Feeding People is Easy Part 6

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Book review

In Part 6 of Feeding People is Easy, Colin Tudge points out that: “Poor countries are hopelessly trapped. The World Trade Organisation which is supposed to provide a level playing field for all is in reality controlled by the richest governments which in turn are beholden to corporates. On the other hand, if poor countries flout the WTO they are liable to find themselves bound in bilateral agreements with the US, on terms that are even less favorable.” “The only way out for poor countries is autonomy: not to be beholden to rich countries. If all countries were free to trade only in the commodities they had in excess, and for which they had guaranteed markets, the world would look very different.” “If countries like Ethiopia and Angola and virtually every country in Africa had new agrarian economies geared to their own local variety of enlightened agriculture then they could be self-reliant in food several times over.” “Enlightened agriculture leads to the new agrarianism which provides the best and freshest possible food and leads to national self-reliance worldwide which at last would provide the only basis for fair trading.” “Abandon the basic principles on which enlightened agriculture is based – common sense, common humanity, sound husbandry, and good biology – and we are bound to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of hunger, dependence, and global profligacy. This is exactly what we are doing.”

FEEDING PEOPLE IS EASY

COLIN TUDGE

PARI PUBLISHING                                    2007

PART VI

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

Though there would still be some specialist plantations and ranches under a system of enlightened agriculture the typical farm worldwide would be small, often family-run, and mixed: arable, horticultural, and pastoral all integrated with several or many kinds of crop or livestock in each.

  • The cuisine would vary region by region and season by season, but everywhere we would find the same, basic, unimprovable nutritional balance: plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety.
  • If all countries grew all the food they need, on their mixed farms, then they would become self-reliant in food. Self-reliant does not mean self-sufficient.
  • Self-sufficient means growing absolutely everything for yourself, and eschewing trade all together. In a world rooted in new agrarianism, there should still be trade in food. But it would be run on commonsense lines.
  • Common sense says that it is good to trade for all kinds of reasons, but it also says it is dangerous to rely utterly on trade. Absolute reliance on trade is the royal road to perpetual subservience.
  • Poor countries are hopelessly trapped. The World Trade Organisation which is supposed to provide a level playing field for all is in reality controlled by the richest governments which in turn are beholden to corporates.
  • On the other hand, if poor countries flout the WTO they are liable to find themselves bound in bilateral agreements with the US, on terms that are even less favorable.
  • Costa Rica no longer grows the maize and beans that are native to the country, and used to support the people, but instead buys them in from the US, where they are grown at several times the cost but are subsidized by the US taxpayers and sold in Costa Rica shops for far more than the old native grown crops.
  • Meanwhile the western leaders shed crocodile tears for the world’s poor and hungry and discuss very minor increases in aid, which they recover several times over in interest on spurious loans.
  • The only way out for poor countries is autonomy: not to be beholden to rich countries. If all countries were free to trade only in the commodities they had in excess, and for which they had guaranteed markets, the world would look very different.
  • If countries like Ethiopia and Angola and virtually every country in Africa had new agrarian economies geared to their own local variety of enlightened agriculture then they could be self-reliant in food several times over.
  • Enlightened agriculture leads to the new agrarianism which provides the best and freshest possible food and leads to national self-reliance worldwide which at last would provide the only basis for fair trading.
  • Abandon the basic principles on which enlightened agriculture is based – common sense, common humanity, sound husbandry, and good biology – and we are bound to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of hunger, dependence, and global profligacy. This is exactly what we are doing.

 

What do we do as the world warms up?

  • Global warming will produce uncertainty everywhere. Even if there is food to buy on the global market, who will be able to out-bid China, whose own fields seem all too likely to fail? The Gobi is currently encroaching on Beijing at 30-50 km a year.
  • For a country like Britain deliberately to run down its agriculture in a time of such global uncertainty seems like madness; and to encourage poorer countries to cut down on food crops just to grow non-food crops for export, again seems very like wickedness.

 

Can the new agrarianism be made to work?

  • Many surveys and statistics suggest that the world’s farmers are an unhappy lot and that their families take every opportunity to leave. Some other surveys suggest that rural life can be very agreeable indeed.
  • To be happy on a farm you need the right temperament; you need an interesting set-up; you need to know what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve; you don’t need to be ridiculously rich; you need to feel valued and not looked down upon.
  • The work on traditional farms can be mercilessly hard – and although mechanization helps in some ways, it makes things worse in others, because it can make the work so tedious.
  • When farms are properly mixed and geared to the local landscape and climate, they become extremely absorbing. If the farms are labour-intensive, as they must be to maintain the highest standards, then each farm becomes a community – and traditional villages, each a focus of several farms, are among the richest communities that humanity has devised. Villages provide the best environments for raising children.
  • Appropriate technology is what’s needed: appropriate to the small, mixed farm. Agriculture is basically a craft industry. The role of science should be to enhance the craft – not, as now, to replace it with rural factories.
  • There can be no technology more valuable to a new agrarian society than modern hi-fi and the internet. With these, you can live in the remotest corners and yet be in touch with all the world: weed the fields while listening to lectures from Harvard and working for your PhD, if that’s what you want to do.
  • Present systems of land inheritance and tenure often mitigate against all good sense.
  • The new agrarianism raises enormous problems but all are soluble. No other route makes sense.
  • So what are we going to do? I discuss at least the beginnings of change in the next chapter.

Chapter 6: Renaissance: The Worldwide Food Club and the College for Enlightened Agriculture

  • We need a new system – and we need new governance. Since the powers-that-be will not or cannot deliver what the world really needs, we, humanity, must dispense with them and assume governance ourselves.
  • I want to focus on the world’s food supply chain because the food supply chain is the thing we really have to get right – and if we do get it right then a great deal else that matters can begin to fall into place as well.

 

How can we take control of our own affairs?

  • There are three possible ways to change the status quo: by reform; revolution; and renaissance – rebirth, starting again.
  • Humanity needs and wants a new food-supply chain, so let’s just create it. We don’t need to ask the government’s for permission. We don’t need to persuade the corporates to do it for us. We just need to do it.
  • In truth, the process of Renaissance has already begun, through many of the groups that see themselves as reformers, trying to change the status quo.
  • The Renaissance that the world requires can at least be put in place simply by bringing together the many different initiatives that are already in train. The prime task is of coordination.
  • All that’s needed is a critical mass – and a critical mass can be quite small, at least to begin with. Majority (and hence, true democracy) can come later.
  • The thing we most need to get right – the food supply chain – is, in reality, the thing that each of us can most directly influence. Not everyone can be farmers, but we all can support those who are – I mean the ones that do it properly. And everyone can cook. Everyone can be a gourmet.
  • If a critical mass of us rediscovered the joys of cooking, the whole sorry superstructure of the present corporate-government-bureaucrat-technology food supply chain would begin to fall apart.
  • A prime task is to establish, worldwide, in every country, a food culture: a critical mass of people who really appreciate food, and will put themselves out for it.
  • Great cooking, sound nutrition, and the best kind of farming that is found in kindness and good biology go hand in hand. They are an inseparable trinity.
  • The food culture, though vital, is not enough by itself. My grandest practical proposal for the world’s renaissance is what I am calling the Worldwide Food Club.

 

The Worldwide Food Club

  • The worldwide Food Club is conceived as a cooperative of people at large who really care about food – truly informed consumers – and of food providers who truly desire to supply it: producers – farmers and growers; and preparers – cooks, brewers, bakers, butchers, charcutiers, picklers, caterers, restaurateurs. The emphasis is on ‘cooperative’.
  • It is not an exclusive club. Anyone can join. The only requirement is a dedication to excellence – not simply in the food itself, but in the underlying morality: it matters how the food has been grown, and where, and by whom, and who profits by it.
  • A future world that works has to be very different from the present one but that world can to a significant extent be created from elements that exist already.
  • Such a cooperative of like-minded suppliers and consumers, content to deal with each other, could become a significant force in the world as a whole.
  • I do not envisage that a world that works around and otherwise ignores the present powers-that-be is innately anarchic. Coordination and organization are needed.
  • Organization need not imply the kind of top-down hierarchies that we have now, dominated by people dedicated to power and to creation of wealth that reinforces power, and by intellectuals and experts who are content to go where the money is.
  • One model is the “neural net”: conglomerations of equal players who self-organise for ad hoc purposes, in ways that are good for individuals but never, like the modern-day corporates, acquire enough power to unbalance and redirect the whole world.
  • The spirit of the Worldwide Food Club – competent people relying on their own craft and cooperating to create a benign society, with no individual striving to be outlandishly rich or to dominate the rest – seems to me very much in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi.
  • The global free market will not do. But the far more subtle and deeply rooted philosophy of Gandhi will do very well.
  • In practice I see the Worldwide Food Club evolving in four phases: Phase 1: The Global exchange; Phase 2: Infrastructure; Phase 3: Material presence; Phase 4: A new-created world: Democracy at last. (Details provided.)

 

The College for Enlightened Agriculture

  • The task is not simply to create a new, democratic food supply chain, vital and momentous though this is. We also need to ensure that we do not allow the world to get into the same kind of mess again.
  • To do this, we need to ensure that the food chain and the world in general cannot again be taken over by particular vested interests and power-groups, whether political parties or vast commercial companies.
  • This requires continuing, hard thinking by people from a whole variety of different fields, from farming to soil chemistry to economics to moral philosophy – everything is relevant.
  • By definition, people from different fields acting together to a common theme form a college. What the world needs, I suggest, in addition to the Worldwide Food Club and providing its intellectual base, is the College for Enlightened Agriculture.
  • The kinds of questions that the members of the College should address must unfold as the thinking proceeds. But there seem to be two essential classes of questions: those that have to do directly with food and agriculture; and those that are concerned with infrastructure.
  • Here are two preliminary shortlists: (Details provided.)

 

Postscript

  • I attended a conference at a very fine farm that is both commercial and experimental: the farmers pioneer new approaches to husbandry, with special regard for animal welfare, but expect to make a living at the same time.
  • At present, farmers the world over are being asked – obliged, coerced, forced with the full might of the law – to conform to an economic system that demonstrably is disastrous for farming in particular and for humanity and the world in general.
  • The present British government does not “govern” in any worthwhile sense. It merely provides the clearest possible arena for corporates to operate in: and its standard solution to all the problems of all countries, including those of much-beleaguered Africa, is to encourage corporates to set up shop within their boundaries.
  • The economic system is most unlikely to produce a world that is secure and agreeable. It is not designed to do so, and indeed in many respects it seems intended to do the precise opposite – to sacrifice everything to the here-and-now advantage of a minority.
  • The only question seems to be whether enough of what’s worthwhile can survive to make any kind of rescue possible, when the present madness has run its course.
  • In all fields we are being asked to sacrifice much that is good – indeed, virtually everything that humanity has evolved this past few tens of thousands of years, our crafts and traditions and ways of life – in favour of a power structure that must be seen either to be mistaken to the point of absurdity, or cynical beyond measure.
  • The present economic system may well produce the best possible battleships or computers or motor cars. But it cannot possibly produce the best possible agriculture.
  • The world needs farming that is specifically designed to feed people, and to provide agreeable ways of life, and to look after the environment – what I am calling  Enlightened Agriculture.
  • If agriculture fails, we will all be dead in weeks. To compromise agriculture, indeed to wreck it, in favour of an economic system that clearly is not intended to serve the real needs of humankind, is the most extraordinary nonsense. Yet the nonsense prevails.
  • Agriculture must be geared to economic reality. But the economy in turn must be geared to biological and social reality. Clearly, at present, this is not the case.
  • The future of all humanity lies with people at large, including farmers, who can create a new food supply chain, distinct from the present-day economy devised by the powers-that-be.
  • The long-term task is to devise agriculture that rally can produce good food for ever (Enlightened Agriculture); to do so within a society that is agreeable to live in and is built around that agriculture (the New Agrarianism – based on science-assisted craft); and to devise an economic structure that is suited to the real needs of humanity and of the whole world (the New Capitalism).
  • The powers-that-be have lost the plot. Simply to follow their lead, to accept the status quo, and to contrive to plug ourselves into the system they have evolved, is suicide.

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