What Naboth Teaches Us Today Part IV
From my initial exposition of the story of Naboth’s vineyard, we can retain three important learnings:
The narrative concerns a dispute between two systems of land ownership, inheritance and possession.
The dispute between land systems is rooted in a dispute between YHWH and Baal. YHWH is the champion of land as inheritance; Baal is the sponsor of land as possession that leads, in turn, to commoditization.
This unequal struggle between these two land systems is interrupted by the sharp, critical appearance in the story of Elijah who is a truth-speaker who exposes the unsustainable folly of royal patterns concerning commoditized owners.
If you have followed my series of expositions of the Naboth story, Parts I, II, and III, by now you know the primary accent points of my interpretation. Nonetheless, the book by Paul McMahon, Feeding Frenzy: Land Grabs, Price Spikes, and the World Food Crisis (2014), merits attention as a rich and suggestive read (I commend it heartily to you)! McMahon takes a large-scale view of the shape of global food policy and practice and the crisis it has generated.
The baseline for thinking about food production is that there was a time when food was locally produced, distributed, and consumed.
In that practice of food, we can identify the grains that undergirded food usage. In China, it was the “five grains:” wheat, rice, millet, soybean, and sorghum (McMahon 7). In the West, that list would be modified to include potatoes, but the same picture is clear.
The great new fact that has altered the world of food is the capacity to store and export surplus grain (Naboth of course had nothing like that on his horizon, he being a locally oriented peasant farmer). James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, has traced the way in which the capacity to produce, store, and administer grains became the basis of the first great states and empires. This remarkable development is reflected in the Exodus narrative of the Bible that pertains to the slave labor that built the great storehouse cities for the storage of Pharaoh’s grain monopoly (Genesis 47:13-26, Exodus 1:11, 5:4-19).
With a long historical leap, McMahon quotes Dan Morgan who describes “how grain became one of the foundations of the post-war American Empire” (See Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Grain Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply). This capacity for the storage and export of grain has decisively shifted the reality of food and drawn energy away from local practices of production, distribution, and consumption.
The development of international markets, trade, and export of food caused a great new hunger for land in which farmers were urged to “get big or get out” (Earl Butts). The acquisition of huge tracts of land (that has led to the demise of the “family farm”) has been propelled by the profit-making drive of the great food companies:
Owning and operating farmland is the ultimate form of vertical integration. It allows companies to control every step of the chain from the germination of a seed to the delivery of processed food to the end consumer. The examples given in this chapter are part of a much larger trend of foreign acquisition of farmland, especially in developing countries. Many call them “land grabs.” It is the most controversial and dangerous phenomenon to emerge as a result of the recent food crisis, one that has echoes of darker colonial era. (McMahon, 178-179)
This astonishing land grab has required and evoked a change in the nature of land rights that undermined long-established peasant practices and customs. The new practice has been propelled by profit-seeking agents with whom governmental officials cooperated:
They target poor developing countries where land is cheap or can be obtained for free. They involve a radical change in the nature of land rights, usually a transfer from government or local communities to a foreign company in the form of a long-term lease. Host governments are usually heavily involved as they often hold the rights to the land … They are often externally imposed by government officials who ignore customary land rights and make massive transfers at the stroke of a pen, or by local chiefs who have been seduced by the investor’s chequebook and do not have the best interests of the people at heart. Many foreign investors engage in a sort of sham consultation with local people after the deal has been made — they have no intention of changing their plans. (187, 198)
It takes no imagination at all to see that such vulnerable peasant farmers, not unlike Naboth, have no resources with which to withstand such aggressive economic power. The land grab has been without restraint or limit and is a story of investment for profit:
The investment story presented is usually about buying under-utilized land, investing capital in new seeds, fertilisers, machines or irrigation, and implementing a “modern” high-input, mechanised farming system. This is the sort of narrative financial investors expect to hear, perhaps because it makes farming sound like the industrial sectors they are used to investing in. (258)
It is not at all a surprise, then, that the land (along with its present occupants) has been exploited and abused, over-farmed for the sake of over-production. McMahon describes the way in which land degradation and land depletion operate, as the pressure for production and profit override all other concerns:
A more insidious threat is land degradation. It happens inch by inch, soil particle by soil particle, so slowly that a farmer, like the metaphorical frog in boiling water, is unaware of what is happening until it is too late. Soils can lose their fertility as their composition and structure alter, or they can disappear altogether through the effects of wind or water erosion. (65)
The phrase “soil particle by soil particle” calls to mind the insistence of Wendell Berry who has said that the recovery of the environment will come, not by some ambitious government program, but rather “one acre at a time.”
But of course loss of one “soil particle” at a time or the recovery of “one acre at a time” is much too slow and too modest for the great engines of profit.
The insistent and recurring question for those who care is how to develop and fund an alternative policy of production (and land care) that will stop the destruction of the land and interrupt the present economics that has refused sustainable food policy. McMahon nicely identifies the “five processes” that constitute the basis for a farming system:
Selecting plants and animals, managing water, renewing fertility, protecting from pests and applying power. (9)
These ingredients of practice and policy are to be kept in purview as we consider how land and food might be cared for and produced in an alternative way. It is not difficult to see how these five processes are factored out by the great “Merchants of Grain.” But the “merchants of grain” characteristically want speed and scale that are unmistakably contrary to both good food production and good land management.
It will not be a surprise that the likely viable alternative to the current profit-driven food policy and practice is a refocus on “small farms” that have been disdained by the “merchants of grain.” Thus McMahon concludes:
An alternative way forward ... could result in a more benign scenario. Two major themes stand out. The first is the need to help small farmers in poor countries to produce more food. This can kick-start a virtuous cycle of rural and urban development in these countries, while reducing their dependence on rich-country surpluses. The second theme is the importance of switching to agro-ecological farming systems that use fewer non-renewable resources, pollute less and enhance the fertility of the land, while still producing sufficient quantities of food. (267)
There is nothing remote or hidden about these two proposals. They are doable once we are free from the compulsions scale and speed according to the rhythms of creation. The current global system of food is not working:
The global food system of the early twenty-first century was both impoverishing and starving one-eighth of humanity, while leaving an even larger number overweight and at risk of disease. The equilibrium that had emerged was unjust, even perverse. But it was also unstable ... Many systems of food production are unsustainable. Without change, the global food system will continue to degrade the environment and compromise the world’s capacity to produce food in the future, as well as contributing to climate change and the destruction of biodiversity. (45, 69)
This leads McMahon to conclude:
Nothing less is required than a redesign of the whole food system to bring sustainability to the fore. (69)
And then McMahon adds this powerful insight:
There is a strong economic rationale for placing ecology at the heart of agriculture. Profitability in farming is driven not by high yields but by good margins, the difference between the price a farmer gets and the cost of production. (258)
This is a remarkable and important correction to the uncritical assumption of “food to scale,” that high yield is the single goal that matters. McMahon sees that it is not the size of the yield but the margin between cost and price that makes the difference to the farmer. As Berry saw long ago, a highly mechanized farm system requires investment in equipment that is incommensurate with the reality of much farm income.
While current commitment to scale, speed, and high yield is endlessly demanding, we may come to our senses with the recognition that food production must soon or late, of necessity, be in sync with the potential, requirements, and limits of the creation as food-giving land. Land as creation has the potential for abundance, but land also has limits; unless and until those limits are acknowledged, the potential of abundance is short-term and uncertain. The land as creation has its own requirements that must be heeded. The Promethean technological capacity of our present world food system has assumed that these requirements can be disregarded and outflanked.
But we know better than that!
Thus, we may draw two conclusions. First: this is, to be sure, a lot to impose on the Naboth narrative. I do so because Naboth serves well as a peasant farmer who wanted only to care for, treasure, and honor his inheritance. It is impossible to imagine that Naboth could care about speed, scale, or high yield. One could imagine, rather, that Naboth would have easily resonated with that other peasant farmer, Micah of Moresheth, the poet, who anticipated a viable local economy outside the arms race of his king:
But they shall sit under their own vines and their own fig trees,
and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Micah 4:4)
(Note well that this verse is missing in the same oracle from the urban prophet, Isaiah in 2:2-4). The additional verse from Micah exhibits the imagination of a peasant farmer who has no inclination for the global food system, but who is content with local food production, the kind that would indeed feed the world.
Second, alternative food policy required for the sake of adequate food and adequate land management is not simply a shift of aims. Beyond any shift of resources, what is required is an act of imagination that lies beyond the horizon of the great grain merchants. That act of imagination can be evoked by giving voice to peasant wisdom that is local, modest, and frugal in a way that appears from the outside as parsimonious. Peasant wisdom is in deep tension with the insistent advocacies of the technological sector that is variously glib, over-confident, self-indulgent, and excessively self-assured. It is certain that this required act of imagination must come from outside the ideology of scale, speed, and high yield.
It is (surprise!) the work of the faith communities funded by the alternative text of the Bible to seed such counter-imagination.
The text entrusted to us is grounded in the claim of God the creator who will not be mocked. This is the God who wills abundance but who keeps the neighbor always in purview, and who intends that creation itself be treated in neighborly ways. At the center of the claim of faith concerning creation is the glad affirmation that the creation, in all its dimensions, belongs to the creator God. A pause in scale, speed, and high yield is essential to the slow down required for recognition of the creator and of the world as God’s creation. It is undoubtedly the case that the practice of local food is in sync with the will of the creator. Naboth understood that in his peasant bones. It is no wonder that the king, committed to scale, speed, and high yield, by the end of the narrative is held under by the severe truth-telling judgment of Elijah.
By contrast we may indeed imagine the murdered Naboth joining the song of Francis:
All creatures of our God and King,
lift up your voice and with us sing,
Alleluia, alleluia!
O brother sun with golden beam,
O sister moon with silver gleam…
Alleluia, alleluia!
O brother wind with clouds and rain,
you nurture gifts of fruit and grain,
Alleluia, alleluia!
O sister water, flowing clear,
make music for our Lord to hear,
Alleluia, alleluia! (Glory to God, 15)
The glad utterance of “alleluia” (praise YHWH!) is a ready recognition of the penultimate status of all creatures, a willingness to be on the receiving end of life, and an acknowledgement of the limits of every Promethean temptation. In that world of glad “alleluia,” Ahab’s land grabbing cannot finally prevail.
In that world, moreover, Naboth will not finally be forgotten or nullified.
Walter Brueggemann
