Green farming in a green land

Green farming in a green land

Response to government consultation on farming October 2001

Bert Bruins

With thanks to Caroline Lucas MEP
(Green Party, South East England)
and Lord Beaumont of Whitley, Green Party speaker on agriculture, fisheries and food

Summary
1. The brief given by the Labour government to the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food is inherently flawed, self-contradictory, and precludes the drawing of sound social, economic and ecological conclusions. Free trade dogma are harming farmers, economies and ecosystems both at home and abroad. Current government policies are exacerbating exploitative and unsustainable economic conditions, and will only help British farming stumble from crisis to crisis. The resurgence and health of British agriculture demand a wholehearted conversion to Green policies.

A holistic approach
2. An answer to the questions asked by the government, such as "what are the problems?" and "what can be done to make them better?" has to be holistic, that is to take in the lessons and conclusions from many other policy fields. In modern parlance: we need joined-up thinking to tackle the short and long term problems facing farming and food production.

3. The Green Party believes that many of the most glaring problems that face the world today are connected and need to be understood in that way to find an answer to each of them. The growing discrepancy in wealth between the North and South in the global economy, the threat to our global ecosystems as exemplified by climate change, damage to the ozone layer, dwindling fish stocks in the oceans, and the escape from the land by family farms the world over, do have common causes. Our response has been written with this in mind.

An exploitative world economy
4. The Green Party believes that despite great scientific and democratic progress since the start of the Industrial Revolution, our society's relationship with the Earth and many of its inhabitants is still largely exploitative. We see the role of so-called Third World economies (the South) still essentially as client economies of the North, despite decolonisation. The fact that many of these economies are still largely agricultural and contain the bulk of the world's farmers is relevant to the debate on the crisis of British farming. The South has for decades seen the relative value of many of its raw materials drop, and yet Northern economic institutions like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) keep pushing these countries to produce more exports to finance industrialisation and/or create greater wealth for their citizens. Some of these export products (eg protein crops) are major feed crops for British farmers and form another link between problems in the North and the South. Others do compete directly with UK produce (eg, increasingly, meat products)

5. The Green Party does not believe that the free trade agenda, as advocated by the WTO and the UK government, can deliver sustainable growth for the South nor the North. We therefore find your brief to "advise the Government on how we can create a sustainable, competitive and diverse farming and food sector (…) consistent with the Government's aim for (…) increased trade liberalisation" inherently flawed and skewed. It is important to remember that one of the main justifications given for unlimited free trade is the purported economic gains resulting from specialisation. This goes directly against the government's wish in the same sentence to create a "diverse farming sector".

6. We have to address the inherently exploitative nature of the North's economic system with regard to physical and human resources if we want to address the questions that you are asked to advise on. The Green Party does not claim to have all the answers to these complex problems, but we do believe that properly describing the challenge that we face is essential for us to get the right answers. We do know that increased global compassion and cooperation has to be part of the solution.

The many crises of British farming
7. Farming in the UK has a long tradition of economic crisis. If it can be said that the agricultural revolution of the late 18th century led to many worthwhile innovations in British farming and a relatively healthy, albeit often unequal, farming economy, the influx of cheaper American grain after the opening up of UK farming to free trade (the repeal of the Corn Laws) led to decades of farming malaise. It is worth noting that there was a trade-off here with free trade for industrial goods and cheap diets for workers in cities, from which Britain expected to benefit. But the health of the agricultural economy was essentially bartered for greater open markets for Britain's industrial goods.

8. Ignoring minor fluctuations in agricultural fortunes, the only good times for Britain's farmers since the mid-19th century have been times of war. Cut off from its dominions and colonies the UK relied heavily on its own farmers during the two world wars, and it can be argued that the price intervention and CAP of the post-war years coincided with the cold war. Now the cold war has been over for a while we are forgetting about the strategic reasons for maintaining national food self-sufficiency, and it is not accidental that farmers are feeling the result.

9. The second world war had also another side-effect in that it saw unprecedented pressure on farmers to industrialise their working methods. There had been a growing interest in working with the soil in a natural way before the war, as witnessed in the work of Soil Association founder Sir Albert Howard and biodynamic philosopher Rudolf Steiner. This was largely cut short during the war by ministry officials, who went as far as threatening requisition of farms that weren't using chemical fertilizers. Also much land was used for crops that hitherto had been used for other purposes.

10. This industrialisation of agriculture continued apace after the war, with for example thousands of farm horses being killed to be replaced with tractors. Productivity went up, but so did fossil fuel use and chemical use, such as pesticides and fertilizers. Also the amount of feed from abroad for livestock went up drastically, which has led to a system of agriculture that uses a large amount of external inputs to produce yields which are often only marginally (and by no means necessarily) larger than those of less industrial systems, such as organic farming.

11. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was the first widely heard warning against the dangers of chemical agriculture, as it showed the dramatic decline in wildlife in chemically farmed landscapes. The present growth of the organic farming movement can be largely traced back to the awareness that this book from the early 1960s raised.

12. It is now known that our intensive external input-rich system of farming has diminished wildlife and plant diversity, has polluted water reserves with nitrates and other farming chemicals and has led to a tenfold increase in fossil fuel use per acre since the war. Research also suggests that an English farmed acre requires at least two acres of supporting land elsewhere (mainly in the South, but also in the US). As we argued before, the Green Party does not believe, as the government does, that this is a beneficial economic interdependency with the world's poorer nations. Evidence is also growing that ME and related diseases in farmers can be traced back to poisoning by certain agrochemicals, such as organophophates.

13. The rampant growth of cross-continental freight (twenty times more food lorries cross the Channel now than 30 years ago) is also an issue with huge environmental implications.

Corporate control of the food chain
14. The agricultural sector is unique in that it has tens of thousands (billions worldwide) of small producers of raw resources, but extremely concentrated ownership of seed merchants, traders, processors and retailers. Only a very small slice of the value of the finished product ends up in the farmer's hands. Farmers in North and South share this undesirable position. Companies like Monsanto (seeds), Cargill (grain) and Unilever (food processing) are examples of companies that control disproportionate segments of the world's food chain. Four British supermarket giants share between them some 70 to 80% of the market in many products. The democratic and legal frameworks to regulate these giants in a globalised world economy do at present not exist. The economic bodies that debate world economic issues (WTO, G8) are notoriously undemocratic, and are in our eyes apologists, or even ideological tools, for a global agricultural economy that benefits the large operators, not the small farmer in North or South. This needs to change to make farming a healthy sector of the economy.

15. John Maynard Keynes wrote: "I sympathise, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than maximize, economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel - these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national." It is indicative of how much the present economic debate is dominated (on a political level at least) by neoliberal theorists, that this opinion by one of our greatest economists sounds so radical. It is not: for many reasons it is healthy and entirely reasonable to "bring the food economy home". The recent Foot and Mouth outbreak showed us just once more how disastrous it is, when a government has its hand tied to supra-national bodies (in this case the European Union), and cannot change a policy that is so blatantly failing. The Foot and Mouth crisis also showed to what extent export-oriented segments of the UK farming industry have a hold on government policy. This led to Guardian journalist and campaigner George Monbiot saying that "the National Farmers Union is the farmers' most dangerous enemy." We have spoken to many farmers who share this view.

16. When an economic theory (free trade) keeps being pushed, while it so pertinently fails to address the world's most pressing problems, such as food safety in the South, rampant growth in the use of fossil fuels, and the destruction of rural communities everywhere, something is amiss. The Green Party believes that both the economic debate and the democratic debate have been dangerously dominated by larger corporate interests, and a new agricultural policy that fails to address this will fail, because it will ignore one of the root causes of the agricultural crisis.

The proximity principle
17. There is a vibrant future for British farming if we adopt "the proximity principle". This means that we produce locally as much as can be produced locally. Although we haven't got many farmers left (at 1.5% of the workforce we have the world's smallest farming population, except for Bahrain), those we do have do care passionately about their profession. There are also many products that we under-produce, for example the UK only produces 5% of fruit consumed and less than 10% of its own timber. The latter may be classed as forestry and not be a traditional pursuit for many farmers, but we do believe that small- and medium-scale broadleaf and mixed forestry can play a part in a plan to revive UK farming. This would help to combat global warming, as would the introduction of other fuel crops. Fibre crops, such as hemp and flax, could also have a role to play in creating a vibrant farming economy. We would expect that in this scenario farming would actually see a considerable rise in people finding meaningful and sustainable employment in the sector.

18. Reducing the degree in which UK farming leans on external inputs would have to be part of any sustainable farming strategy. Organic principles, where farmers are encouraged to grow their own feed and use nitrogen-fixing crops and their animals' manure to maintain soil fertility, would go along way to dealing with this challenge.

19. We support added-value projects by farmers (on-farm processing), diversification where necessary, and promoting local food distribution networks. But the Green Party does also believe that intervention by national and international monopolies watchdog bodies is necessary to tackle the concentration of control over the food chain by far too few companies. While we question the wisdom of unfettered economic globalisation, while it is happening we need stronger international democratic controls over the global economy. Undemocratic organisations like the WTO and the G8 will not do.

20. In the words of American poet and rural campaigner Wendell Berry, unrestricted free trade "is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby 'freeing' the hounds". The Green Party hopes passionately that the Government's policy review will lead to steps to protect England's family farmers and environment against global predators. Environmental grants to help farmers look after the land while perpetuating support for globalisation would be an expensive solution that does not deal with some of the root causes of the problem.

21. Further information on Green Party agriculture policy can be found in the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society, at www.greenparty.org.uk/policy .

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