particular gene or genes to produce plants
(animals and microorganisms) with novel traits, such as resistance to briny conditions,
longer "shelf-life," or enhanced nutrient content. A change in a plant's genetic sequence
changes the characteristics of the plant. Such manipulation of genesgenetic
engineeringresults in a genetically modified organism or GMO.
Genetic engineering has both sped up the process of developing crops with "enhanced"
or new characteristics and allowed for the transfer of genes from one organism to

another, even from great evolutionarily distances, such as the insertion of a gene from
an African frog into rhododendrons to confer enhanced resistance to root rot. Moving
genes between species creates transgenic plants and crops.

This is a very specious argument that is being made. Data from World
Bank shows that around 60.3 percent of India's land area is
agricultural land. The bank defines agricultural land as share of land
area that is arable, under permanent crops, and under permanent
pastures.
In fact India has the second largest agricultural land in the world. As
India Brand Equity Foundation, a trust established by the Ministry of
Commerce and Industry points out: At 157.35 million hectares, India
holds the second largest agricultural land globally. Only, the United
States has more agricultural land than India.
What this means is that India has enough land dedicated to
agriculture and even if some of it is taken away for other purposes
there will still be enough land left for agriculture. Nevertheless, there
are bigger problems when it comes to Indian agriculture.
As a report in The Wall Street Journal points out: India is the second
largest producer of rice and wheat after China, with China producing
about 40 percent more rice and wheat than India. India is also the
second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world after
China, but Chinas fruit production is three times Indias production.

What this tells us is that India's agricultural productivity is low

compared to that of China and many other countries in the world.
A report in Mint using 2013 data from the Food and Agricultural
Organization points out: India produces 106.19 million tonnes of rice
a year from 44 million hectares of land. Thats a yield rate of 2.4
tonnes per hectare, placing India at 27th place out of 47 countries.
China and Brazil have yield rates of 4.7 tonnes per hectare and 3.6
tonnes per hectare, respectively.
In case of wheat the productivity is better than that of rice. With 93.51
million tonnes of wheat from 29.65 million hectares, Indias yield rate
of 3.15 tonnes per hectare places it 19th out of 41 countries. Here, we
do better than Brazils yield rate of 2.73 tonnes per hectare, but lag
behind South Africa (3.4 t/ha) and China (4.9 t/ha), the report points
out.

There are multiple reasons for this low productivity.

The average holding size of land has come down over the decades. The
State of the Indian Agricultural Report for 2012-2013 points out that:
As per Agriculture Census 2010-11, small and marginal holdings of
less than 2 hectare account for 85 percent of the total operational
holdings and 44 percent of the total operated area. The average size of
holdings for all operational classes (small & marginal, medium and

large) have declined over the years and for all classes put together it
has come down to 1.16 hectare in 2010-11 from 2.82 hectare in 197071.
The shrinking size of the average land holding of an Indian farmer has
held back agricultural productivity and there is not much that can be
done about this.