Feeding People is Easy Part 4

Book review

In Part 4 of Feeding People is Easy, Colin Tudge points out that: “No society throughout history has regarded its agriculture simply as a business. Always people at large and the powers-that-be have felt that farming is in various ways special.” “Although farmers have commonly worked within a general atmosphere of free trade, most civilized and organized societies have manipulated the market to ensure that farmers stayed in business.” “Our food supply is particularly badly hit by the new economics. The things that farmers need to do to stay financially afloat are absolutely at odds, diametrically opposed, to what needs to be done if we seriously care about the 6.4 billion people who are with us now, and the 9 billion who will be here in 2050, and the 5-8 million species with whom we share this Earth; and if indeed we care about our own children.” “Irrigation is immensely valuable. One third of cultivated land is irrigated, and that land provides two-thirds of the world’s food. Irrigation carries many dangers: from soil pollution to the creation of deserts in the places whence the water is drawn. If it is overdone, then the bonanza quickly gives way to desert. Huge tracts of western and southern Australia have already been lost to salt, dragged up from below. The logic of the present global market says “So what?” In the short term there are fortunes to be made, and the future can take care of itself.” “One of the most sorry aspects of the whole sorry scene is that we could be using our present science and engineering truly to create a safe world that is good for everyone. Instead, we are deploying science and the high technologies it gives rise to primarily and often exclusively for short-term profit.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING 2007

PART IV

Chapter 4: The Rot Sets In: Farming for Money

Agriculture is just a business like any other

I first became aware of the turn that the economy was taking in the 1970s when I worked for the British farming magazine Farmer’s Weekly. It was then that I first heard the chill phrase, “Agriculture is just a business like any other.”
No society throughout history has regarded its agriculture simply as a business. Always people at large and the powers-that-be have felt that farming is in various ways special.
Its output is vital to us all, and cannot be interrupted even for a few weeks. Yet the output of this vital industry is bound to vary from year to year, unpredictably, for reasons that are quite beyond human control – the greatest single reason being the vagaries of weather.
Total wipe-out of crops or livestock is a disaster for everyone. Glut is bad news for farmers as it sends the price down and can force farmers out of business.
Although farmers have commonly worked within a general atmosphere of free trade, most civilized and organized societies have manipulated the market to ensure that farmers stayed in business.
Farmers have often formed all kinds of cooperatives that are of enormous help to everyone. If cooperatives become cartels then this is bad for the consumers, and for the producers who are not in the cartel.
In my days at Farmer’s Weekly I was always impressed by the freedom and generosity with which individual farmers discussed their methods and their successes. If they found a good way to do things, then they wanted others to share in it.
Nowadays I am proud o be at least loosely attached to the Food Animal Initiative, based in Oxford, whose raison d’être is to pioneer new methods of husbandry and to share them with farmers at large.
Competition has become the order of the day, not because it works particularly well, but as a matter of dogma. The very obvious fact that cooperation has its virtues too – most obviously it saves a great deal of fighting, which takes a huge amount of energy for no constructive purpose – has been written out of the act.
Our food supply is particularly badly hit by the new economics. The things that farmers need to do to stay financially afloat are absolutely at odds, diametrically opposed, to what needs to be done if we seriously care about the 6.4 billion people who are with us now, and the 9 billion who will be here in 2050, and the 5-8 million species with whom we share this Earth; and if indeed we care about our own children.
Not capitalism per se, but the modern form of it, is the greatest mistake that can be conceived.

How to be a successful capitalist – and why farming is different
The aim of the universal money-game isn’t simply to make money, but to generate profit. Profit is not bad. In essence it is a way of keeping score.
It is the obsessive desire to maximize profit without moral restraint, and to do so with maximum competitiveness so that those who are not so single-minded go to the wall, that is so destructive.
To make a profit in any business you have to do three things: maximize turnover; add value; and minimize costs. These three requirements are the bedrock. Kept within reasonable and moral bounds, they are fine.
But if you set out to expressly maximize profit, with no other end in view; if you are determined to be as ruthless as is necessary to achieve this maximization; and if you operate within and contribute towards an atmosphere of to-the-death, all-against-all competition; then the world is in trouble.
This simplistic approach produces a system of farming, and an overall food supply chain, that seems expressly designed to ensure that humanity as a whole cannot be well fed, and in which vast numbers of people are bound to be treated unjustly, and other creatures are bound to go extinct, and the future is left entirely to hazard.
Let us take the three prime requirements one by one: maximum turnover, maximum value-adding, and minimum costs and see how this pans out.

The trouble with growing too much

In the 1970s it looked for a time as if it was going to be well-nigh impossible to feed the world population of the time, which then stood at something over 4 billion.
In particular, yields of cereal in India were too low. India in those days grew old-fashioned varieties of wheat which had very long stems.
From the late 1960s, using breeding techniques that fell short of bona fide genetic engineering but still were very fancy indeed – involving direct transfer of chromosomes from plant to plant – breeders were able to produce a new range of “semi-dwarf” varieties of wheat, with short stems. Plied with extra N, they produced more grain.
Now most wheat worldwide is dwarfed. The yields of grain when the crop is heavily fertilized, are fabulous: thee times what was common in the 1970s.
Comparable semi-dwarfing genes were then introduced into rice, which vies with wheat as the world’s most important cultivated crop.
The development of semi-dwarf varieties, and the heavy fertilization and irrigation (sometimes) that went with it, was “the Green Revolution”. Its perpetrators received Nobel Prizes.
There was, and is, a lot wrong with the Green Revolution. It put a lot of farmers out of work, with hugely adverse consequences. It required continuing capital input, mainly for nitrogen fertilizer, so on the whole it achieved less than is desirable for the poorest farmers.
But it did produce a lot more grin and at first sight, it looks like, and has often been presented as, an unequivocal victory for high tech.
Irrigation is immensely valuable. One third of cultivated land is irrigated, and that land provides two-thirds of the world’s food.
Irrigation carries many dangers: from soil pollution to the creation of deserts in the places whence the water is drawn. If it is overdone, then the bonanza quickly gives way to desert.
Huge tracts of western and southern Australia have already been lost to salt, dragged up from below.
The logic of the present global market says “So what?” In the short term there are fortunes to be made, and the future can take care of itself.
Very high yields are commonly achieved not simply by new and fancy crops, not simply by irrigation, but by huge inputs of industrial chemicals: fertilizer (including N), pesticides, fungicides, herbicides.
In industrialised systems the soil is generally taken for granted, with no attempt to retain its texture or volume. (in absolute contrast, in organic systems – as conceived by Lady Eve Balfour, who founded Britain’s Soil Association – the soil is given priority.)
The rapid conversion of the Amazon rainforest first into poor grazing and then into desert, is the best-known example – but the devastation of the Cerrado, Brazil’s dry forest, is even more dramatic.
The gratuitous ploughing of Greek hillside and English downland is smaller in scale but equally horrible in its way.
Overall, the destruction is a serious blow to the world as a whole and to all humanity. It results entirely from the desire to maximize yields in the short term, without regard for the long term.
Without regard for our children, that is.
One of the most sorry aspects of the whole sorry scene is that we could be using our present science and engineering truly to create a safe world that is good for everyone.
Instead, we are deploying science and the high technologies it gives rise to primarily and often exclusively for short-term profit.
The fabulous insights that science provides us with, which could and should be among our greatest assets, instead are boosting a world economy and order that are threatening to kill us all off.
It is as if the aim was to bring on the apocalypse. It is beyond belief. But it is the way things are.

What’s wrong with adding value?

Adding value is good – if value is truly added, and is not otherwise harmful.
But value-adding in our modern, debased, simplified economy is something quite different. The core idea is not to add worth but to increase the money that can be charged.
The entire modern livestock industry has almost nothing to do with good agriculture, or with good nutrition or gastronomy, but is entirely an exercise in value-adding.
The industry is designed primarily to make the people who control it (usually not the farmers) enormously rich, and in this it succeeds spectacularly.
But it is horribly cruel to animals and people alike, creates horrendous pollution, and in general is a huge threat to the security of the Earth as a whole and hence to all humanity.

The nonsense of modern livestock

Committed herbivores such as cattle and sheep should primarily be fed on grass or browse on cellulose which human beings cannot eat, and which are grown in places where it is hard to grow cereals.
The omnivores, mainly pigs and poultry, should be fed on leftovers and substandard or surplus crops.
Both the herbivores and the omnivores may be given some grain as a supplement.
The production of livestock by modern means – turning cheap cereal and pulses into expensive meat – is the most flagrant and widespread exercise in value-adding of all. It is, indeed, extremely lucrative.
It also ensures that humanity’s chances of surviving in a tolerable world are hugely reduced.
But the third requirement of standard business practice – cut cost to the bone, and then cut them again – is the most pernicious of all.

Cutting costs

Nothing has harmed our world and the people in it more than the frenetic desire, and the perceived need, to farm on the cheap. Cut-price agriculture is extremely dangerous.
Cheap farming is simplified farming – the biggest possible fields with the biggest possible machines to achieve economy of scale; single kinds of crops grown horizon to horizon – large-scale monoculture – so that all can be harvested together, with one sweep of the combine.
Because the vast crops are uniform, all are vulnerable to the same diseases. One particularly virulent strain of one pathogen could wipe out the whole lot.
It is particularly dangerous – and cruel – to produce livestock on the cheap. Britain’s recent epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, was caused entirely by the perceived need to cut costs.
BSE is a horrible disease that attacks the nervous system, first causing the animal to stagger, and quickly and virtually invariably leading to death. It is spread when animals directly consume tissue, particularly nervous tissue, of other animals.
It is caused by a prion, the same class of agent that causes scrapie in sheep and kuru in human beings.
Until BSE turned up, cattle were not known to be susceptible to prion diseases. They do not generally eat flesh of any kind.
Now that yields must be maximized, to maximize profit, animals are given more and more concentrate. Cereals are the traditional protein source.
But it can be cheaper to make protein concentrate from bits of dead animals, including dead cows.
Whatever is cheapest must, of course be done. So in recent decades, cows have been turned into cannibals. Not nice; but that’s modern business.
In the 1980s it was found that cattle flesh can contain rogue prions which spread like wildfire. They also spread to humans who had eaten cattle flesh – in the form of vCJD (variant Creutzfeld-Jacob) disease, related to kuru.
Variant CJD kills people just as surely and horribly as BSE kills cattle. 100,000 people might be infected with the prion which has a very long incubation period and several have died already.
Whatever way you look at it, the BSE-vCJD episode has been a disgrace: thoroughly bad practice that should have been condemned on grounds of common sense and common decency.
Britain’s other great gift to modern agriculture came in 2001: the biggest epidemic in history of foot and mouth disease (FMD), caused by a virus.
Because Britain’s livestock are not vaccinated against it, the virus found very rich pickings. It infected animals on 2030 UK farms and spread to Holland and France.
Four million animals were killed, and were burned in huge pyres. The overall cost was put at £10 billion, about 1% of Britain’s GDP.
Britain’s whole agricultural system is run on a wing and a prayer. If modern livestock production had been designed by a crack team of pathogens, they could scarcely have done the job better,
Yet there is worse. Most destructive by far is that cut-price agriculture puts people out of work. It is so important it requires us, humanity to rethink the way we are structuring the entire world.
Unemployment is the road to poverty. If all the world followed the western way of farming up to two billion people worldwide would be without livelihood.
More westernization: high tech and the global market, are guaranteed to create poverty on a scale than even in this miserable world is still hard to conceive.
In short, although capitalism in some form or other may still offer the world its best options, the present, simplified, consciously amoral form of it is highly destructive.

The illusion of cheap food

There is no such thing as cheap food. We can be sure that some person or society or animal or landscape, somewhere along the supply chain, is being screwed.
Some farmer is working for less than the cost of production; his workers are paid slave wages; the animals are packed into cages with the lights dimmed, and a body-full of growth promoters; some hillside is being eroded, some forest felled, some river polluted – and all the creatures who used to live in those hills and forests and rivers, and all the people who enjoyed them and made their living from them, are being swept aside.
The food is cheap only because the true costs are not taken into account. Sooner or later, all of us will be picking up the bill.
Half a century ago when their food was still great, French people spent 30% of their income on food. Why not? They built their lives around it – and very civilized they were too.
The British at present spend only 8% of their income on food and still “demand” that it should be cheaper. Why? Perhaps because so much of it is rubbish, and the less you spend on it the better.
We should question the sanctimonious argument that food must be cheap for the sake of the poor. In countries like Britain and the US, both fabulously rich by world standards, we should ask, “Why do they have poor people at all?” The answer is injustice.
Many people in these rich countries remain poor because the economy is designed above all to ensure that some people are extremely rich.
The economy is designed to be maximally competitive but is not designed to be equitable.
The antidote to poverty is to give a damn, and create economies with fairer shares.
The answer is not to be cruel to animals, or to screw farmers into the ground, or to fell forests and pollute rivers. These are the methods of the scoundrel.
In short, the globalised market is demonstrably bad for agriculture. Farmers are in the front-line, and they are suffering already. In South Korea the suicide rate has become horrendous – and as globalisation bites they will suffer more. Farmers and their families, worldwide, account for about four-tenths of all humanity.
Agriculture that really works and is sustainable needs good farmers, and plenty of them. It needs to be labour intensive.
The economic system that is making it impossible to be labour intensive is killing all of us.

Can we do better?

The short answer, I believe, is yes. Various think-tanks and individuals around the world are on the case, taking their lead both from ecologists and from professional economists.
They include Britain’s New Economics Foundation, co-founded by James Robertson and his wife Alison Pritchard.
The task before us is not to confront big governments and the corporates, for that is merely exhausting. We need to create viable and clearly superior alternatives, and allow the status quo to wither on the vine.
In the last chapter I discuss how we might bring the necessary change about within the specific and crucial context of food.
In the next, penultimate chapter I want to broaden the discussion and ask what a society would look like if it really did have an economy geared to its own wellbeing, and really was concerned for its own children and for the world as a whole.
Such a society would, in fact, be agrarian.

Chapter 5: The New Agrarianism

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