The Multifunction of Agriculture

Dr. Iwao Watanabe, Deputy Director, FFTC, 2000-06-01

During the second half of the 20th century, there was tremendous material progress. In highly industrialized countries, people are now enjoying a range of goods and a level of convenience which was hardly dreamed of fifty years ago. At the same time, people are becoming more aware of some of the undesirable side effects of this progress, such as the degradation of the environment, the growing income gap between rich and poor, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the increased mental stress felt by city dwellers.

As the industrial structure has moved from primary industry to secondary industry (processing) and then to tertiary industry (services), most people in authority are now part of the latter two sectors. The fundamental principle of these latter two sectors, "Increase productivity as much as possible", is now being applied to primary industry, making it dogma for the whole of society.

City People Isolated from Nature

Increasingly, people have become separated from the involvement with nature which is a specific characteristic of primary industry. The pattern of daily life affects the ideology of people. We have begun to forget the fact that human beings are part of nature, and cannot live isolated from it.

Mental health is crucial for human society, as well as the environment. In highly industrial countries there are sometime cases of random violence against strangers. Such acts seem to reflect the mental sickness of people who live in a highly stressful urban environment. Many people experience most of their social interaction through a computer. People who live in the virtual reality of a computer have lost any evaluation standards which would let them judge correctly what is happening in real life.

To conserve the sound mentality, we need the help of another function of agriculture, that of keeping us in touch with nature. We are already becoming aware of the function of agriculture in conserving the environment. Economists are even beginning to translate this environmental value into monetary terms. The function of agriculture in conserving the sound mentality is even more difficult to evaluate in monetary terms. This function is literally "priceless".

Let me give some examples of how it works. Mental stress is relieved by a feeling of happiness. Human beings have the ability to create useful things with the help of tools. We feel great delight when we succeed in making things. We enjoy the process of seeking out the materials, planning the methods and procedures, and finally realizing our concept as a tangible object. Repetitive mechanized production, on the other hand, where what we do is only a small part of the whole process, is more likely to give pain than pleasure. It can never make us happy. Agriculture is valuable because it is a creative long-term process which people perform by themselves, according to their own judgement.

Modern food processing has also removed people further from nature. Many people today are eating processed foods without knowing anything about the natural raw materials they are made from. Many urban consumers have no experience of looking closely at rice plants or vegetable plants. They buy sliced fish ready for cooking, and have no idea of the color or shape of the original fish. It is easy for them to forget that what they are eating was once alive, and deserving of care and compassion. Instead, they regard living things as commodities, like cars or television sets.

A New Paradigm for Agriculture

We cannot step back into the age of subsistence agriculture. What we can do, however, is have the courage to change our values. Instead of making efficiency of production our goal, we can aim for a wholesome society. We must remember the wholesomeness of agriculture, and find ways of bringing that quality into urban daily life.

Small-scale Asian agriculture has the merit that it brings rural life into close contact with urban life. Closer contact between the two increases the sustainability of each one, by making them mutually supportive. For example, urban wastes can be recycled on farms, and city dwellers can share the experience of farming.

Green tourism, in which city dwellers experience not only the harvest, but also plowing, planting, weeding and pest control, may be one solution. The recent trend towards decentralization of authority points in the same direction, and favors this tendency to evaluate agriculture for purposes other than purely economic ones.

In 2001, the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center will be holding an international seminar in Japan on "The Multifunction of Agriculture".