Feeding People is Easy Part 3

Book review

In Part 3 of Feeding People is Easy, Colin Tudge points out that: “Industrialized farming makes maximum use of mechanical power and industrial chemistry; and although industrial farming is the Johnny-come-lately, it is already commonly called ‘conventional farming’. It is conventional only insofar as it makes use of western methods, and is geared to the western, industrial economy.” “Enlightened agriculture as I envisage it is very like modern organic farming, but begins from a slightly different base. The organic movement was not founded to provide good food for everyone forever. It is, however, the prime agenda, from the outset, of Enlightened Agriculture. Enlightened Agriculture would allow itself to be more catholic in its choice of technology, than organic farming is. Agriculture becomes truly enlightened only when it keeps all the balls in the air – biological, social, moral – with the general aim of creating a world that is good for everyone forever, and for other creatures too.” “In principle, it really should not be difficult to supply everyone who is ever likely to be born with great food, forever; and to do so without wiping out other creatures, and generally wrecking the fabric of the Earth. Present day agriculture is not directly geared to human well being, and takes virtually no account of biological reality. It is designed to make money, in the apparent belief that the maximization of disposable wealth is both necessary and sufficient. How this works, why it is so destructive, and how this perverse state of affairs came about, is discussed in the next two chapters.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING                                    2007

PART III

Chapter 3: Great Food and Enlightened Agriculture: The Future Belongs to the Gourmet (Cont)

Postscript: Enlightened Agriculture and organic farming.

• The world population when large-scale farming first began around 10,000 years ago is estimated at a mere 10 million. Since numbers were approaching three billion by the 1930s, when high-tech farming first became widespread, we can see how successful craft-based, traditional farming has been.
• It produced a three-hundred fold increase in human numbers since hunter-gathering days – and has contributed a great deal to the further increase, since the 1930s, when the population has doubled again.
• It simply isn’t true as some zealots of modernity seem to think, that farming was floundering until science and high tech came on the scene. In truth, agricultural science has achieved the successes it has only because it had such a firm – traditional – base to build on.
• Industrialized farming makes maximum use of mechanical power and industrial chemistry; and although industrial farming is the Johnny-come-lately, it is already commonly called ‘conventional farming’. It is conventional only insofar as it makes use of western methods, and is geared to the western, industrial economy.
• Organic farming is like traditional farming insofar as it makes no – or minimal – use of industrial chemistry. The modern organic farmer actively rejects the industrial methods: it’s not that they are not available.
• Organic farms also tend to be more traditional in structure than industrial farms: more craft-based, and more labour intensive; and organic farmers apply ‘tender loving care’ as a matter of philosophy.
• Organic farmers make tremendous use of modern science, often of the most intricate kind, to ensure that soil is maintained in the best possible ‘heart’ – finest texture, highest fertility, high organic content; and to explore means of containing pests by ‘biological’ means.
• Enlightened agriculture as I envisage it is very like modern organic farming, but begins from a slightly different base. The organic movement was not founded to provide good food for everyone forever. It is, however, the prime agenda, from the outset, of Enlightened Agriculture.
• Enlightened Agriculture would allow itself to be more catholic in its choice of technology, than organic farming is. Agriculture becomes truly enlightened only when it keeps all the balls in the air – biological, social, moral – with the general aim of creating a world that is good for everyone forever, and for other creatures too.

 

So where have we gone wrong?

• In principle, it really should not be difficult to supply everyone who is ever likely to be born with great food, forever; and to do so without wiping out other creatures, and generally wrecking the fabric of the Earth.
• Present day agriculture is not directly geared to human well being, and takes virtually no account of biological reality. It is designed to make money, in the apparent belief that the maximization of disposable wealth is both necessary and sufficient. How this works, why it is so destructive, and how this perverse state of affairs came about, is discussed in the next two chapters.

 

Chapter 4: The Rot Sets In: Farming for Money

• We are failing, miserably, to feed ourselves properly. Along the way, we cause huge collateral misery while wrecking the fabric of the world itself. If we go on as we are then life will be impossible for our own children and grandchildren. Why are we behaving so perversely?
• The logistics of power favors wickedness in the highest places because the people who are most likely to acquire the most power are the ones who are most focused on power: and the desire for personal power seems largely incompatible with the primary virtues of respect for others, and of personal humility.
• Rich and powerful people include some of the most intelligent of all and some of the best: people who really do want the world to be a better place, and seek to benefit humanity as a whole.
• Such people still exist in particular in India among people from both a mercantile and a Hindu tradition. In the West the Quakers, steeped in Christian morality, have been serious commercial players – and of course you don’t have to be either a Hindu or a Christian to be humanitarian.
• The fault does not lie primarily with wickedness, or stupidity. It lies with error. We have contrived by degrees to create a world economic system that is bad for humanity in general and disastrous for agriculture in particular – the thing we absolutely have to get right. How come?

 

What’s gone wrong?

• To people brought up in the Cold War, the world’s economy is clearly divided into Communist and capitalist. The West is conceived to be capitalist, and those who feel that the present western economy is not what the world needs, are still liable to be called “Commies”, and banned from serious further discourse.
• The kind of economics that Communism traditionally embraced is now rare. As first envisaged by Karl Marx, the people own “the means of production.”
• Many conclude that the ideological war is over. All the world’s economies – all except those eccentrics that have kept themselves to themselves or have been shunned – subscribe to the global free market, presided over by the World Trade Organisation, based in Geneva.
• Since everyone is a consumer, the system is innately democratic. Anyone who isn’t capitalist these days must be an idiot, or (as George W Bush put the matter), “evil”.
• Doubters must be the enemies of democracy, and world unity, and therefore the enemies of humankind itself.
• What this simple-minded but alarmingly common view of the world significantly fails to register is that there is a huge, deep, ideological and practical division within capitalism itself.
• On the one hand we have the global, allegedly free market, which now prevails. On the other hand, we have capitalism as envisaged, and espoused, by the founders of the modern United States – Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the rest – at the end of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th.
• The difference between the two capitalist models is profound.
• People like me who feel that the global free market in its present form is a disaster are not necessarily “Commies”, or religious “fanatics”, or hippies or weirdos. On the contrary, I see myself as a good Jefferson.
• The United States was the greatest social experiment ever undertaken, breathtaking in brilliance and moral sure-footedness, and if only the US had continued as it began, the world would now be very different and a far better place.
• I hate the present system – we have to stand up to it – but in hating it, I claim to be a better capitalist than its modern practitioners.
• I argue, as many do, that capitalism is really about free trade, markets, and personal ownership, and as such it seems to be as old as humankind.

 

In the beginning

• Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations of 1776, explained why the free market could meet the needs of humanity. Customers could go elsewhere and cheats would go out of business. An “invisible hand” would ensure that honesty and justice prevailed.
• However, the invisible hand could be relied upon to dispense justice only if there was an infinite number of traders, competing on level terms; and an infinite number of consumers who each had perfect access to all traders, and perfect knowledge of what was going on.
• If any trader had a monopoly, or groups of traders – or consumers – ganged together to form cartels to put pressure on the rest, or if information was concealed or misrepresented, then the invisible hand could not work its magic.
• The market would simply be dominated by the strongest players for their own particular benefit. The founders’ vision has been horribly betrayed. Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.

 

The end of the invisible hand

• Since the founders’ day there have been three key changes.
• The first is that the market has been taken over and controlled by corporates, shifting investment according to what is most profitable.
• The world’s most powerful governments now depend on those corporates and so does the global market.
• The modern global economy is not the dynamic, restless interplay of infinite components that Smith envisaged. It is a ponderous clash of titans.
• In such a system, the invisible hand that is supposed to create social justice, does not come into play.
• The second shift has been the rise of monetization. The creation and the generation of wealth – almost by whatever means – is thus justified on moral grounds.
• The moral excuse for extreme personal wealth is provided by the notion of “trickle down”. Up to a point this is true. Rich people can employ poor people, and entrepreneurs who are truly socially inspired can create fine industries that give rise to and support entire communities.
• But wealth doesn’t necessarily “trickle down”; the rich may use their power to maintain their ascendancy. As economists at the merchant bankers Goldman Sachs recently put the matter: “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.”
• Thom Hartmann records in What Would Jefferson do? that since 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, the USA has grown richer and richer while the real income of the middle class has declined by 10% and the minimum wage of the poorest people has fallen by 17%.
• 80% of American homeowners of low and moderate income now spend more than half their income on housing, and half of the ever-spiralling tally of bankruptcies are brought about by medical bills.
• Such is the faith in “trickle down” that Britain’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown believe that salvation for African countries lies with foreign companies (notably corporates) setting up shop within their boundaries, and making money.
• Governments measure their success in terms of increase in GDP – gross domestic product. – or economic growth.
• Nations that are “growing” fastest are deemed to be the most successful, and those with little or no growth are perceived as lame ducks or even as “failed states.”
• GDP has very little to do with wellbeing. War is extremely lucrative, which is one reason why there is so much of it.
• Crime in the US in particular is a huge industry: all those prisons, prison officers, policemen, lawyers, clerks, cleaners, drivers, and manufacturers of safes, burglar alarms, guns, truncheons, and cop cars contribute wonderfully to GDP.
• Nowadays, it seems, the richer people are, the more admirable. One of the Russian Oligarchs who effectively stole the wealth of his entire country now owns England’s leading football team, and is one of our modern heroes.
• The third shift in emphasis is perhaps the most pernicious. In the modern global economy, morality itself is defined by the market.
• In modern markets, in this age of moral relativism, what is “good” is taken by definition to be whatever people are prepared to pay for.
• In reality the poorest people with the greatest needs cannot afford to buy anything at all, and if the market is all there is, then they are sidelined.
• Neither could the market, left to itself, produce the kind of society that most sane people would find agreeable. Many people are prepared to pay a fortune for child pornography and for child prostitutes, but no one that I know would defend either on market grounds.
• Worst of all, the particular moral message that emerges from the modern market is that material success is all, and that material success depends on ruthless competitiveness. Winning is all that matters.
• The inbuilt moral restraint that Adam Smith envisaged – the “natural sympathy” – has been overridden.
• The richest calculate whether it is more economical to obey the law, or to break it and pay the fine. If they are really rich and powerful, they can buy the law itself.
• In The War Against Nature Robert F Kennedy tells how he sued an American meat company whose piggeries were polluting several if not most of the rivers of North Carolina. After a decade’s endeavour, he brought the company to court. He won. Then he lost – for the company appealed, and by the time the appeal was settled, two years later, the law had mysteriously been changed to enable them to dump their ordure with impunity.
• To many, including many in the highest places, this kind of behaviour is perfectly acceptable.
• Winning is the name of the game and whatever wins is good by definition. Might is right. The winners write history. Everyday mottos capture the point.
• For my part, I claim to be a good capitalist, and am sure that an economy that can truly serve the needs of humanity must be fundamentally capitalist.
• But we need a new model of it; far closer in spirit and to some extent in detail to the vision of Thomas Jefferson, than the world of the modern corporates. As briefly discussed later, some people are on the case.
• The present system does produce some things efficiently – big aeroplanes and big ships; possibly motor-cars and computers – and perhaps this is good for humanity.
• I do claim, however, that the present economy, the globalised clash of corporates and of corporate-dependent governments, is disastrous for agriculture.

 

Agriculture is just a business like any other