You know when something doesn't sit well with you when you get an unsettled feeling inside each time you hear the argument.

For years I have struggled with agribusinesses' boasts of helping to feed billions of people around the globe via the green revolution, and their ongoing claims that only they hold the key to preventing mass starvation via ever more technology.

I couldn't get to the core of my discomfort until I read some recent articles (for example) denouncing Prince Charles's outburst against GM crops....inexplicably I suddenly saw the whole story unfold in one of those ‘aha' moments.

In the natural world, if you provide more resources, living entities will expand into it, i.e. provide more food and a population will increase accordingly. Diminish resources and populations contract, generally via fertility changes, conscious choice, or competition (ie, starvation/death). It is part of the natural cycle - always has been, always will be.

Starvation/death is admittedly the least preferred option, but only happens when resources decline rapidly. When resources are constant or fluctuate slowly, fertility changes and/or conscious choice are the likely self-correcting responses.

So what is happening to humans today? Why do we seem to be on a never-ending spiral of chasing more and more resources? Why are we plagued by the spectre of mass starvation on a scale never seen before?

Could it be that the green revolution didn't really save billions of starving people in a so-called humanitarian gesture? Instead it simply fuelled a massive surge in population.

This self-created population surge then supported an expanding green revolution industry with an enormous bubble of newly generated money - money that the industry is unlikely surrender readily. The industry that created the revolution now needed that revolution to continue!

Now coincidently, at the same time that the green revolution was emerging, the link between human consumers and natural resources conveniently started to unravel worldwide. Humans started demanding more and more without being aware of the consequences those demands were having on already stretched natural resources.

For example, when milk was unavailable humans simply shopped elsewhere or demanded that it be brought in from somewhere else. It was all so easy. The green revolution industry responded and obliged them - tightening the spiral one demand at a time.

Unfortunately though, the green revolution technology has left a wake of destruction behind it - declining soil fertility, sub-standard food, poor farm management practices, reliance on toxins.  It has created a mountain of artificial abundance that is set to fall over at any time - forcing mass starvation/death upon the world.

So when you stand back and look at the big picture you see that it is the green revolution industry that created and is still responsible for our food crisis and looming world starvation outlook.

If we had have stayed within the limitations of nature, mass starvations would not be the preoccupation - world populations would be continuously self-correcting around a sustainable resource base via conscious choice (and perhaps fertility changes). Hysteria and fear would not prevail.

But what about the droughts and disease that the green revolution aimed to alleviate?

It is admirable that humans thought they could eliminate these natural phenomena - but unfortunately, through lack of understanding, the green revolution technology has instead exacerbated these phenomena into world-wide crises - chronic water scarcity, climate change, disease epidemics, as well as ever more damaging and virulent pest and weed problems. The scale of destruction now stretches beyond short-term regional impacts into catastrophic global consequences.

At the same time, new scourges have been created that are more insidious and dangerous than droughts, diseases and even natural disasters combined in terms of human suffering. We now live in a poisoned world - whereby every single human is affected - through the air they breathe, the soil they till, the water they drink and just about every item they touch and use.

The green revolution industry claims that their technologies are the only solution to the predicted humanitarian disaster. Given that they created the problem - it is ironic that they continue to sponsor it using humanitarian and emotionally charged reasoning. Can they really lead us out of this by stretching our natural resources even further?

The Solution

We can continue on the path we are on - living beyond the natural capacity of nature by allowing humans to cocoon themselves from their links to nature and escalating their demands for green revolution solutions to their every whim - until the system collapses into mass starvation and destruction.

Or we can start winding back our artificial systems towards nature-based systems and allow our populations to fluctuate slowly and gradually through conscious choice. 

We have all the tools at hand to feed our current population. But we need to reconnect humans to nature and understand that nature can and does provide generously, but it cannot be abused without consequence. Human satisfaction cannot continue at the expense of all else. The man in shining armour offering a silver bullet to all our unnatural desires is an illusion.

Carolyn Ditchfield