The effect of war on growing food - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
One of the outcomes of the recent cease-fire between Israel and the government in Gaza was the welcome inflow of food and other supplies to the starving people of Gaza.
What I learned in reading an article by Brenda Schoepp in a recent issue of Farmtario was that, until the outbreak of war two-and-a-half years ago after the Hamas government of Gaza attacked Israel, killing more than 1,000 at a music festival and taking hostages who are only now being gradually released, Gaza was self-sufficient and food secure. The war forced them to become food insecure and dependent on imports.
The recent war wiped out most agricultural land, greenhouses, trees and water infrastructure - the ability to nurture food. Gazans are the victims of 42 million tons of contaminated bombing debris that they must now deal with.
This is the high cost of war, aside from the multitude of deaths. In 2023, Schoepp reports, there were 59 conflicts in 35 countries where 300,000 lives were lost. Not reported is damage to land and water that erodes a nation’s ability to feed itself now and in the future.
We in Canada and the western world are familiar with the cost of two World Wars. The base content of a bomb is usually highly flammable white phosphorus, which itself causes decades of soil destruction and water contamination.
During the first 18 months of war in Ukraine, there were vast amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere. This was free to blow in the wind to unknown places.
Schoepp argues Canadian farmers like our neighbours in Huron County cannot be thought of in isolation, “for what happens a world away is part of the greater ecology”.
Areas of Europe where the First World War was fought are still scarred more than a century later. Soil is disturbed by the digging of trenches. Chemicals from weapons still affect the soil. Now and then farmers working the land still unearth unexploded weapons.
One would think that Russians, having had the Germans invade their country in World War II and be battled back, with who knows what poisons were left in their soil, would think twice about inflicting more damage on Ukraine, especially since they hope to make Ukraine part of an expanded Russia. Under Vladimir Putin, that lesson has not even been learned.
Ukraine was one of the major sources of food imported to feed starving people in Africa. How many people will not get food to eat because of Russia’s invasion?
The population of the world continues to increase and we destroy food-producing soil needed to feed the expanded population. No doubt there will be wars in future years as starving countries seek to insure food for their people, which will destroy even more food-producing land.
Meanwhile, we well-fed people in Canada, particularly those of us who live in southern Ontario, continue to expand cities; our city-bound leaders see little of the worth and necessity of growing food on the land we pave over. Because we have lots of food, we don’t understand its value. We also regularly elect leaders from urban areas who don’t see the necessity of growing food, because food, to them, comes from a grocery store where the shelves are always full.
Other urbanites are always casting doubt on the need to grow food in the earth because they invent ways of growing food indoors in buildings.
Of all the animals on earth, humans are the only one that destroys the very environment we depend on for life. We are creative enough to find ways to make war or build cities, but we are not wise enough to understand our need to eat when we have plenty and understand how fragile our food-making world is.
Our human population continues to expand. More and more of us want to live in cities, leading to the loss of the very land we require to feed all those urban-dwellers. And we continue to find reasons to fight each other, leading to the destruction of the food-growing ability of land.
We Canadians living safely here in North America are blessed. We aren’t losing family members, friends and neighbours as those in Gaza, Ukraine and other war-torn places in the world are. But we need to remember how valuable the food-growing land is that we keep burying to enlarge cities.
Human life, the life protected by the growing of food, is so valuable that we need to preserve the soil that food is nourished by. Something in humans gives little value to something that is so common. Yet soil is also precious and should be valued.