Farming for food security and biodiversity
In an extract from his foreword to Michel Pimbert’s new report for the IIED, Participatory research and on-farm management of agricultural biodiversity in Europe, Colin Tudge argues that farming must be approached from the premise that access to good food is a fundamental human right, and that it can feed the world and play a lead role in the global economy without compromising biodiversity.
Participatory research and on-farm management of agricultural biodiversity in Europe, by Michel Pimbert with a foreword by Colin Tudge, is published by IIED (May 2011) and is available to download free or in print.
It should be fairly straightforward to feed everyone who is ever liable to be born on this Earth, and to feed them to the highest standards of nutrition and gastronomy. We should be able to this without wrecking the rest of the world and driving our fellow creatures to extinction – farming can be wildlife friendly; for many creatures, farmland is a serious component of their habitat. Worldwide, agriculture is still by far the world’s greatest employer, and so it could – and should – remain. The jobs it supplies should be among the most absorbing and agreeable of all, and of high prestige. Most of today’s farmers work, as most farmers have over the past few hundred years, on small, mixed family farms – which still supply about 70 per cent of all the world’s food; 90 per cent in countries like Nigeria. Industrial farming that is now called “conventional” is anything but. It accounts for only 30 per cent of the total world output and has existed for only about a century – less than one per cent of the total known history of agriculture.
Of course, all farming could benefit from good science and appropriate technology – this is true for all human endeavours. But we could easily do the basics right now. To a very great extent the necessary knowledge, methods and skills are what traditional farmers have and practice as a matter of course.
But we are not feeding ourselves well. An estimated one billion out of the world’s seven billion people are chronically undernourished. Another billion suffer the “diseases of affluence”, of which obesity is the most obvious and diabetes is probably the most widespread and destructive. Our farming is not Earth-friendly. We are in the midst of a mass-extinction, for which agriculture is largely responsible. Half of all our fellow plant and animal species are estimated to be threatened. All the non-renewable main ingredients of crop production – soil, fresh water, phosphorus – are being squandered. Industrial – “conventional” – farming depends absolutely on oil, which is running out. However, this may be just as well because if we go on burning it at the present rate, we will wreck the climate, as is already obvious. There is a horrendous loss of farmers worldwide as family farms which were traditionally small and complicated, producing mixtures of crops and livestock, give way to big, ultra-simplified estates and plantations that are monocultural to the point of absolute uniformity, and that employ as few people as possible. Even most farmers in rich countries today are poor, being among the lowest-paid in their respective societies, almost always stressed, sometimes despised, often in poor health, and prone to suicide. Yet a handful in Europe and the US are very rich indeed – heavily supplemented by government or European subsidies.
The entire global food industry is extremely lucrative – one of the world’s biggest, as indeed it should be. Food remains the key to human existence as it always will—but the actual production of it has been virtually sidelined. Most of the wealth has shifted these past few decades out of farming and into food processing, distribution and retail. This is mostly under the heading of “value adding”, largely controlled by a few giant corporations and very rich individuals who swallow up more and more of the production and build increasingly bigger and ever more specialised industrial units, often with direct or indirect help from governments. Overall, this shift of wealth from the many to the few can, and should, be seen as a giant, systematised exercise in expropriation.
In essence, food production is a matter of biology: how much does the human species really need, and how much can the world produce—not just for the next few decades, but at least for the next 10,000 years. Food production is also, of course, a matter of morality: do we actually want to provide everyone in the world with good food, or are we content that the Devil should take the hindmost? Some, it seems, feel that while mass hunger is not exactly desirable, it is at least inevitable. If people are starving it must be because there are too many people.
However, agriculture is perceived these days not as an issue of biology and morality. It is seen, as the chill expression has it, simply as “a business like any other”. There is nothing wrong with business per se – we need not be anti-capitalist to abhor what is happening right now to the world – but it is surely wrong to add “like any other”. Many would say that access to good food is a fundamental human right: that to devise a system of farming that leaves people out in the cold – let alone a very fair proportion of the human race – is an absolute breach of human rights; an offence against humanity. This thought underpins Michel Pimbert’s report, and is endorsed by various branches of the United Nations.
Colin Tudget is co-founder of the Campaign for Real Farming and the College for Enlightened Agriculture. His latest book, Good Food for Everyone Forever, is published by Pari Publishing.
Dr. Michel Pimbert is currently Principal researcher and Team leader for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty at the UK based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
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I do seriously question how it can be “fairly straightforward to feed everyone who is ever liable to be born on this Earth, and to feed them to the highest standards of nutrition and gastronomy”. It is surely a dangerous “head in the sand” approach if we continue in our failure to address the need to halt then reverse unrestrained population growth (through a combination of education and economic measures).
Resource depletion, affordable housing shortages, pollution, food security, energy security, climate change, and congested transport systems are all made worse by the unsustainable population growth we are failing to address even ‘though the UN predicts there will be 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 – so what are we doing to prevent that nightmare of a prediction becoming a reality? There are environmental limits on this finite planet which we break at our peril. Living in harmony with the environment through a low carbon, resource efficient approach to the production and consumption of goods, services and food, and halting then reversing population growth are two sides of the same coin…