I started reading this Mother Jones article with a bit of skepticism because it seemed to be talking about exports to other countries. I was trying to be fair, as in, “perhaps food aid is not counted as an export since we aren’t paid for it.” But no. Very little of the soil-destroying, pesticide-laden food that we grow is sent to poor countries whose people are starving. The last chart is the most damning: showing how much our food donations count as a percentage of that country’s food supply. The largest percentage is Haiti, at 17%. It drops precipitously from there: the next highest is 7%.
The majority of what we grow goes to animal feed. The majority of our exports goes to countries with very little hunger. Yet a constant excuse for our mono, chemically laden food culture is because it “feeds the world.” We must use GMO’s and the other things because we can’t grow enough food to feed everybody. Even Neil DeGrasse Tyson insists this is true.
It just turns out that’s not what we’re doing with the food. I might accept the necessity of this way of farming, if our food aid was a large percentage of the receiving country’s food budget. But it’s not. It’s barely a blimp on their radar.
And we’re destroying our soil to do it.
Marlene Dotterer 
Millions of children around the globe still suffer from extreme hunger and poverty. This is one issue that needs to be taken cared of.
Which is really irritating, isn’t it? We do all this “to feed the world” and the world is still hungry. Don’t forget that we also throw away an unconscionable amount of food, wasting what we’re destroying the land to grow. And none of it helps the people who are still hungry.
Exactly.
The stakes on this are even higher than that. There are only two black soil regions in the world. One is in the United States (with all the pesticides) and the other is in Russia. Around Chernobyl.
I’d never heard of “black soil regions,” but a (quick) search shows it’s interesting. I’ll have to take more time to look at it. You know, most of the really great soil areas got that way over millions of years. The black soil regions are some of these, but I’m more familiar with the central valley in California. Fertile soil, due to those millions of years of deposits, but not an area with much rain. Yet we come along and farm it to destruction in less than a century, partly because we discount the lack of water. We never look at the big, long-term picture.