9 - Radices: food futures, with or without finance as we know it?

Summary

In March 2018 the activist group Save Our Water staged a “poo protest” in the south of New Zealand's Southland and dumped cow effluent drawn from regional rivers at the feet of dumbfounded councillors of Environment Southland, in an effort to protest against the massive environmental impact of dairy farming in the country. As one of the hotspots for sheep-to-dairy conversions over the past years, the site seemed perfect for it, the more so as some councillors were seasoned dairy farmers themselves. The group claimed that, contrary to 2012 plans by the council to improve water quality by 2020, things had actually become worse. It wanted “action including a ban on stock getting to rivers and streams, a ban on the draining of wetlands, a ban on new dairy conversions or extension, a phasing out of intensive winter grazing, and active support for farmers to transition away from intensive agriculture” (Bonthuys 2018). Interestingly, when interviewed later, one of the organizers of the protest referred to one of the asset managers sampled here (Case 7) as a good example of environmental stewardship, because he had converted several of their farming properties to organic status. The protestors espoused the idea that more optimistic scholars and activists display from time to time, namely that institutional finance as “smart money” and “patient capital” can be used to catalyse more sustainable futures.

Intensive agriculture is a major driver of global environmental change (climate change, land cover and use change, biodiversity loss, depletion of freshwater resources and pollution of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems through nitrogen and phosphorus run-off from fertilizer and manure application), which often also comes at a great social cost, such as the uneven distribution of environmental goods and bads or the processes of exclusion, dispossession, deprivation and violence that result from or underpin agricultural production in different parts of the world. A recent pioneering study entitled “Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits” found that between 2010 and 2050, as a result of expected changes in population and income levels, the environmental effects of the food system could increase by 50–90% in the absence of technological changes and dedicated mitigation measures, reaching levels that are beyond the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity.

(Springmann et al. 2018: 519)