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.

Unfortunately, it is still a relatively small percentage of individual who take the trouble to cultivate a discerning view about what they eat and how their food is grown; and it is this more than anything else which allows factory farming and agrichemically dominated conglomerates to retain their stranglehold over around 90% of the western world’s food chain. We have been indoctrinated to believe that human, animal and environmental health are somehow ‘luxuries’ that must take second place to the continued rape of planetary resources for the maintenance of the essentially moribund ‘growth at all costs’ economic model so blindly adhered to by those who exercise the levers of power.

The UK has been a leading exponent of this materialistically driven ethos ever since the industrial revolution burst into the rolling fields and meadows of our erstwhile ‘green and pleasant land’. The agricultural policy setters who once resided within the hallowed walls of Westminster have long since departed to be replaced by European Union technocrats, large agribusiness concerns and pharmaceutical cartels.

There is no ‘agricultural policy’. Just pressure groups vying for the dominant market position and manipulating government to support their agendas.

So, here in the UK, we see the need to show a profit turning once reasonably managed family farms into competing businesses, each vying with the other to become megasized production units of the sort that dominate the mid-west of North America. Permission to build dairy units for anything between 3,000 to 8,000 cows have been presented to planning authorities in Lincolnshire with the expectation of approval and the chance to become market leaders in the mass production of milk and dairy products for the leading supermarket chains. Fortunately, the applications have been turned down on environmental grounds – but this doesn’t mean the threat will not rise again.

The average size of a UK dairy herd today is approximately 70 cows. Thirty years ago it was 25 and all the cows had names. The scale and factory style technology proposed for these megadairies would mean that cows would join commercially indoor pigs and chickens as nothing more than units on a conveyor belt designed to extract the maximum amount of milk from the cheapest available high protein diet. A diet that will be laced with antibiotics and composed of genetically modified soya, maize and quite possibly nanotech feed components as supplementary ingredients. In the UK we think it’s clever to copy America and apply Ford motor company principles to the management of sentient livestock. However the implications are quite horrific to anyone who has a serious interest in the animals in their care.

Corporate UK is not alone in ignoring the basic rules of good husbandry and human and environmental health. All across Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union continues to promote efficient factory farming as the way forward. Exponents, faced by a swelling tide of consumer resistance, turn time and again to the mantra that “we must be able to feed the world.. By 2050 there will be 9 billion people on our planet, and only by exploiting the most advanced technologies will we be able to provide them all with adequate amounts of food”. There is a shocking degree of duplicity and arrogance in this propaganda which is continuously rolled out by GM corporations, governmental bodies and pseudo scientists in equal degree. It needs to be challenged head-on because it has nothing to do with benevolent concern for the human race and everything to do with maintaining profit driven industrial agriculture’s domination of the food chain.

All the serious evidence points to the opposite conclusion: it is only by nurturing small to medium sized mixed family farms that practise environmentally benign and humane land management systems that communities all over the world will be able to feed themselves and countries develop acceptable levels of food sovereignty / food security. The carefully researched and widely acclaimed IAASTD report of 2006/7 laid to rest the spurious claims that only genetically modified, nanotech and hydroponically raised crops – produced on vast monocultural prairies and endless rows of soil-less glass laboratories – can be relied upon to provide our daily nourishment. We need to remind ourselves that the 400 international scientists who composed the report came down firmly on the side of the small and medium sized mixed family farm coupled to localised distribution patterns as the best bet for feeding the swelling numbers expected on this planet.

There are many daunting challenges facing even the most thoughtful farmers and gardeners today. Not least the extraordinary plight of our honey bees.

As bees throughout Europe and North America continue to succumb to what is termed ‘colony collapse disorder’ the starkest warning yet of the plight of our food production systems stands apocalyptically before us. Over the past decades bees have been developed along similar lines as livestock and seeds: they have been hybridized to produce maximum volumes at the lowest possible cost. The great majority have their own version of factory farms to contend with. Their sanitized hives sprayed with powerful insecticide chemicals, their diet reduced to that which can be foraged from monocultural plantations and prairies of oilseed crops, themselves subjected to high doses of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. Their hives transported hither and thither over miles of motorways that link pollination demanding commercial fruit and vegetable farms. All this further compounded by the addition of copious volumes of refined white sugar to their honey factory hives.

Attempts to nail one predominant cause of the mass die-offs are currently focussing on a particularly insidious insecticide widely sprayed on crops typically foraged by commercial honey bees. Germany has moved to ban this BASF product and environmental organisations in other countries are following suit. However, genetically modified organisms are also possible culprits – then what about atmospheric aerosol spraying, mobile phone masts and associated electro magnetic microwaves? Governments are failing to act with any sense of urgency in this dramatic situation. They remain broadly resistant to the warnings, not daring to offend their paymasters and political allies. And here lies the rub: how can we ever change the rules of the game if those in charge of the rule book have little or no desire to count the costs of industrial agriculture? Furthermore, time and again we see our political figureheads adopting the solution that offers the best financial return and the least prospect of threat to their cosy power base.

In Poland, where I work with Jadwiga Lopata at the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside, the farming community is just realising what it means to seek to gain advantage from the CAP subsidies on offer to EU member states. Under the current subsidy scheme payments are made on a per hectare basis throughout Europe: the largest farms are best rewarded and the smallest farms get the crumbs. Such a system could only have been devised by power cartels and technocrats intent on preserving the distorted status quo. How this translates on the ground for Poland, Romania and other Eastern European newcomers is into intense pressure on small farms of 2 to say 15 hectares – of which there are 1.5 million in Poland – to remain solvent in the face of skewed market forces that highlight the financial advantage of being big and brutal.

Foreign corporations have moved into Poland and bought up large tracts of ex-co-operative government land thereby guaranteeing themselves comfortable subsidy-based profits even if next to no food production takes place on their newly acquired assets. The best of such land becomes the venue for intensive agrichemically supported arable cropping that quickly drains the soil of its natural fertility and undercuts the market value of produce from smaller farmers still utilising traditional rotations and unable to benefit from the vast economies of scale enjoyed by their competitors. It is the Tescos of this world who are the main beneficiaries of this patently biased EU subsidy regime. They can acquire hundreds of tons of produce from single specialised farm units that will use all the chemical tricks of the trade to ensure that their cereals, potatoes, cabbages, fruits and livestock conform to the exact specification that the supermarkets demand and can be supplied at prices so low that only very large volumes ensure financial viability. It is these farms/ farmers who are most eagerly targeted by Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Pioneer, BASF, Bayer et al. It does not require a hard sell to get many of them to sign up to lobby for GM crops and seeds and to insist on the spurious notion that GM animal feeds comprising largely genetically modified soya and maize should be the staple diet of their mass production animal factories and the vast intensive indoor pig units that operate under the aegis of transnational giants like Smithfield and Danish Crown.

So bad is the food quality of products emanating from such animal and cereal concentration camps that I would hesitate to call it ‘food’. So depleted of vitamins and energy and so lacking in flavour are the majority of products emerging from these enterprises (let’s not call them ‘farms’) that they can only be successfully marketed by utilising the skilful propaganda tactics and virtually bottomless advertising budgets transnational corporate food distributors have at their disposal. Products which are essentially worthless in terms of their nutritional value can be made to look like wonderful fresh foods that every modern housewife must surely want on her family table. Given the right marketing regime and peak time television airspace, almost anything is possible.

Through successfully manipulating these powers, the combined forces of the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the European Union, agrichemical conglomerates and big pharma have pretty much stitched up the food chain from farm to fork throughout the so-called developed world. Now the only option for those unwilling to sell their souls and degrade their soils is to either try to operate beneath the radar or start another ball game on another pitch, and try to attract enough discerning citizens to support their efforts to ensure their survival. There are many signs that seem to show such a resistance movement is under way, albeit sporadically, in many parts of the UK and on the continent of Europe.

The peasant support group La Via Campesina which claims a membership of some 40 million peasant farmers mostly in South America, has set up also in Spain and France. The organisation has its European office in Brussels and promotes food sovereignty and respect for the role of small farmers in maintaining the biodiversity of traditional European foods and ecologies and indigenous non-hybrid seeds. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement has now spread around the world and is encouraging peasants to hold-on to their artisan skills in the face of the sterilisation and globalisation of once vibrant, living indigenous foods. In France, Les Faucheurs (the Reapers) have succeeded in blocking any further attempts to cultivate the GM maize MON 810 and have managed to infiltrate a number of commercial and government laboratories working on GM seed research projects. Public pressure in almost all of mainland Europe remains firmly against GM food and farming. Five Countries have managed to outright ban MON 810 GM maize. And opinion polls continue to indicate a 70% figure of those saying ‘No to GMO’.

However this has not stopped the European Commission from trying to foist responsibility for decisions of whether or not to accept GM plantings of those varieties already accepted for cultivation in Europe (mainly maize and now a potato for starch) on individual member states. The European Parliament’s committee for Agriculture and the Rural Economy is pressing ahead with proposals to ensure that each member state sets its own specific ‘co-existence’ rules, thus backing the WTO’s demand of freedom of choice of farmers to plant GM crops if they wish. ‘Co-existence’ is a classic Trojan Horse. It allows GM crops to be planted next to conventional and organic crops with only a 30 metre intervening strip of land acting as a barrier – thereby virtually ensuring cross-contamination and the demise of a largely GM free Europe. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, are some 500 patent applications for so called ‘climate ready’ GM seeds and plants. These seeds are designed to operate in conditions of drought and flood and to displace altogether the traditional seeds that are saved and planted by

the great majority of small farmers and gardeners the world over.

On 21 January 2011, 20,000 protesters congregated in Berlin to expose the Angela Merkel government’s continued support for GM crops and corporate control of the food chain. Under the banner ‘We have had enough!’ they demanded a return to small-scale, localised and ecological food and farming practices and genuine food autonomy at the grass roots level. The protest was timed to coincide with a high-level meeting on global agricultural policies attended by Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation.

The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside demonstrated solidarity with this protest by initiating ‘Support the Traditional Countryside’ actions in 90 venues throughout Poland, attracting much interest and support. The Polish government is trying to play to both corporate and social interests at the same time. It continues to sell off state agricultural land to the highest foreign bidders while claiming to be protecting the interests of its own farming communities. On GM issues, it has failed to take any decisive action for fear of upsetting the EU to whom it is increasingly kowtowing and whose Presidency it takes over in July.

I cannot do justice to the numerous self-autonomous ecological initiatives that have come to our attention over the past year or so. As corporate attempts to take total control of the food chain appear to be tightening their grip, so too does the awareness of this threat appear to be growing. There is no doubt that the battle lines are being drawn. The Codex Alimentarus stick wielded by the World Trade Organisation and seemlessly passed on by the European Commission is attempting to crush the right of family farmers the world over to produce and sell the products of their own farms unless they conform to ever more draconian and increasingly arbitrary sanitary and hygiene measures. Even seed saving and redistribution is now heavily restricted, with large fines threatened for anyone daring to make commercial use of any seeds not on the super hybrid official EU ‘seed list’. Compliance to such demands bankrupts most traditional family farming enterprises and ensures the placement of such farms on the market where hungry corporate predators are ready to swoop in and sweep them up, setting in motion the factory farming regimes that are tied in with the leading supermarket chains of North America and Europe.

On my own farm in the UK (Hardwick) I have set in motion a scheme to let local people grow their own food on a 2.5 acre site previously rented out as a horse paddock. We have 25 families already well-installed on subdivisions of the field and another 6 acres is being allocated to 2 small holding initiatives. I believe that this marks a turning point and possible watershed for a radically new direction for the procurement of high quality, fresh, seasonal and local food. It marks the start of ‘Farming for the People with the People’ (see ‘Manifesto for 21^st Century Food and Farming’, ICPPC Anniversary, November 2010, http://icppc.pl/eng/index.php?id=498) as the only way forward for all those determined not to become slaves to a systematically robotic, coldly inhuman and exploitative global cartel that will stop at nothing to achieve its ambitions of exerting total control of the food chain, thereby imposing a form of dietary genocide on the population of this planet.

If you want to ensure you are not a victim of this Orwellian nightmare – now is the time to make the change.

Julian Rose

Julian Rose is author of ‘Changing Course for Life – local Solutions to Global Problems’ New European publications 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 thank you for the opportunity of speaking on this special occasion.

There could hardly be a more important issue confronting not just farmers, but the whole of society, than the subject of this meeting: how to grow adequate food and produce adequate energy without the aid of rapidly diminishing and highly polluting fossil fuels. And the reason why it is so important is because: this is not a concern for the future – it is the reality at this very moment. The transition from a 250 year old fossil fuel powered society to a genuinely sustainable renewable energy fuelled society is to be achieved in less than 25 years – if we are to avoid an ultimate meltdown of most of what sustains our present planetary ecology. That is not my prognosis but the increasingly broadcast view of the majority of professional climatologists from all around the world.

The task involved in meeting this deadline would be considerably easier if we had started in earnest some 30 to 40 years ago – but we didn’t. And we still haven’t today. The juggernaut is barely even applying the brakes and is happily cruising through the red lights, building an impression of absolute immunity to nature’s warning cries. The tractors and combine harvesters, even on England’s green and pleasant lands are still getting bigger and the use of oil-based synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is not diminishing. More roads and airport runways are planned and more hypermarkets are queuing to convert green pastures into concrete Warehouses for factory farmed foods. And if this isn’t enough we have leaders hell bent on adding genetically modified foods and nuclear power stations to the apocalyptic corporate soup.

To this we can now add the planned introduction of “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill” through which this government wants to allow the creation of genetically modified human embryos – a technology that will ignore all ethical considerations and lead – for the first time – to the legal creation of patented genetically modified babies.

I hope those of us in this room are under no illusions about what goes on in these hallowed halls for the majority of the year. The Houses of Parliament have become a very prestigious auction house, where the welfare of humanity is auctioned off for the price of maintaining the corporate-led status quo, and the organophosphate treated wool is pulled over the eyes of the expectant electorate – many of whom still believe that governments are supposed to be interested in their future.

Global warming and industrial agriculture coupled with untempered mining of fossil fuels, is a combination that leads directly to ‘mutually assured destruction’. Ecological farming of food and energy and their localised distribution, is a combination that leads directly to ‘mutually assured creation’. It is that simple!

So will this House now pass an act to put this resolution into action? All those in favour? Against? Abstentions? Now then, the first thing we will need is independent and caring farmers, saving and growing their own seeds and selling the resultant foods locally. They will only be able to do this if they are supported by local consumer groups who work out a contractual agreement with such farmers to grow foods for them on an annual basis (Yes, this is the way). This is the only genuinely manageable route to food and energy sovereignty and a long term foundation for well-maintained soil fertility, clean air and a humanitarian culture of town and country. Neither farmers nor consumers can survive unless each helps the other to achieve their basic needs; and this must first happen at the local and regional level. It must be a mutual- self-help-community- inspired action. It is here that we find the seeds of hope, that can lead on to the celebration of a shared harvest feast that we are all, perhaps unconsciously, longing for.

To set this process in motion, we have to do two things: we have to first ban the genetically modified seeds of despair that enslave farmers and destroy the diversity of the gene pool which is the source of life and our common inheritance; then we have to adhere to something I have called the ‘Proximity Principle’. Quite simply this means acquiring the majority of our ecologically managed food, fuel and fibre products from the areas of land that immediately surround the townships and villages that form the main population centres across the country. It is a plan so simple that most adults can’t understand it! But here is a clue: let us say that 1 acre of land can provide for 1 person’s basic food needs. Then we can extrapolate that a market town with a population of 10,000 would need 10,000 acres of land to feed it. Well, the Proximity Principle informs us that the cheapest, quickest and most environmentally and humanly benign way of achieving this town and country mutual support symbiosis is for the farms that immediately surround the town to be the suppliers of the town’s needs. This formula can then be repeated throughout the towns and villages of England and the world, so that only when an overall surplus of food or energy is left over after firstly fulfilling the immediate needs of each region, should this surplus be available for export into the nearest region or other country which is suffering an under supply. So where there is a short-fall of local food, energy or fibres this is to be met by the nearest region which carries a surplus of these. We have first to fulfil our own needs with the land resource we have at our disposal, and cease relying on a cut-throat aggressive and inhuman oil fired global economy to provide for our basic needs.

It is the antithesis of the hypermarket-led global food business which is now as popular with organic growers as with conventional growers – and is the single most destructive factor in food and farming’s contribution to climate change and a generally burnt-out world.

Adherence to the Proximity Principle will revolutionise our relationship with the land and those who farm it, providing fresh, flavourful and nutritious local food to all who need it, and increasingly, supplies of local renewable energy as well – finally ensuring that farmers have a guaranteed all year round market - on their doorstep. It is the first stepping stone in assuring the food sovereignty that is our democratic right, and is a task which lies at the heart of the ISIS report Food Futures Now.

In this way the seeds of despair will be transformed into the seeds of hope.

Julian Rose

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.

………………………………………………………

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