The UN Task Force on the Food Crisis Favors Corporate Farming By Ignoring The Definitive State of the Art Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology That’s Pertinent To Rural Development. The IAASTD's recommendations came like a breath of fresh air after years of the smells from feedlots and industrial farms. The gist is that region-by-region, the world’s farmers consider using agroecological methods, such as cover crops, integrated pest management, farmer-saved seed, grazing livestock, instead of fossil-fuel intensive methods, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, herbicide resistant GMO seeds. For instance, agroecology resolves the twin perils of using feedlots for meat production: managing mountains of livestock manure without injuring ground and surface waters, and growing feed for the livestock without depleting soils of nutrients, loading them with chemical residues, reducing biodiversity and creating excess greenhouse gasses. An agroecological method returns livestock to grazing, which utilizes the livestock to disperse their manure while they graze (instead of soil compacting tractors) while feeding them pasture crops. While grazing thus solves two monumental environmental problems, it encounters three major obstacles in our political economy. The first is the market power of feedlot owners, one of the most concentrated, most profitable, most destructive components of the present system of food production in the US. The second is that leveling the economic playing field, so that grazing competes economically fairly on a sustainable basis with feedlots, requires eliminating the direct and indirect subsidies we taxpayers pay to feedlot owners, through unsustainably loose environmental controls and through subsidies for the farmers who supply them with feed. This will lead to higher meat prices, reduced consumption, and reduced profits of the feedlot owners and the farmers who supply them. The threat to feedlot owners is just one of many threats implicitly posed by the IAASTD’s recommendations, a threat that illustrate why the dominant UN powers represented by the UN Task Force had to kill the IAASTD recommendations the best way it could. It did so by dimissing their recommendations as a mere “broader change agenda,” and refusing to explicitly adopt even one.

Surprisingly, the World Bank started the IAASTD. First it enlisted co-sponsorship of the concept by the FAO, IFAD, the WFP and some others, before persuading the UN General Assembly to approve its mandate. Making matters particularly painful was its mandate: was to develop peer reviewed and government approved, scientifically robust, assessments on the state of agricultural knowledge in five world regions for the use of high-level decision-making bodies like the HLTF. Imagine the consternation of the HLTF when the IAASTD released its assessments in the Spring of 2008, just in time for the first meeting of the HLTF! With such impeccable legitimacy, if the HLTF respected truth, instead of power or fait-based economic justifications, then it would have immediately embraced the IAASTD’s assessment of the state of the art of agricultural science and technology as “on target and on time.” Instead, the IAASTD reports were seen as an irksome call to jettison industrial agriculture, which threatened profit possibilities for the food TNCs and national agribusinesses, which control the international agricultural agendas of the dominant UN powers. The legitimacy of the IAASTD first caused the food TNCs to squirm in discomfort, and then induced them to send their lobbying minions into action. The result was the HLTF rescue—ignoring the IAASTD’s assessments in its attempt to relegate them to the dustbin of history.