Feeding People is Easy Part 5

Book review

In Part 5 of Feeding People is Easy, Colin Tudge points out that: “Economic growth – rise in GDP – has become the prime index not simply of “progress” but of “development”: an even grander concept. Traditional farms do not make as much money as factories and call-centres and sweatshops may do and so they must be swept aside. The agricultural work-force is being replaced as quickly as can be arranged by heavy machinery, industrial chemistry and, now, biotech. Agrarian societies – built around labour-intensive  farming – have become the world symbol of backwardness.” “We need the new agrarianism for four main reasons. First, the world needs agriculture of the enlightened kind – designed expressly to feed people, and to look after the fabric of the world; and since enlightened agriculture requires skill and is complicated, it needs a lot of hands on deck. Contrariwise – the second reason to be agrarian – low-labour farming is extremely risky. Thirdly, farming is still the world’s biggest employer by far – and if we look at the world’s resources realistically, we see immediately that it always must be. Finally, if people don’t live in the countryside they have to live in the cities – and the cities are already overwhelmed. Modern farms are as big as possible and are typically devoted to single crops – the approach known as “monoculture” – so that the land can be prepared and the crops harvested by the biggest possible machines. Monocultures are extremely vulnerable. All the individual plants are susceptible to the same strains of disease and infection  that can attack any one of them is potentially able to wipe out the whole lot. So the crops need or are perceived to need extra quantities of herbicide, fungicide, and pesticide; and since labour is cut to the bone there is no time to assess the crops to see if particular pests are in practice causing problems and so the toxic brew must be applied prophylactically, in anticipation of possible outbreak, just by following the manufacturers’ instructions. Meanwhile the copses and hedges that wildlife need and the patches of horticulture which in the Third World in particular people depend upon both for gastronomic variety and for micronutrients, are rooted out. They get in the way of the machines. The land is deemed too valuable to waste on human communities and ways of life, or on the survival of wildlife. There are profits to be made.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING                                    2007

PART V

Chapter 5: The New Agrarianism

• In the main, in these secular days, “progress” is taken to mean industrialization – the replacement of human labour and of craft with machines and factories; organization – the government knows where you live, and so can ensure that you pay tax; urbanization, for cities are much tidier than higgledy-piggledy villages and farms; and increase in wealth, measured as “Gross Domestic Product”, or GDP.
• Economic growth – rise in GDP – has become the prime index not simply of “progress” but of “development”: an even grander concept.
• Traditional farms do not make as much money as factories and call-centres and sweatshops may do and so they must be swept aside.
• The agricultural work-force is being replaced as quickly as can be arranged by heavy machinery, industrial chemistry and, now, biotech.
• Agrarian societies – built around labour-intensive  farming – have become the world symbol of backwardness.
• Small farmers worldwide are perceived as an encumbrance, almost as a disease: a strain on the economy; an insult to the modern ideal of the designer tee-shirt and the cappuccino.
• They are also perceived to be unhappy – suicide worldwide has reached epidemic proportions.
• For reasons that seem to me inescapable, human beings have very little chance of getting through this present century and into the time beyond unless our overall economy remains agrarian.
• The task for humanity is not to sweep the agrarian way of life aside but to make it work.

 

Why must the world be agrarian?

• We need the new agrarianism for four main reasons.
• First, the world needs agriculture of the enlightened kind – designed expressly to feed people, and to look after the fabric of the world; and since enlightened agriculture requires skill and is complicated, it needs a lot of hands on deck.
• Contrariwise – the second reason to be agrarian – low-labour farming is extremely risky.
• Thirdly, farming is still the world’s biggest employer by far – and if we look at the world’s resources realistically, we see immediately that it always must be.
• Finally, if people don’t live in the countryside they have to live in the cities – and the cities are already overwhelmed.
• Modern farms are as big as possible and are typically devoted to single crops – the approach known as “monoculture” – so that the land can be prepared and the crops harvested by the biggest possible machines.
• Monocultures are extremely vulnerable. All the individual plants are susceptible to the same strains of disease and infection  that can attack any one of them is potentially able to wipe out the whole lot.
• So the crops need or are perceived to need extra quantities of herbicide, fungicide, and pesticide; and since labour is cut to the bone there is no time to assess the crops to see if particular pests are in practice causing problems and so the toxic brew must be applied prophylactically, in anticipation of possible outbreak, just by following the manufacturers’ instructions.
• Meanwhile the copses and hedges that wildlife need and the patches of horticulture which in the Third World in particular people depend upon both for gastronomic variety and for micronutrients, are rooted out. They get in the way of the machines.
• The land is deemed too valuable to waste on human communities and ways of life, or on the survival of wildlife. There are profits to be made.
• Farming that is maximally industrialized uses enormous amounts of fuel; and since masses of any one kind of food are produced all in one place it then has to be shipped, and sometimes jumbo-jetted, around the world.
• All this while the oil-wells are running dry and the atmosphere is turned into a greenhouse by surplus CO2.
• Monocultural farming also lacks versatility – a few crops with the same genes grown on the largest possible scale. Yet in times of climate change versatility is a prime requirement.
• A six-year-old could work that out. But not the powers-that-be, fixated on whatever is cheapest, now.
• It is with livestock that the dangers of low-labour farming are most evident. Traditionally, a farmer might keep a dozen dairy cows as one component of a mixed farm.
• Typically, dairy cows on traditional farms lived a dozen years or so, producing 10 calves along the way, each birth followed by a lactation in which each cow produced 2500-4000 litres of milk (500 to 800 gallons) over 10 months.
• In modern, industrial dairy units one worker may “manage” 120 cows or more, each of which is typically expected to produce at least 5000 litres in each 10-month lactation.
• These benighted animals are lucky to survive two lactations, let alone 10. 1.8 lactations is the current British average.
• Although the modern cows and the machines that milk them and the drugs that keep them roughly on their feet cost a fortune, the overall system is “economic” because there are so few employees and the output is so enormous and besides, in the European Union and the US, such systems are subsidized with taxpayers’ money.
• We taxpayers-qua-consumers are rewarded in turn, or so the policy makers deem to be the case, with milk that sells in supermarkets for less than bottled water.
• Also, some of us have shares in the companies that are making a fortune from such exercises, or our pension schemes do.
• In the United States, multistoried piggeries with a million animals are now almost commonplace and, again supported by taxpayers’ money, they are planned for Europe.
• The cruelty of such units both to livestock and employees beggars belief while the pollution problems are horrendous. A million-head piggery produces as much sewage as London.
• The companies who create the nightmare can bend the law to absolve themselves blame, and carry on as normal, if they are big enough.
• The epidemics of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease that were Britain’s contribution to world farming during the last decades of the 20^th century, resulted entirely from the perceived need to cut costs, and then to cut costs again.
• Most important, though, is the third reason for keeping people on the land. It employs people. Follow the path of the modern progressives and we will put nearly half the world’s workforce out of a job.
• Unemployment is the royal road to poverty. The more we contrive to industrialize and monetize the world’s farming in the spurious cause of “modernization”, the more we create poverty.

 

How many farmers is enough?

• In Rwanda and Uganda 90% of the workforce works on the land. In Angola it is 80%. We can all agree that this is too many. The Rwandans and Ugandans agree with this too: this is not high-handed European imperialist talk.
• The 10% or 20% who are not on the land are not enough to fill all the other jobs that societies need.
• Farmers need other people doing other things both to supply them with a market and to supply life’s other needs and pleasures.
• On the other hand, no one who is not steeped exclusively in money, can possibly suppose that it is good to employ only 1% of people on the land full time, as has become the case in Britain and the US.
• What would be the ideal proportion of people to work the land in any one country? Since two billion people worldwide are working on farms – about one in three of all of us – this ought to be the subject of urgent debate. Every other social issue seems dwarfed by it.
• One of the most alarming features of the modern world and of the powers-that-be who run it is that the really important questions are not discussed – and indeed are not even conceived.
• In the Third World as a whole, 60% of the workforce are on the land. We may reasonably guess that the total Indian population that is directly dependent  on farm labour is around 600 million – far more than the total population of the newly expanded European Union.
• In recent years the British government has been encouraging Indian agriculture to industrialise, but that would put at least 250 million people out of work.
• India has an IT industry of world class, but it employs just 60,000 people, all of them graduates. Millions, doubtless are employed in tourism.
• Modern western life is tolerable if you are up to speed economically. Not otherwise. But as everyone surely knows these days, it would take the resources of three planets Earth to raise everyone on Earth to the material standards of the average Brit, and five or more earths to bring us all up to the average Californian; so the dream of western wealth for all is obviously a mirage.
• As Gandhi pointed out, Britain depended for its meteoric industrial rise on the wealth of its empire – the countries that now form much of the Third World. Who, asked Gandhi rhetorically, will be the Third World’s empire?
• Only after Britain’s factories and all that goes with them had been up and running for the better part of two centuries did Britain finally industrialise its agriculture, and remove the traditional farm workforce.
• If and when Rwanda or indeed India have industries that are truly able to employ the people who now work on the land, then will be the time to invite them into the cities.
• To destroy the traditional farms and the employment they provide before there are such industries seems to me careless to the point of wickedness.
• But there never can be such industries on the scale required. The Earth simply isn’t big enough to supply the necessary resources.
• In particular, the industries of the west have been fueled by fossil fuels that have been superabundant and ridiculously cheap, and those days are past.
• Yet people are being urged with all possible vigour to industrialize their agriculture and leave the land. Again, the sheer lack of grasp among the people who have the most influence beggars belief.
• And where are the ex-farmers and their families supposed to live? In 2006, for the first time in the world’s history, the number of people in cities equaled the number in the countryside.
• By 2050, on present tends, two-thirds will be in the cities. The population in cities will then equal that of the whole population of the present world. At least a dozen cities will have more than 50 million people each.
• It is already clear that the cities cannot cope. According to the United Nations a billion worldwide are living in urban slums. The priority in China, as everywhere, is to make the countryside agreeable.
• I suggest as a working hypothesis that the rural workforce in any one country should not be greater than 50% or less than 20%. India is probably on course already.
• Mere tweaking of policies is not what’s called for. A whole new mind-set is needed.

 

Local produce, self-reliance, and fair trade at last