On the eve of war, farming in Britain remained essentially its old nineteenth-century self. With cheap food imports available from overseas, British farmers had coasted along for years, and the nation’s half-million farms were mostly of the small-scale ‘Old McDonald’ variety, with a few cows, pigs and chickens and some arable land. The nearest most came to progress was a carthorse; there were still 640,000 working the land in 1939, as opposed to just 100,000 tractors.64 But when German U-boats cut off Atlantic supply lines, the inadequacies of British farming were made all too apparent. The country suffered its worst food shortages in more than a century. The famous ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, in which patches of land as unlikely as Kensington Gardens went under the plough, got the nation through the crisis, but after the war, the Attlee government was determined that Britain should never be as vulnerable again. The 1947 Agriculture Act was the result: a licence to slash, dump and spray in the name of increased productivity.
The last great transformation of the British countryside now took place, as the land was cleared of obstacles, enriched with fertilisers and doused in DDT in a bid to make the nation self-sufficient in food. In the 50 years after the war, Britain lost an estimated 190,000 miles of hedgerow, 97 per cent of its flower meadows and 60 per cent of its ancient woodlands.65 But dramatic though the changes were, they were only half the story. The rest became apparent in 1962 with the publication of Silent Spring, an explosive investigation into the effects of DDT by the American biologist Rachel Carson. Carson showed that by indiscriminately killing off virtually all insect life, DDT had a devastating effect not only on its intended victims, but on the rest of the food chain too, passing directly into birds and eventually into humans, causing cancers and other diseases. Carson argued that in the future, the spring would be silent, because there would be no birds left to sing.
The book brought the predictable howls of protest from the chemical lobby, led by the US biochemical company Monsanto, which published a pamphlet entitled The Desolate Year, rubbishing Silent Spring and describing the devastation that would be caused if pesticides were not used. However, Carson’s evidence was enough to persuade the American and European governments to ban the use of DDT on crops – which, had this been Hollywood, should have been the end of the story. Instead, it was just the beginning. Far from waning, the use of indiscriminate pesticides, including DDT, has increased in the developing world, with all the predictable side effects. According to the World Health Organisation, between one and five million pesticide poisonings take place every year, leading to 20,000 deaths, virtually all in developing countries.66
Mad Cows and Englishmen
For 40 years after the war, British consumers enjoyed ever-cheaper food, blissfully unaware of the crises brewing in the farming industry. Tough times make for tough attitudes, and for a nation recovering from austerity, the prospect of cheap food was too attractive to quibble about how it was produced. Battery farming was introduced with barely a murmur of public protest; the fact that animals were being pumped full of hormones and antibiotics – and fed the ground-up remains of their fellows – went unnoticed. British farming had entered its post-industrial, invisible phase.
For a while, as yields rose and prices fell, everything in the garden seemed rosy. But then it was payback time. From Edwina Currie’s salmonella-infected eggs in 1988, to BSE in 1992 and the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001, British farming was hit by a series of scandals and plagues of truly biblical proportions. The crises couldn’t have come at a worse time for British farmers, already struggling to survive in the global market, but the Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming, chaired by Sir Donald Curry in 2001, wasn’t very sympathetic. The Commission delivered a damning verdict on the state of British farming, calling it ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘unsustainable’, and blaming subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for masking its inefficiencies. The CAP should be abolished, the report concluded, and farmers left to sink or swim in the global market. Farmers would have to adapt: become entrepreneurs, salesmen, land managers. Not exactly the skills your typical dairyman or herdsman went into the business for 40 years ago – which is roughly when most of them did. The average age of a British farmer today is 59.
These days, few people outside France have much good to say about the CAP. Set up in 1960 in the aftermath of postwar recovery, it was concerned primarily with ensuring food security in Europe. But the policy was soon attracting critics. Subsidies encouraged farmers to overproduce, creating the notorious ‘wine lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’ of the 1970s. By 1975, the Common Market had half a million tonnes of unshiftable butter on its hands: enough, as the Monster Raving Loony Party pointed out, to make a ski slope for Eddie the Eagle.67 There was a more sinister side to the surpluses too: export subsidies were used to encourage farmers to ‘dump’ surplus food on developing nations at cut-price rates, so putting their competitors out of business. Subsequent decades saw various attempts to reduce food surpluses in Europe: limits on production were first introduced during the 1980s, and in the 1990s ‘set-aside’ payments were made to farmers to let their land lie fallow.
For all its labyrinthine muddle, the main effect of the CAP in Britain over the past two decades has been to disguise the fact that the government has lost interest in preserving food production in this country. That has left supermarkets free to engage in a cut-throat ‘race to the bottom’, screwing farmers to the point of bankruptcy. In the 10 years to 2005, more than half the dairy farmers in Britain went out of business, and livestock producers are finding it increasingly uneconomic to farm here. Much of our meat now comes from Brazil, Argentina and Thailand, where lower welfare standards and cheap labour costs make it up to five times cheaper to produce.68 Unless something changes soon, there won’t be any livestock left in Britain – or any farmers either.
The question of how Europe should feed itself remains unclear. To keep local farmers going by subsidising them to produce mountains of food doesn’t make much sense. The trouble is, neither does simply abandoning food production to the global market. Apart from the obvious wastefulness of ‘food miles’ (and the oft-forgotten issue of food security), urban demand for cheap food is destroying the planet. While producer nations fiercely defend their right to exploit their natural resources, just as we did in the West, the scale of destruction involved in farming today is of an entirely new order. Modern agribusiness is all to do with short-term profit, and nothing to do with stewardship of the land. As the Amazonian rainforest goes up in smoke to make way for beef and soya, or the forests of Borneo (the last natural habitat of the orang-utan) are destroyed to create palm-oil plantations, our cheap food is costing us far more than money. An estimated half of the world’s species of anything you care to mention lives in tropical rainforest, including all the countless nameless things we haven’t discovered yet. Who is to say what obscure Amazonian toad or Bornean fungus might not possess a natural cure for cancer? It is not just native tribespeople and orang-utans we are destroying, but all the unknown things that live alongside them – all the unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.69
Free trade may have a beautiful economic logic to it, but as history tells us, beautiful economic logic doesn’t necessarily make for a beautiful world. Rather the opposite, in fact. An estimated 1.7 million hectares of Amazonian rainforest are currently lost to farmland every year, and a staggering 20 million hectares of existing arable land to salination and soil erosion. Yet despite all that destruction, we aren’t managing to feed the world. During the second half of the twentieth century, global food production increased by 145 per cent – the equivalent of 25 per cent extra per person worldwide – yet 850 million people face hunger every day.70 It doesn’t make much sense, but then very little about the modern food industry does.
Constable Country
If you look at Britain from the air, it seems inconceivable that we don’t produce most of our own food here. The landscape is overwhelmingly green; the cit
ies tiny in comparison with the irregular patchwork of fields stretching from coast to coast. Seventy per cent of the nation consists of farmland – so if we’re not going to grow food in it any more, what exactly are we going to do with it? One answer, according to the Curry Report, is to make it somewhere nice for city-dwellers to spend their weekends:
In a small island, a rich and varied countryside is a precious resource for us all – including those who are not privileged to live there. An antidote to busy modern life. A place for Sunday walks; a chance to ‘recharge the batteries’ surrounded by nature.71
All well and good – except that, after years of being adapted to produce large quantities of food as cheaply and efficiently as possible, the British countryside doesn’t have a huge amount of ‘nature’ left in it:
Beyond any doubt the main cause of this decay has been the rise of modern, often more intensive, farming techniques. Agriculture was once environmentally benign, and a healthy and attractive countryside was a relatively cost-free by-product. The practices that delivered this benefit for society are often not now economic. Farming practice and the familiar English landscape have diverged.72
The solution, concluded the report, was to stop subsidising farmers to produce food, and pay them to manage the countryside instead. Which is where we are now. In 2005, the government ‘decoupled’ farming subsidies from food production. From now on, instead of being paid to grow food, farmers would be paid to prettify the countryside and encourage wildlife. They would be given a flat rate according to the size of their farm, and could apply for bonus payments for providing wildlife habitats, planting woodland and hedgerows and so on. So there you have it. In modern Britain, an attractive countryside is worth paying for, but local food isn’t.
Which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all. The British countryside is a working landscape, the product of countless agricultural revolutions driven by urban demand. It is a landscape made by food, and those parts of it we find pretty are mostly the accidental by-products of the way we farmed in the past. The Curry Report insists that ‘the countryside is not a rural Disneyland’, yet its recommendations are likely to produce just that. It is all very well – indeed highly desirable – to have a rural landscape teeming with wildlife, but without food production alongside it, such a landscape would not only be fake, it would be unsustainable. The report says it wants to reconnect food production with the countryside, but is silent on the question of how that is to be achieved, when most of the food we eat in Britain today produces anything but beauty – hell on earth, more like. If we want a rich and varied landscape on our doorstep, we are going to have to start eating as though we mean it.
One of the ironies of British attitudes towards the countryside is that arguably our most famous image of it – John Constable’s The Hay Wain, painted in 1821 – itself depicts a rural way of life that was disappearing. A contemporary of Cobbett’s, Constable could see the farming communities near his home at Dedham Vale on the Suffolk/Essex border were under threat from industrialisation, and he sought to save them by painting the landscape he loved so that others might fall in love with it too. The Hay Wain shows a perfect English summer’s day: scudding clouds sail over a flaxen meadow, oaks rustle in the breeze, a team of carthorses cools off in a stream. The immediacy of the image comes from Constable’s ability to capture the constantly changing light and mood of the British weather: ‘No two days are alike,’ he wrote, ‘nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world.’ Standing in front of The Hay Wain, one can almost feel the breeze on one’s cheek, hear the horses neigh, smell the hay. Constable makes us see the world his way, through a window as manipulative as any TV screen. But, as with all pastoralist imagery, the painting’s beauty masks a desperate reality. Rural life in Britain was already on its knees, squeezed out by the economies demanded by urban markets and competition from abroad. When it comes to food, some things never change.
Today, with farmers fast disappearing from the scene, the British countryside is starting to look to a growing number of people like a large piece of valuable real estate. Many, quite understandably, are asking why, if we are not going to be farming it any more, we need to keep all that green stuff empty. With a chronic housing shortage in the south-east, the sanctity of the green belts is coming under increasing pressure. Meanwhile others are looking to turn the countryside into a business opportunity. ‘Constable Country’ is set to become a global brand, with the proposed Horkesley Park Heritage and Conservation Centre, a £20 million leisure complex with shops, cafés and even an ‘art experience’ (a genuine Constable painting) at its heart. The centre, which lists as its main content an ‘interactive interpretation experience of the Life and Times of John Constable’, hopes to attract 750,000 visitors a year. The proposals have caused an uproar, with English Heritage, owners of nearby Flatford Mill (the original scene of The Hay Wain), worried that the tiny site, which already attracts 200,000 visitors a year without any publicity at all, will be completely swamped.
Projects like Horkesley Park highlight how detached we have become from rural life in Britain. By turning our countryside into a heritage theme park and buying all our food from abroad, we might think we are getting the best of both worlds, whereas what we are actually getting is the worst. While we prettify and petrify our own back yard, our eating habits are despoiling those of others. Like the picture of Dorian Gray turning nasty in the attic, we are letting a hidden world bear the brunt of our urban lifestyles, while we pretend those consequences don’t exist. Never mind pastoralism – what we are practising is Nimbyism, and on a global scale.
No Business Like Agribusiness
With its rural depopulation, land reforms and economies of scale, the English agricultural revolution paved the way for modern agribusiness. Today, rural communities all over the world are being transformed, with traditional mixed farming methods giving way to large-scale monocultural production. Peasants are a threatened species. Although there are still 700,000 small-scale farms in India, that figure is expected to drop by half in the next 20 years, and the story is the same all over Asia. As Western patterns of urbanisation are adopted worldwide, so are our far-from-perfect methods of feeding ourselves.
Technical advances in farming are nothing new. Farmers have always sought ways to increase yields by improving the seeds they sow, and at first glance, the genetic modification of crops just seems like the latest step in an age-old tradition. The development of plants to make them more resistant to disease, for example, should theoretically be an entirely benign and important use of science. But recent developments in GM have taken it in a very different direction. Cell-invasion technology, in which new DNA is ‘smuggled’ into a host gene, now allows engineers to interfere with the very life-force of a plant. And if that seems a little sinister, how does this sound: ‘terminator technology’, in which plants are bred with ‘suicide genes’ so that they die after just one germination? For thousands of years, farmers have saved their seeds, selectively breeding them over time to create a better crop. But if modern seed companies get their way, grain, like cars, will soon have an inbuilt obsolescence. Farmers who want to sow next season’s crop will have to buy next year’s model – it will be a case of germinate, and terminate. If Justus von Liebig thought he was ‘sinning against the Creator’, one wonders what he’d call what we’re doing now.
Modern agribusiness isn’t just about producing food, it is about maximising the profit to be made from it – and after a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1980 that the patenting of life was permissible, there has been plenty to be made from GM.73 Ever since then, the US biotechnical company Monsanto has been doing just that, accumulating more than 11,000 patents on genetically modified seeds, giving them a 95 per cent share of the global market. As the film-maker Deborah Koons Garcia documented in her 2004 film The Future of Food, the company is ruthless in asserting its rights of ownership. Farmers unlucky enough to
have land neighbouring Monsanto’s are frequently sued by the company for illegal possession of their seed if it is found to have accidentally blown over in the wind.
Unsurprisingly, Monsanto has attracted plenty of criticism for its bully-boy tactics, but its lobby is a powerful one. Several board members have served on the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has taken a remarkably soft line on GM testing. Now, thanks to something called TRIPS (the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement), companies like Monsanto can claim patents on life all over the world.74 As the Indian farming campaigner Vandana Shiva points out, that is not good news for millions of farmers in the developing world. Not only is the ancient practice of farmers saving their own seed under threat, but those who take out loans to buy expensive seed and fertiliser are finding themselves in a spiral of debt. Worse still, many of the crops they buy are failing. Designed in a laboratory somewhere in the USA, many of the crops turn out to be unsuited to the conditions in which they are actually grown. For the first time in history, Indian farmers – who are not exactly unused to hardship – are committing suicide in their tens of thousands.75 As Shiva observes, when food production goes global, small farmers are the first to go.
Eating Oil
Whatever your agricultural persuasion, it is hard to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with the way we’re feeding ourselves now. One doesn’t have to look very far for the physical evidence: deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, poisoning and pollution – it all speaks for itself. Our food may seem cheap, but that is only because the price we pay for it doesn’t reflect its true cost. The damage is accounted for elsewhere. One recent study by Essex University found that the annual cost of cleaning up the chemical pollution caused by British agriculture was £2.3 billion a year – almost as much as farmers themselves got back in income.76
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 6