The global food economy, served and shaped via state and corporate control of the food chain, has resulted in unquantifiable levels of pollution, destruction and exploitation in every dimension of agriculture, from soil to seed, to plant, to animal and to man. In other words: our existence.

As we approach the second decade of the 21^st century, it is becoming abundantly clear that an entirely new vision, understanding and implementation is required in order for agriculture to truly serve its original purpose of feeding humanity (all peoples) with good quality, affordable and mostly local foods in ways that do not harm the environment.

In order to make this wholesale shift it is necessary to entirely step aside from State and corporate control of the food chain. No compromise is possible here. Maintaining and re establishing the genuine independence of farmers throughout the world is a prerequisite for our survival as sentient, healthy human beings.

Non participation in the corporately controlled global market place must, in order to be effective, be accompanied by the widespread implementation of localised, quality food production and consumption practices. Practices that bring into close proximity the food grower and the food consumer; at the same time – by-passing entirely, the corporate multiple chains that profit by keeping them separate. This is the only way that genuine accessibility of optimum condition foods and medicinal plants can be ensured for billions of people throughout the World.

Continuing to adhere to the present corporate and state controlled food and farming regimes means that:

• Farmer’s time honoured right to save their seeds and to cultivate, distribute and trade the produce resulting from these seeds will continue to be subverted, curtailed and stolen.
• People’s right to perpetuate the biodiversity of locally adapted native plants, herbs and animals will be denied.
• People’s rights to gain lawful access to unused or barren land for the purpose of growing food for their own consumption in ways that do not harm the environment will be blocked.
• People’s time honoured right to carry on the daily operations of good farming practice unhindered by state and corporate power structures, will be denied.

It is the obligation of head’s of state to consult the people, in advance, about any new laws or alterations of the current law and any political questions concerning agriculture.

“Farming for the People with the People” therefore calls for all farmers, growers and sympathetic citizens, to take back control over their destinies and to join together to free our agricultural practices from the corporate treadmill of destruction and despair to which they now are tied.

At the same time, we call upon the Polish government, and all national governments, to act NOW on the demands of the vast majority of their citizens to:

• Ban all forms of genetic engineering in agriculture, horticulture, silviculture and fisheries.
• Withdraw all financial support for factory farming regimes that dehumanise agriculture and debase the animal kingdom.
• Prohibit, without exception, any and all patenting of plants, animals, their traits and genes, as well as patents on breeding methods. Thereby making it unlawful to attempt to exercise control over biodiversity.

Every Country should have the right to protect its food sovereignty.

We call for a people led and people owned renaissance of agriculture. One which will liberate the creativity and ingenuity of man and draw inspiration from the time honoured peasant and family farming practices that still form the foundation of self sufficient, sustainable and ecological agricultural production throughout the world.

Please feel free to use and adopt in your Country!

This document was ratified on the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside (ICPPC) www.icppc.pl

during the seminar “Food Sovereignty, Self Sufficiency and the Family Farm”

November 20/21 2010.

Is this an example of the sort of ‘democracy’ that the US wishes to defend and promote throughout the world via the establishment of its 600-plus military bases in more than 60 Countries?

It’s truly shocking to read about the hysterical federal and police intimidation actions taken against ‘Rawsome’ in Los Angeles this June. An action that bluntly flaunts the law in order to impose the will of some corporate pirate determined to maintain a stranglehold on the food chain. This is a prime example of totalitarian state interference in the lives and activities of well meaning citizens.

Personally, I have not witnessed anything approaching this level of outright malevolence in Europe; nor have I heard of such incidences from others. However, there lurks in the background the barely hidden threat of heavy fines or even imprisonment for anyone considered to be participating in activities that might be deemed to be in breach of some EU or government ‘sanitary and hygiene’ food regulation. Plenty of farmers have already suffered under such impositions.

The ‘bacterialogical police’ are the long arm of corporate attempts to maintain dominance over the food chain. They operate at the behest of large supermarket chains that use their vast profits to lobby Brussels to introduce ever more draconian ‘standards’ upon independent family farms that fail to slot in to the monocultural centralised chain of command. Any form of ‘competition’ that might hold up attempts by big pharma and big agro to dominate the food chain – are not smiled upon. However, in Europe, ‘sophisticated propaganda’ is preferred to rule by the gun.

It may even be more effective. We have had ear tagged cattle and animal passports for more than 20 years. We have been put under the cosh of centralised bureaucracy ever since the European Union introduced “The Common Agricultural Policy” in phased instalments across Europe over the past 40 years. This has meant the virtual elimination of local abattoirs, local processing plants, agricultural supply shops, family seed businesses and countryside support organisations right across the EU. ‘Real Farms’ have disappeared at the same rate as trees in tropical rain forests and desert like monocultures have taken their place, just as the GM soy and palm oil plantations continue to replace the hacked down rain forests.

However, this seemingly relentless top-down heist to install a ‘one world food chain’ is meeting increasing resistance. Resistance from farmers and from ‘consumers’. A resistance that springs from a desire to ‘take back control’ of our basic rights to simple good food and authentic quality.

In the UK there are now more clandestine house cows than before the war. More and more people are keeping and raising domestic poultry, maintaining a pig and digging a vegetable plot. Raw milk is selling out more quickly than it can be produced and new producers are coming into the market. A little revolution is under way that threatens to open a substantial chink in the corporate and state armory.

There are entrepreneurial farmers getting together to establish a ‘grass fed’ marketing regime in response to people’s wish to purchase meat with real flavour and free range status. The word ‘local’ is getting a wider and wider airing as customers seek regional authenticity, more genuine choice and less food miles. Health concerns, brought about by obsessive ‘pharmaceutical fixes’ to all symptoms and a totally degraded food supply chain, are attracting considerably wider interest in natural remedies and organic foods. Even the British House of Parliament insists on organic food on its menu – while promoting GM research and supporting Codex attempts to close down natural remedy outlets and marginalise homeopathic medicine.

All in all, one can detect a simmering renaissance of agricultural diversity stirring amongst the stalwart monocultures of European agriculture and in the newly established smallholding revival culture. There appears to be a growing (and possibly subconscious) desire amongst many (mostly town dwellers) to get their hands in the earth. If this is so, then it is a genuine survival signal that has pushed its way to the surface in a sterilized and largely urbanised environment where living on additive loaded junk foods is part and parcel of everyday life – and a fast lane to hospitalisation.

None of this is to say that the corporate powers that dominate the food chain do not maintain their steely controls. They do. The massive profit driven budgets of the Tescos and Walmarts of this world ensure an endless stream of TV adverts that create a chloroform sense of ‘food conformity’ in the great majority; but a new awareness is growing. An awareness that stems from a rising number of independent thinking people who care about their health and that of their children.

The US is not the UK and the tide of totalitarian state intervention is less advanced in Europe than in North America. But we live in globalised world where a handful of mega corporate enterprises team up with bankers and pharmaceutical/ agribusinesses to keep their world domination agendas on track. Raw milk producers are, of course, in the front line of attack. They have had the gall to offer the public a ‘living food’ that cannot help but expose the ‘dead food’ that most rely upon. This, to the state controllers in the US at least, appears to amount to an act of terrorism, where giving people a life line to health is a dangerous and subversive activity that should be snuffed out before it gets going.

But we are an irrepressible tribe. We won’t lie down. The new resistance is growing and won’t be stopped. We are establishing the new arks that will indeed be life lines for those who wish to maintain a decent, humanistic quality of life and refuse to be pushed into the darkness of an extended slavery. Fighting back against the forces of repression is a natural reaction, it is proof that we are still human beings and not automatons.

Julian Rose

(Sir) Julian Rose is an organic farmer and founder of the Association of the UK based Unpasteurised Milk Producers and Consumers. He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and author of the book “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” www.changingcourseforlife.info

This article is taken from www.theecologist.org

The dreams of the early organic pioneers have been subsumed into a rush for global supply chains, strict regulations and fast-selling brands

Back in 1975, when I first started converting my farm to organic agriculture, there were no standards for production and no rule book. Just a few people committed to weaning their land off agrichemicals, improving soil fertility and supporting good animal health through regular crop rotations and through the sensible applications of farm yard manure. It was about taking a caring attitude to the overall welfare of our farms and trying to engender a wide bio-diversity of species within the farmland habitat.

We were not overly concerned about financial profit, but were interested in making an adequate return on our investments and in the quality, flavour and freshness of the foods we produced. We were perhaps more mindful than most of the words of Soil Association founder, Eve Balfour, that ‘organic’ food should be mostly unrefined and distributed and consumed locally, in its optimum condition.

Happy cattle

I decided to develop my farm at Hardwick, in the Chiltern Hills of South Oxfordshire, on a mixed farming model, utilising a wide number of grasses and herbs in the lays and retaining all the ‘never ploughed’ permanent pasture that covers the chalk hills and sweeps along the Thames-side meadows. My view was that the dairy cows, sheep and beef cattle that I purchased to graze these meadows would produce subtle, fine flavoured milk and meat and would be kept healthy by eating their particular choice of medicinal herbs and hedgerow leaves, at will.

I was not disappointed. The cattle thrived and the crops grew free from disease. We were able to start a local unpasteurised milk and cream round that was much appreciated by local country people. When, in 1987, the Government tried to ban raw milk, I led a ‘Campaign for Real Milk’ and beat it off.

A growing enterprise

As we continued to build up the enterprises on the farm, so the milk round offered more choice of fresh and local organic produce: free range eggs, butter, pork, beef and table poultry. And in 1986 Hardwick’s smoked bacon won the first ever Soil Association Food Award.

The organic farming movement was giving birth and there was a sense of excitement in the air. We were proving that the wisdom of old was alive and well: one could contribute to the long-term sustainability of the land while producing robust, wholesome foods in sufficient volumes to satisfy local needs and produce a modest economic return. At that stage there was no premium, no mass production and no supermarket sales. We were an embryonic movement which shared much commonality with the fast disappearing traditional mixed family farms whose standard practice included rotational farming and minimal applications of agrichemicals.

The dream sours

What ‘organic food’ and its localised market was in those days bears little resemblance to ‘the industry’ that it is today: an industry that is heavily and centrally policed, has a compendium of regulations and is ‘big business’ on a global scale. In fact, much of the ‘organic’ produce shipped in from around the world and across the UK today carries no sense of connection with its geography or its farmers. It is as anonymous as the majority of conventional chemically produced foods, as dull in flavour and as lacking in nutritional vitality. What’s more it belongs in the category of ‘high food miles’ heavy ecological footprint produce, exceeding the 3,000 kilometre average shopping basket once identified as the UK norm. Due to the need to carry a lot of information, it is also responsible for an excessive level of packaging – most of which is non biodegradeable.

All this is a far cry from what might be considered a responsible and sustainable form of greening, and a far cry from the original aspiration that organic food should stand for ‘unrefined, fresh, local and seasonal’. One can even purchase ‘organic’ ultra heat treated homogenised milk in supermarkets today, a product that bears no resemblance to real milk at all.

Stagnation

However, there just might be some compensation for this consumer-oriented form of ‘green’ indulgence if the level of UK land converted to organic farming methods had shown substantial increases throughout this time. But this is not the case. In fact the official statistics reveal that there has been a negligible level of land converted to organic status over the past 20 years. It has remained pretty much static at around 3 to 4 percent of UK farmed land throughout this time.

So apart from the resilience of a small body of local producers who have helped to pioneer such marketing ventures as box schemes, farmers’ markets, farm shops and dedicated farm-to-mill/processor chains, we have today an organic marketplace that is almost wholly dominated by super- and hypermarket chains. Their green credentials include the import of some eighty percent of organic foods, shipped and flown in from all over the world and from farms that are often as big and as undistinctive as their conventional monocultural lookalikes.

A boon for Tescos

Of course this is all very nice for the Tescos and Sainsburys of this world. It provides a nice bit of green icing for their very un-green cake. But what does it mean for human health? For the future of the 96 per cent of our farmland that remains dependent on heavy doses of toxic agrichemicals? To the once happy dream of a living, quality food-based rural economy and to more birds, bees and insects establishing their habitats amongst our unsprayed species rich fields? To farmers who care?

Organic food and farming was predicated on the belief that something called ‘holistic thinking’ would grow up along with the species-rich meadows and living foods. It was established on a belief that we humans are capable of comprehending, even participating in, the cyclic wheel of nature, seasons and unforced productivity. But only a little way down the line, it seems that we lost the plot.

We are now fast approaching a state in which a first and second class ‘two tier’ food culture will become the norm. A culture in which the financially secure and generally privileged will choose a premium priced, largely pesticide free ‘organically raised’ diet, while those less fortunate will have to contend with factory farmed, hydroponic and genetically modified foods, churned out by corporate enterprises having no other goals other than big profit and domination of the human food chain.

The organic food and farming movement can only help reverse this Orwellian scenario, and contribute to a better future, by revisiting its roots and ceasing to chase the chimera of big-time branded salvation.

I ran a doorstep delivery service of our own Guernsey organic raw milk and cream, and this inspired me to write a leaflet with a tear-off strip briefly proclaiming the positive case for raw milk. The purchasers then signed the statement and sent the slip back to AUMPC. This was reproduced amongst 150 raw milk producers and their customers. We collected 15,000 signatures and delivered them personally to the Minister of Agriculture.

The scientific case was greatly helped by a very useful publication, The Case for Untreated Milk, by Barbara Pickard. The other element in our favour was that the Prince of Wales is a keen supporter of raw milk and family farms. He was able to support our campaign with some well-chosen words, and this greatly helped in promoting the issue in the press.

I still have hundreds of letters of support from raw milk enthusiasts. They are outstanding for their passion and determination to keep the raw milk tradition – and associated family farms – alive. I can see that the same enthusiasm is alive and well in Canada and the United States.

But we are up against the intractable obstinacy of technocrats and more than that: a deliberate attempt to destroy independent mixed family farms by corporate/government cartels only interested in exercising total control of the global food chain. I have no doubt we will win this battle – “people power” once harnessed to a strong grassroots cause will always come through the victor in the end. With this can come a genuine “renaissance” of food and farming: real food and real farming.

The positive values of responsibly produced raw milk greatly exceed the negative factors. In fact, there are virtually no negatives when real milk is coming from well- cared-for family farms whose owners understand and apply the simple laws of animal and land husbandry.

The cream layer of raw milk has enzymes that are of the highest value to our health – highly protective of our immune system. Which is probably why “the industry” insists that butter fat is a cholesterol raiser and thrombosis threat. In the 1980s, Japanese firms were approaching British raw milk producers and contracting owners of high butterfat herds to sell them the cream off their standing milk in order to develop special anti-cancer medical products with these high-enzyme derivatives. As we know, pasteurization kills off the subtle nutrients and vitamins that our bodies must have for proper protection.

It’s a sad reflection on the bewitching powers of the reductionist “dead food is safe food” lobby that our supermarket-obsessed culture can’t even access real food any more. But it’s a sure sign of hope for farmers’ markets and other alternative marketing ventures that are burgeoning in the U.K. and beyond. There are new raw milk producers registering their farms every month, and public interest in acquiring their products (milk, cheese and cream) is on the rise.

More and more people are waking up to the reality that most of what is called “food” is nothing more than a synthesized conglomeration of quasi-food materials to which are added various synthetic chemical components, including colours, preservatives and flavourings, with the now added-value factor of genetic modification and nanoparticles.

Standing up for our rights to produce and consume real food is probably the single most important act of independence and responsible citizenship we can make.

Julian Rose
January 2010

In Changing Course for Life, Julian Rose spells out the truth of our current socio-economic context in a blatant and transparent acknowledgement of the ills of our society. It is easy to hide behind our ignorance of the finer and less savoury details of corporate greed, of modern industrialised agriculture, of the wide ranging effects of our unmitigated obsession with technological advancement. He explores just how and when our economies and societies departed from the objective of servicing our needs for a happy and harmonious state of existence with the natural world, to the point at which we now find ourselves: disconnected. A condition Rose aptly summarises as a state of being ‘subjugated to a sense of impotence by our own inventions’.

The book covers a broad range of aspects of modern society, from the disproportionate levels of power and wealth, to society’s single minded focus on technological advancement at the expense of labour enhancing techniques to the continuing loss of food biodiversity and steadily declining state of our soils.

But this book goes beyond merely pointing out how and where we have gone wrong. His clear objective is identifying a new way of living our lives. This encompasses a very personalised and spiritual consideration of the ends to which we devote our daily thoughts and energies. He acknowledges the need to realign our energies with the natural rhythms of the earth rather than directing them daily into the current model of degradation of our natural state of being. But he also discusses society at large, considering the necessary changes to our politico-economic environment, to agriculture, education, and greening our city lives. This book is, quite literally, bursting forth with ideas: ideas for change, ideas for how we can move forward into the next phase of consciousness, away from a mechanistic view of us in relation to the universe and the landscape, to a mindset that embraces the concept of living as a holistic integrated whole.

Rose writes with a palpable energy that is infectious. I found that no matter what frame of mind I was in when I sat down to read this book, when I put it down the energy contained within flowed through my veins and made me urgently aware of the need and desire to DO something. This book is full of idealism at a time when idealism is exactly what we need. It is perhaps our current tendency towards too little idealism and too much apathetic acceptance of the status quo that sees us trapped and stagnating as we are. So I challenge you to read this book, to awaken and to transform your way of interacting with the world around you.

(Louise Tait is an economist working in the environmental and development fields and has worked in both South Africa and the UK. She likes to read and think and engage with the world around her. She believes in the harmony of all things and strives to make this a reality.”

During the 20^th century, the word ‘Horsepower’ has been adapted to describe the power output of the internal combustion engine.  However, the early road hauling and agricultural steam engines were quite literally described as being three, four or five ‘Horse power’, thus one could equate the strength of the horses to that of the steam engines of this new era. These steel beasts lead the charge of the all-conquering industrial revolution, followed by the dominance of the internal combustion engine and the almost total dependence on oil for the great majority of agricultural and transport needs.

We have now reached the beginning of the end of that era.  We are now in the time of ‘post peak oil’, which means that world reserves are past their peak and in a process of decline.  Demand however, particularly from China and India, is still increasing.  Prices for crude oil are therefore on an upward journey – and apart from a few ‘blips’ in market pricing policies, will be in excess of what many of us can afford in the very near future.  This will have a particularly marked effect on agriculture, because the global market for food is heavily dependent upon oil.  Oil for fixing nitrogen for synthetic fertilisers, oil for the creation and production of herbicides pesticides, fungicides as well as the construction and maintenance  of virtually all tractors and agricultural machinery.

The industrialised West is so fixated on oil and its derivatives that few have yet woken up to the implications for food production in a post peak oil era.

However we at ICPPC have given it considerable thought, and see the return of the work horse as a very real solution to the looming crisis.

At the epicentre of this oil crisis is the almost sacrosanct belief amongst capitalist nations that free trade between all countries is the foundation for an ever expanding world economy, and that all rules and regulations should be adapted to keep this economic momentum going and growing.

What we see today under the world free trade banner is the movement of mass-produced foods and agricultural commodities from one end of the world to the other, with no regard for the inestimable pollution and environmental destruction, let alone the depleted nutritional status of the foods themselves, travelling half way round the world and passing through countless temperature changes and distribution outlets before reaching their destination.

Counting the true cost of oil dependent industrial agriculture and the globalised supermarket-led free market of food distribution, reveals a massive debt accrued to mother earth, a debt which is entirely unsustainable and unimaginably destructive.  Global warming is the most blatant expression of our earth’s current desperate cries for help, and the fever which grips her every artery.

If we wish to survive we must help our planet to be healed, not tomorrow but now.  And our first and foremost task must be to once again regionalise and localise our food production, using systems that are not dependent on oil.  Local food for local people will soon not just be the cry of a small number of concerned environmentalists; it will become an absolute necessity for the survival of communities the whole world over.

As western countries search for low energy solutions to rising CO2 emissions and food production and distribution needs, Poland will find herself suddenly ahead of a game she thought she was lagging behind in. The 1 ½ million peasant farms, many with work horses or at least some experience of handling heavy horses, are finding themselves in the spotlight, as oil-free food producing specialists  par excellence! Far from being chided as leftovers from a vanished era, they are increasingly recognised as being at the forefront of an ecologically benign, time-honoured system of small-scale rotational farming. A system which treats the living soil with the respect it is due, and therefore also the food that grows in it.

This little booklet “Renaissance of the Workhorse”  features a few of the skilled exponents of the oil-free agriculture of tomorrow, and the equine partnership whose physical and emotional link is so unique in expressing the timeless bond between animal and man.

Julian Rose,  July 2007

Introduction:

The Polish Countryside is the single greatest resource base of the Nation.

The nurturing of it’s health and welfare therefore needs to be given the highest priority.

There is a great need (and opportunity) at this moment in history, to initiate a bold plan to unite the key social, environmental and economic elements of country life and thus prevent it continuing to suffer a slow death.

European/World Agriculture in Crisis:

Because of the rapid changes that have taken place during the past three decades, many traditional countryside values are now under threat. Some have already reached breaking point.

Throughout Europe, the health of the environment, agricultural communities and food quality have been undermined by large scale corporate agribusiness with the sole ambition of maximising profits.

This has caused a huge rupture in the continuity and equilibrium of rural life. US style supermarket chains, industrial agriculture and European Union hygiene and sanitary regulatory controls – as well as subsidies designed to benefit large scale farming enterprise, have combined to stifle the natural entrepreneurial instincts of farming communities and have opened Europe up to exploitation by the corporate promoters of the global market place.

Poland is now coming under the shadow of this regime.

In the rush to supply the increasingly dominant supermarket chain’s huge demand for large volumes of cheap food, pharmaceutical inventions and genetic engineering are being given precedence over land wisdom. Genetically modified organisms and cloned sheep and pigs are just the latest in a line of laboratory techniques designed to promote this agenda and to work against the wishes of the people, in Poland and throughout Europe.

Poland has the unique opportunity to by-pass this destructive course. Capitalism, in the hands of corporate imperialists and weak government has proved to be as destructive as Communism in the hands of a centralised politburo.

Poland’s Opportunity:

Of all the Countries in Europe, Poland is best placed to reverse the momentum of the destructive trends described above.

Many small and medium sized peasant and family farms are still operational, but only just.

Their owners, while not necessarily forward looking, retain a priceless knowledge of the land and the ability to maintain it in optimum condition from generation to generation. Mostly it is unpolluted by pesticides and retains relatively high levels of soil fertility. Consequently, a rich tapestry of plant and bird diversity, unequalled anywhere in Europe, continues to enrich the Polish countryside. It is an untold wealth and provides the base upon which Polish citizens will have to rely in the future and upon which National Food Security depends.

However, these family farms are now under enormous pressure from

the European Union and The ‘global marketplace’. It is the European Commission’s stated intention to ‘restructure’ Polish agriculture and make it conform to the model of the soul-less, sanitised and mechanized ‘agribusiness’ described above.

In order to achieve such a ‘modernisation’ programme, more than one million farmers must be driven off the land and into the cities, according to senior figures in the European Commission, adding to already acute unemployment problems. The same ‘restructuring’ process has been forced on every other EU country over the past 3 decades, with devastating effects on rural employment, food quality, soil fertility, biodiversity and human health.

Current Destruction of Local and National Natural Resources:

The infrastructure which supports diverse family farming in Poland is already in an advanced stage of crisis. More than 60% of small and medium sized milk and meat processing plants and approximately the same number of local abattoirs have already fallen to EU sanitary and hygiene regulations that have little or no connection with maintaining healthy food and healthy people. Thousands of farmers have already been forced into bankruptcy through the closure of these vital links in the chain.

Poor quality imported milk, meat and vegetable produce is replacing high quality, home grown, Polish foods and at subsidy backed distorted prices.

The sole beneficiaries of this agenda are the large multinational hypermarket chains and the large scale farming enterprises that supply them. UK research has shown that over 250 small businesses go bankrupt every time a new supermarket is opened.

Intensive lobbying by large companies and the main supermarket chains, has established a monopoly of agricultural business between large, intensive farms and the major multiple chains. The majority of small and medium sized farms are simply eclipsed. Those that remain and apply for EU subsidies become enslaved by a distant and detached bureaucracy which decides and controls every aspect of agricultural production.

Poland As A Pioneer of Positive Change:

Our job is to rescue Poland from this fate and to build in it’s place a new vision

of a thriving, independent and largely decentralised, agriculture and mixed rural economy which will eventually be recognised as a model for other countries, both in Europe and the World. It is a radical but essentially ‘common sense’ agenda.

This undertaking calls for an agricultural/countryside policy which links traditional and environmentally friendly forms of land management to a new and innovative use of natural resources and renewable energy technologies. It centres on a pluralistic and mixed rural economy that encourages a wide variety of small and medium sized enterprises to be established in rural areas currently over reliant on agriculture as the main employment generator.

The goal will be to re establish food and energy sovereignty at the local, regional and national level.

This will involve a revival of country towns as trading ‘hubs’ coupled to national targets for renewable energy, food and building material self sufficiency over the coming years.

This should emphasise the potential of geothermal and hydro power as well as biomass production for regional heating and electricity generation.

Incorporated into this approach will be the need to sustain new vocational (hands-on) educational and employment opportunities for young people, required for the realisation of the overall “Greening of Poland”. A direct link into the creative arts is important to provide fresh momentum and a new sense of excitement concerning the challenges involved in establishing new opportunities in the countryside. ‘Start up’ appropriate local business opportunities – and new or adapted buildings – must be supported by National government to give youth the incentive to develop active employment in Poland.

A GMO free Poland:

National Agricultural Policy must ensure that all farming, forestry and energy production is carried out according to methods that combine proven ecological conservation with meeting the basic needs of the population for food, shelter and fuel. There is no need – and no place – for massively costly and high risk developments, such as nuclear power stations or intensive chemical and GMO farming in this scenario. The risks far outweigh the advantages. Neither is there any place for the import of seeds and plants for bio-fuel production. Utilising indigenous plants, trees and seeds is a far more effective way of meeting the Country’s green energy requirements than relying on mono cultural practices that utilise toxic chemicals and as much (if not more) energy than they ever give back.

The global export market can no longer be the main target for realising economic returns to farmers. It has already failed all but the biggest. The supply chain must now be internalised and greatly shortened. Some exports to surrounding European markets should be maintained.

There are guidelines how to achieve internalised food security laid out under the ‘Proximity Principle’ (author, Julian Rose circa 1998). The priority is to provide the basic needs of all population centres from natural resources drawn from the area of land immediately surrounding them. If there is a specific local shortage, this should then be sourced from the next closest area of availability .. and so on throughout the country.

Where there is a surplus, it can be used to make up any shortfall in other adjoining areas.

The Proximity Principle particularly applies to food, fuel, fabrics, minerals, water and energy. It is an essential component in the creation of genuine ‘sustainable development’. Only when all local, regional and national needs have been met internally, should the export market be utilised for any remaining surplus. Low ‘food kilometres’ are part of the targets for all nations today. A big reduction in road freighted commodities is essential to maintaining environmental and human health.

At a time of acute environmental stress and the ever present threat of global weather disruption, specific targets for reducing fossil fuel energy consumption and a switch to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, methane, micro-hydro and biomass, are essential worldwide, and of great importance to Poland.

Adherence to the Proximity Principle, plus a major energy saving drive in all areas of domestic and industrial life, will be essential in order to redress the currently ‘out of balance’ industrial and household emissions position in Poland.

The process of harnessing ‘new solutions to old problems’ will stimulate the national, regional and local economy and create jobs that would otherwise not exist.

It is a dynamic ‘greening’ agenda, similar to that currently being pursued by Barak Obama in The USA, in order to rescue the collapsing US economy.

The Foundation for Sustainable Development:

A disregard for the subtle fabric of our precious planet has led to a fragmentation of the social and economic cohesion of previously stable communities as well as the

near collapse of much native flora and fauna.

Once one has established the correct stimulus to encourage country towns and villages to purchase the majority of their food, fuel and fibre from local sources, many other neglected indigenous social and cultural benefits will fall naturally into place, including the rekindling of a pride in village and town life and the revitalising of positive traditions and skills that will otherwise be lost forever.

By initiating incentives to promote the purchase of ‘local food’, schools, restaurants, government institutions and small shops will directly stimulate employment in the local economy and support farmers who otherwise will have no market in which to sell their produce and support their families.

Computer models can be developed that demonstrate the Proximity Principle in action

and certain market towns can be chosen to become pioneer projects, attracting national and EU funding. Government agencies and advice offices will also have an important role to play in implementing local and regional ‘green’ action plans.

A genuine renaissance of interconnected rural and town life, giving hope and security to young and old, can be achieved providing this holistic, joined-up approach is carefully followed. The re linking of town and country in a truly organic and sustainable way, is not just an ‘interesting idea’, it is a necessity of our time. Our planet, no less the Polish countryside, cannot absorb any more wasteful exploitation of it’s rapidly diminishing resources, without self destructing.

Everyone has a part to play in ensuring that a better world can be passed on to the generations that follow us.

Julian Rose, Stryszow, February 2009

“One cannot solve present problems by using the same thinking that produced them”

Albert Einstein.

Agriculture As Though the Earth Mattered

Julian Rose, June 2007

Almost everything that has gone wrong with food, farming and our environment over the past three or four decades, has done so because of an unswerving allegiance to market forces and what is described as ‘The Free Market’.

Agriculture, as the origin of the word conveys, is ‘a culture of the field’ and is not an industry and therefore should never have been subjected to the competitive and often aggressive cut and thrust of commerce. Once under the influence of the market economy, it became transformed into an industry in which ever greater productivity at ever lower costs became the all pervading mantra.

Only 35 years ago the average UK dairy herd had fifteen cows and the farmer made a reasonable living from selling his milk to the Milk Marketing Board or as a producer retailer. His/her fields supported a rotation involving mixed cropping and virtually all such farms kept some hens, three or four pigs and a bit of fruit and veg around the farm house. A very civilized life style.

In 1972 there were some forty five thousand dairy herds in the UK. Now there are just thirteen thousand and the rate of decline is still accelerating. An organic farmer I know has recently increased his milking herd from eighty cows to two hundred and fifty in a desperate attempt to keep his farm economically viable under the intense competition generated by an almost constant downward pressure on milk exerted by the inexhaustibly consumptive supermarkets.

In 1995, when milk sold in supermarkets for around 42p/litre, the retailer made 1p margin per litre and the farmer made 5p margin. By 2005 the milk price had risen to 51p/litre, but the farmer’s return had remained too small to cover costs, necessitating some drastic action.

This same price squeezing exercise has been applied to all main UK farm supplies, not just milk.

The end of the road for most UK mixed family farms has thus been ushered forward by the sheer greed of the big retailers and their relentless pursual of profit at any cost.

On my own farm, in South Oxfordshire, I decided to bottle and sell my own unpasteurized organic milk. Mainly because I love the quality, texture and flavor of this food, but also to avoid getting sucked into the fickle price fluctuations of the bulk market.

Things went well at first with a small but healthy demand for our rich flavorful Guernsey milk and cream. But, on expanding my milk round into Reading, I ran into an intercernine supermarket price war for the ‘white stuff’ they sell. Tescos, Sainsbury and Asda all going for each others jugular – succeeded in dropping the retail price of milk by 8p/litre in less than one month. My newly aquired customers, still largely unaware of the outstanding difference in quality between the white stuff and real milk, complained that my price was uncompetitive and ceased their orders. It had the effect of undermining the economic viability of the delivery round and led on to the sad day (in 1998) when there was no option other than to sell my herd of sixty lovely Guernseys.

However, I am proud to have stuck to the principle, since converting my farm in 1975, of selling as much of its’ fruits as possible locally. And to this day, in the hands of colleagues, the tradition continues, with all the beef and lamb produced sold through home counties farmers markets, and all the fruit and veg. On a box scheme to surrounding towns. I have now turned my concentration more onto the farm’s woodland enterprise, including the maintenance of a fire wood round to local residents, as well as a small scale planking operation for local D.I.Y enthusiasts.

As some readers may be aware, the supermarket led globalized food industry is run by a small, but powerful club. A club composed of the chief executives and chairmen of the main agrichemical and seed corporations, pharmaceutical companies, most banks and insurance companies as well as senior officials of the World Trade Organisation, the United States Dept. of Agriculture, the European Commission and most national governments.

Being a member of this club implicates the individuals concerned in a criminal activity; namely the destruction and decimation of virtually all rural, human scale activities, and particularly the most honorable task of nurturing and sustaining our precious soils, crops and animals.

The long standing tradition which established mixed family farms as the backbone of British agriculture, has been ripped to shreds by this modern day cowboy culture – and it is hard to comprehend how ‘organic food’ could ever have become so closely associated with such a devious regime.

Many modern day organic farmers hitched a ride on this inglorious bandwagon, waving cheerfully as it drove off into the brave new world of mass produced cling film wrapped mediocrity.

Some thought that it was the only way to ‘grow the organic movement’. However, the reality is that while millions now flock to the supermarkets to purchase organic food, the amount of land being converted into organic production has risen by just over 2% in the past twenty years. A fraction of what was confidently predicted two decades ago.

The rapidly growing volume of organic food sales are largely made up of imports from every corner of the world, revealing a very ‘inorganic’ food miles equation and heavy carbon footprint.

Organics is thus subjected to the same market forces that fuel conventional mass production systems that were supposed to be shunned in favor of local, fresh, seasonal and flavorful food.

So what is to be done?

For the past six years I have been spending much time in Poland; having, in November 2000, been invited to become a co-director of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside.

ICPPC’s founder, Jadwiga Lopata, grew up on a small peasant farm near Krakow and was drawn back to the countryside after a brief spell working as a computer programmer.

Our task is to try to help to secure the survival of some one and a half million small family farms averaging approximately seven ha., that range across the length and breadth of the Country.

These farms are the guardians of an extraordinarily rich natural biodiversity which places Poland at the top of European species rich regions.

The small peasant farms utilize only the very minimum of sprays and nitrates – and mostly none at all. The owners can’t afford them. They are, if you like, organic by default. All biodegradeable materials are returned to the soil as a matter of course and regular crop rotations are always followed. Most of these farms have a cow or two, a work horse, a few pigs and a flock of laying hens. Typical is also a small orchard of apple, cherry and plum. They are subsistence farms whose essential role is to feed the family and sell any surplus locally.

Because such farms don’t fit the formula devised for European Union Common Agricultural Policy, they are currently under intense pressure to ‘conform’ or give up. Conforming means complying to Brussel’s plans to ‘restructure and modernize’ Polish agriculture: another way of saying ‘get big and go for maximum agrichemical assisted production. It also means accepting the pitiful subsidy which only converts into a worthwhile economic return if one has one hundred hectares or more.

Once any subsidy is taken however, the farmer quickly becomes a slave to the countless obsessive hygiene and sanitary regulations that eventually brake the back of even the strongest resisters. Brussels holds the whip hand, eating from it invites the consequences.

The future of the Polish countryside and of the thousands of varieties of indigenous seeds still freely swapped between farmers, depends upon an absolute resistance to this highly seductive EU trap. A trap which every other Country in the European Union has so far fallen into over the past three decades. A trap which has led to the ruthless decimation of our human scale, diverse, community based farming cultures and the establishment of the almost all conquering agribusiness empires.

What I have learned, in observing and sharing with these peasant farmers, is the unique importance for us Westerners of retracing our steps; retracing them until they come to a sufficiently solid foundation from which to build anew.

Firstly, our priority should be to feed ourselves. When one starts a small fruit and vegetable garden , mixed smallholding, or allotment patch, the objective is to enjoy the fruits of this land and to supply one’s family, extended family, neighbors and friends with any surplus. It is not to try and make a profit. This is fundamental – yet for many, illusive. If one’s main objective is seeking to make a profit the pressure will be on from the beginning to expand, invest capital, cut labor, mechanize and find new markets.

It is ‘the profit urge’ that marks the progressive symptoms of a disease which fuels the cut throat market economy of to-day. And it delivers exactly the wrong message to all regions of the world where community still forms the foundation of food sovereignty.

But if one stays small, moves slowly, eats well and pleases one’s neighbors with the fruits of the land, one will not suffer the often tragic demise of so many of to-days overstretched farmers, always struggling to keep up with the brutal forces of global competition.

In Poland, most of the small (7ha) mixed farms are kept going on a part-time basis. Family members may take outside work (if they can find it) to help the cash flow. Often, either the man or woman of the house will seek work to supplement the small farming income. But before you jump

up and declare ” I told you – part-time farming – that’s not real farming!” I must insist that it is real farming! It is just that the objective is not be become rich, but rather to maintain a way of life passed down from generation to generation.

The fact is that to-day, in a climate of very low prices for the main agricultural commodities, it is necessary to supplement farming incomes. In England, more than fifty percent of all farmers are doing the same.

Many Polish small farmers still keep and utilize a work horse – not for romantic reasons – but because a horse does a better job than a tractor in most circumstances and is considerably more economic. No soil compaction, a delicate turning of the topsoil under the plough and a diet of home grown hay rather than petroleum – are three characteristics.

Most farmhouses are home built (no outside contractors) and farm tools/implements, some more than one hundred years old, are very carefully maintained.

Food is stored over winter in the traditional way: fermented and kept in jars, pickled or preserved and put in the cellar without the need or use of modern refrigeration.

Herbs are grown for culinary and medicinal purposes – the doctor is rarely called.

Hay for the animals is ‘stooked’ and then transferred to the barn or loft – no modern baler required.

Pigs and chickens are killed when they are required for the table, hung in the pantry or barn and often smoked for a variety of sausages. Cooking, and most heating, is done on wood burning stoves using small batches of timber from local forests.

You can see why the European Union hates these independent souls and is determined to undermine their highly sustainable life style, by tagging the ears of cattle, insisting on ‘passports’ and forcing long journeys to distant supermarket controlled abattoirs.

Just last year, selling milk from hand milked cows was declared illegal.

Genuine independence is a rare condition these days. It presents one of the last true threats to powers who wish to exert total control over human activities. Polish farmers represent a pretty formidable obstacle to EU and corporate agribusiness; and the only reason they remain is because they have not sought to make a profit ahead of their wish to live humbly and to perpetuate a cycle of landed wisdom so particular to peasant cultures.

This is a massive lesson to be learned by the overdeveloped West. The true peasant way of life, wherever it is practiced in the world, provides a fine example of genuine ‘sustainable living’, an immediate solution to global warming Co2 emissions and a stern lesson for practitioners who have put the lure of the market place ahead of meeting the basic needs of local people.

Polish farmers are are approximately twenty five years ahead of where most western based agricultural enterprises are supposed to be going in order to meet the challenge of saving our planet from imminent meltdown.

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Postscript:

1. Julian initiated a project in 2000 to help make the market town of Faringdon, South Oxfordshire, become self sufficient in food, fuel and fiber by 2015. If you would like some information about this project please email him on contact form