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

Research carried out in the UK some 15 years ago revealed that the average distance travelled by the food in a typical supermarket trolley is more than 3,000 kilometers. Most”fresh” produce is at least 4 days old and has passed through a number of processing and storage plants, involving subjection to very different temperature fluctuations, before getting onto the shelves. In the process, there is a loss of between 40 and 50% of the nutritional value of these foods.

„Sell by dates” are routinely altered in many chains, to keep fresh looking produce longer. Staff are paid very low rates and, in more than one known chain, have to wear nappies, as they are not given sufficient breaks to go to the toilet.

Huge power requirements are needed to maintain freezer and cold storage facilities, drawing heavilly on the national grid and thereby encouraging wasteful practices that increase already critical global warming patterns. They use excessive, non biodegradeable packaging and contribute significantly to Britain’s vast saturated rubbish tips.

Being able to buy “anything at any time” comes at a high price to our environment and farmers. The large supermarket chains buy their supplies from wherever it is produced at the lowest cost on the world market. Organic and conventional. This involves contracting large agrichemical oriented farms to mass produce “cheap” food. Because the price paid is very low, the farmer has to compensate by maximising production and minimising employment.

The result is the huge monocultural prairies that dominate US agriculture and have now established a significant foothold in Europe. These ‘food factories’ are entirely dependent upon chemical inputs: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, nitrate fertilizers and increasingly, genetically modified seeds/plants. Their soils are so barren that they care incapable of producing any crops at all without heavy doses of agrichemicals.

The same applies to meat production. The great majority of farm animals, in order to be raised to strict supermarket specifications and time lines, are housed is vast sheds with very little room to move freely or express their natural physiological needs. Electric lighting is kept on night and day and most animals never see real daylight or indeed, the outside world. Pigs and chickens are routinely fed antibiotics in their heavilly processed and genetically modified feed, in order to speed up their rate of growth and prevent them from becoming sick. Inspite of this, mortality rates are high.

All chickens routinely have their beaks clipped in order to stop them pecking each other in the overcrowded cages in which they are raised. The feed of egg laying hens contains chemical colours to make the yolks look red. The farmer can choose from a wide variety of orange colourings.

When I kept hens (free range) I was sent a yolk „colour chart” by the manufacturers hoping I would buy their products!

Without these colours the yolks of hens kept in these conditions would be grey and conequently completely unacceptable. Hens require access to green foods (ie grass) to have naturally orange yolks. The hens that supply the supermarket chains never get outside. They live for an average of just 3 months before being culled and put on display on polystyrene dishes in supermarket chillers, as quick chill chicken dishes and dog/cat food. The same goes for birds specifically grown for meat: they are fed 24 hours a day on genetically modified maize and soya plus antibiotic growth promotors in vast indoor air controlled (no windows) sheds often containing upwards of 30,000 hens. They are slaughtered at an average age of 2.5 months, their under – formed leggs barely able to hold their exaggerated weight.

Pigs suffer in similar conditions as chickens. They are housed on concrete and metal slatted floors and in large artificially heated and lit sheds. They are fed on mostly antibiotic laced GM soya and the piglets are fattened and slaughtered in less than half the time of piglets raised on free range outdoor systems.

On average, dairy cattle are culled (slaughtered) after just 3 lactation cycles, because they cannot maintain the peak volumes of milk demanded by the supermarkets in their thirst for profit, beyond the age of 4/5 years. Many suffer severe mastitis inflamations of the udder and hoof rotting due to the unnatural conditions in which they are kept.

On my organic farm in the UK, my diary cattle averaged 14 years before they ceased commercial milk production. I then kept them on as nurse cows for raising calves.

Each large supermarket that gains planning permission acceptance leads to the subsequent loss of an average of 250 local jobs through the closure of local businesses (Rural Development Commission, 1992). Money which used to circulate in the local economy is lost to the global economy, thereby draining the community of its life blood.

Supermarkets and hypermarkets require special road structures to cater for their large transportation vehicles and equally large concreted delivery areas. They are major contributors to CO2 emmissions, largely because of their vast and power hungry refrigeration units, but also because they encourage families to use cars to get to them – instead of shopping locally.

Tesco’s profit margins increase every year – and are now regularly in the 3.5 billion pound area. The other large competing chains are not far behind. They are all leading exponents of a cetralised market economy and have no interest in supporting local communities or stocking local food, inspite of requests to do so from their customers. Their representatives often claim that they will take an interest in purchasing locally – to placate any critics – but in reality they source 98 percent of their produce wherever it can be purchased most cheaply and most easily on the national and world market: via farming ‘sweat shops’.

All in all supermarkets and hypermarkets are at the front line of contributors to a degraded food growing environment on a global scale; inhumane animal welfare practices and the undermining of the integrity of local communities.

Any community that wishes to encourage a robust local economy would be well advised to steer well clear of such marketing practices. Individuals should think three times before spending their money in support of such irresponsible and market dominating monoliths.

Julian Rose

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.

This article is taken from Resurgence magasine May/June 2010

The green movement needs to revisit its fundamental principles; including (and especially) ‘Small is beautiful’, writes Julian Rose.

In the rush of excitement over both government and corporate moves to back green solutions for tackling climate change, many of the lessons so clearly spelled out by our founding fathers, including Leopold Kohr and E. F. Schumacher, have been all-too-hastily abandoned by those who should have known better.

Not only should we all be questioning the direction in which the environmental movement has moved over the past decade, but we should be asking why it has failed to come up with a dynamic, localised and ‘human-scale’ solution to the large-scale and government-backed, corporate agenda that continues to dominate our lives and our landscapes. Instead, there has been a noticeable and insidious growing level of largely passive ‘green’ obeisance to central government policies and EU handouts.

It is salutary to take ‘energy’ issues as an illustration of this. Here, it is plain to see the increasing monopolisation of green issues by market-oriented, profit-driven business enterprises and government institutions whose goals bear no relationship to the ones that inspired the term “Small is Beautiful” or the potent spark that title once ignited in our imaginations. There is no relationship, either, to the deeper concepts of ‘sustainability’ and ‘scale’ which directly connect appropriate technological advances with comm-unity regeneration and a due sense of proportion in all things.

What we have seen instead is widespread failure amongst large segments of society to recognise that most negative environmental impacts come about because of the profligate material expectations that continue to dominate our Western world – expectations that are raised and continuously promoted by powerful corporate, government and media vested interests.

Government calls to move towards renewable energy resources in order to “satisfy UK needs” (while meeting binding CO2 emission-reduction obligations) are really calls to continue to massage the needs of a consumer-fixated society rather than to address any of our actual needs, which, in truth, remain largely unknown. What is now known is that sentient human beings embody a greater need for spiritual, intellectual and emotional development than for the trappings of material opulence. The reason why this never gets mentioned is that we have allowed ourselves to be subjects of societal indoctrination, an indoctrination that promotes excessive consumerism as a baro-meter of human happiness and as being essential for the continuation of the now infamous holy grail: ‘economic growth’ and ever bigger profits for the dominant corporations.

But the long-sustained myth about the benefits to be accrued by this unending expansion of consumer-driven growth has recently been dealt a severe blow. There is no shortage of evidence of growing destruction to natural habitats and both ecological and human degradation continuing to be manifest even in ‘developed’ countries boasting a high GDP. Why then, in this ‘developed’ world, are the majority of green thinkers not converging on finding common and enduring answers to the ever deepening crisis in our midst? Are these deeper issues being sacrificed to the apparent imperatives of climate change?

If so, we need to recognise the fact and address it. Countries attempting to comply with national climate-change targets do so by postulating the need for so many million gigawatts of processed energy to fulfil ‘x’ perceived national demand. However, such calculations are predicated upon the wrong model: the current ‘living beyond our means’ one. The one that leads to the statement that we would need four more Planet Earths in order to supply the whole world with the standards of living “enjoyed” by Western Europeans and North Americans.

But what sort of standard of living are we enjoying when, for example, 10,000 tons of food is thrown out of households and supermarkets in England and Wales every day? When every rubbish tip is filled to bursting with packaging materials? When our impoverished soils are still being soused with thousands of tons of toxic agrichemicals every year? When almost everything we purchase today has three or four times less life-expectation than during the Victorian era? Is this still all going to be fine just so long as the generated energy that makes it possible is coming from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels?

The UK Green Party, for instance, is now publicly calling for help in the development of “Large-scale wind and tidal energy schemes” involving “massive investments” that will “raise wind energy production to the levels of Denmark by 2020″. Such ambitions seem to indicate that the Green Party is being swept along by the dictates of mainstream ‘business as usual’, in which broadly centralised energy-distribution patterns are main-tained and under the same corporate ownership – but driven by renewables instead of by fossil fuels.

Some may dispute this, but the impression being given is that there is a supposed ‘plus’ brought about by providing extra jobs through encouraging such schemes, and that this overrides the actual stand-alone merit of the schemes themselves.

So what would a renaissance of genuinely ‘people-led’ regional regen-erative initiatives actually look like?

The essence of my argument is that we don’t need ‘massive investment’ in any grand schemes. On the contrary, we need lots of small investments in highly diversified local and regional schemes, owned and run by the communities they serve. Integrated, local regeneration and ‘people-led’ creative solutions are, I would suggest, the imperative of our time.

There are signs of the emergence of such schemes within localised food and farming initiatives and through such initiatives as the Transition Town energy descent models. However, good as these are, they still fail to touch the broad swathe of green supporters needed to create a critical mass of public opinion for deeper change.

Fritz Schumacher and Leopold Kohr argued most cogently for “appropriate scale” in all things constructed to meet our daily needs; ones that are at once low impact and affordable and utilise local materials, thereby exerting a largely benign influence on our environment. Their words resonate ever more clearly as each year passes. We need to remind ourselves of this and act on such fundamental wisdom while we still have the chance. Large-scale wind farms, vast banks of photovoltaic panels, giant hydroelectric schemes are not the solution in the majority of cases. Not to climate change, nor to human change. Schumacher, in his wisdom, once stated that no structure should ever be built to a height taller than the tallest tree in the area, thereby never dominating Nature or humans.

How far we still are from this level of sensibility and vision! Instead we see green energy proponents applauding the establishment of regimented rows of 30-to-60-metre-high wind turbines that are increasingly marching across the landscape of the Western world, starkly symbolising continued obeisance to the gods of mass-produced power distributed through vast, centralised grid systems. It is a startlingly cogent reminder of just how sidelined and ignored the whole issue of scale, proportionality and environmental impact has been in the blinkered rush for idealistically flawed ‘green’ manufactured energy. ‘Scale’ as a humanitarian instinct guided by Nature, not by money and power.

So it has to asked, maybe even shouted: Why is it that the broader environmental movement is not promoting this sort of subtle and sensitive approach to our human and environmental needs? Why is so little emphasis given to the need for decentralised, human-scale solutions to the most pressing issues of our time? What has happened to environmentalists, ecologists, greens? Have the big environmental lobby organisations sold out to the ‘green’ corporate lobby? Are they simply the purveyors of a superficial greening of ‘business as usual’?

There is a pressing, urgent need to focus attention on the truly human-scale solutions that our world so profoundly needs and not to become obsessed with the grand technological fixes that are being mooted as potential deterrents to climate change. Let’s not be taken in by talk of a new ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ which so excites political figureheads and industrialists today. We citizens should have none of this. It’s more than time to take control over our destinies and cease supporting the out-of-control corporate theft of our futures.

Within the great shake-up which is now under way throughout a wide arena of planetary concerns, we have a one-in-a-million chance to do something radical: to help people take control of their lives at the local and regional levels, within communities, and not further appease the already ‘past its sell-by-date’ consumer-driven status quo.

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.”

Excerpt:

“It is said that a civilisation that is loosing its seeds and destroying its soil is a dying civilisation: and we are. Today, over eighty percent of mankind’s diet is provided by the seeds of less than a dozen plant species – and most of these are ‘owned’ by just two or three transnational corporations. Ninety eight percent of vegetable varieties have disappeared from the diet of the western world over the past hundred years. Unless this catastrophic loss of biodiversity is reversed, our gene pool – upon which all life depends – will run dry within the span of this century.”

As US citizens remain transfixed by the financial crises engulfing their nation, the US House of Representatives is about to take a decision on a seemingly innocuous series of bills that appear to offer further protection against poor hygiene and sanitary conditions in the food chain. However, these bills are not what they seem. A carefully planned and executed heist is underway, care of the Monsanto Corporation and the ‘Codex’ arm of the World Trade Organisation, to rid the agribusiness dominated food chain of any genuine ‘organic’ produce. ‘Nutrients’ of virtually all descriptions are under attack as potentially ‘unsafe’ and therefore a threat to public health. They should be made illegal according to the protagonists of these bills. So only sanitized, irradiated and chemically treated ‘nutrients’ will be permitted to enter the food chain if these bills get through Congress. In fact, the food chain will be one step nearer ‘total ownership’ by the “two or three transnational corporations” cited in the above chapter of my book.

Its a very disturbing development for US citizens who, for the most part, still appear to be bathing in the ‘Obama Honeymoon’ with its still lingering promise of change and more power to the people. Barak Obama had, prior to his election, raised hopes amongst anti GMO and pro organic activists, by stating that he would support the development of ecological farming and critically review GM technology. As it is, he has elected Tom Vilsack, the most solid of GMO supporters, as Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack was named ‘Governor of the Year’ by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation in 2008. Just to compound the deception, the President’s wife instigated the digging up of part of the White House lawn in order to grow some symbolic organic veggies.

What happens in the USA tends, after a small delay, to arrive in Europe. Owing to the dubious distinction of the ‘special relationship’ between the USA and UK, almost everything involving US corporate aggrandizement and power politics gets ‘special attention’ by leading political figures in our Country. Blair was already promoting Monsanto’s GM technology on the behest of Clinton. Lord Sainsbury was given the job of pushing forward the UK GM agenda when he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. I was surprised to see his heraldic ‘Knights of the Garter’ flag hanging in Windsor Castle’s Saint George’s chapel, in 2000.

Blair’s team invested large sums of pension funds in UK GMO developments, but was no doubt disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm of the British public for GM foods and field trials. The trials were unceremoniously ripped up by protesters who knew that pollen from the maize and oilseed rape crops would soon contaminate the British countryside, causing irreparable damage to the food chain. Brown, not to be outdone, continues to press-on with secretive GM research funding programmes and Hilary Ben has never flinched from the idea that genetic modification still has an important role to play in the future of our food.

What all this tells us is that the Agricultural Policy in the UK, USA and most of the ‘developed’ world, is an unashamed attempt to exert almost total politico-corporate control over the food chain, and to do it using a technology that guarantees the patented ‘ownership’ of plants and seeds by the corporations that create them. This involves expropriating the seeds that are the intellectual property of peasant farmers from around the world, laying claim to the seed’s DNA, and selling them back again under strict contractual conditions that include prohibiting any subsequent harvested seed to be saved, as well as demanding royalties be paid on every new purchase. Such practices are condoned by our governments as part of necessary ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ policies for southern hemisphere countries. But the reality is that they force independent farmers into slavery to the vast corporate agribusiness and pharmaceutical agencies that profit from their carefully conceived ‘patents on life’ and the vast outreach accorded to them by the World Trade Organisation’s forcible demands that poorer Countries lift their protective trade barriers. This, in exchange for vast loans designed to ‘Westernise’ native agricultural practices whose origins and current practices are about providing food sovereignty to their people – and not providing western supermarkets with mass produced green beans.

The ‘Codex Alimentarius’ arm of the WTO is now working in tandem with the US pharmaceutical companies to destroy not only organic food and farming, but natural medicine as well. All herbal, naturpath and homeopathic practices are being told that they will have to to be registered under the same costly terms as commercial pharmaceutical companies by 2010/12, or be forced to close.

Our ‘freedom of choice’ is being curtailed at a rapidly gathering pace. Once the food chain has become dominated – and quite literally ‘owned’ – by the corporate conglomerate, it will be too late to protest. It is for this reason that “Changing Course for Life” is calling for us to “take control of our lives before we become unrecallably controlled.” This can done by shifting our allegiances away from the supermarkets: the mass global food purveyors of unashamed ‘consumerism’ – and returning to more human , local and regional, small to medium-scale decentralised models of genuinely sustainable production and consumption.

Its a challenge we cannot shirk if we want to retain the ability to feed and house ourselves in the not too distant future. But its not just a countryside challenge. City dwellers take heart; in Cuba 8% of the total urban land area is cultivated by 18,000 gardeners and is thus helping to supply urban generated food for many thousands of families. Greening the city is not just a nicety, it is an essential component in the strategy of ‘taking control’ recommended in my book as a sine qua non for forging a new renaissance of enduring community living; in defiance – if necessary – of the bureaucratic rule book and state interference. Such an event is, in fact, already beginning to manifest itself in many urban centres throughout Europe and beyond.

The stage is now set for a radical, and distinctly pragmatic, reappraisal of our long overrated consumerist life styles. The catalyst of such a change will be the no longer tolerable forces of politico-corporate oppression, coupled with a resource and climate crisis that demands a very different approach to the way we currently manage our planet and ourselves.

In “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” the reader will be able to find a thought provoking resolution to these crucial issues that confront us in all the main avenues of contemporary life. It is a call to action, providing answers at a time when mainstream politics has no answers. If we really want to escape the clutches of Codex and the advancing ‘One World Government’, we have no option but to invent and build the new society.

“There is no magic pill to cure our planet or its people. However the more aware we become about the deep seated ills afflicting all realms of planetary life, the more ready we will be to shift the angle of our current trajectory, and embark on the new course. A course that leads beyond the ensuing chaos and into the new order which it is our absolute prerogative to set in motion.”

“Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” by Julian Rose. New European Publishing Company. Paperback. Price 10 pounds. See www.changingcourseforlife.info

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

Answer: Hit the seeds. The starting point of our genetic resource base and the foundation of the biodiversity of the planet and all its edible (and inedible) products. The true battle lines of the GMO resistance and acceptance war are being drawn up around the future of our right to grow our own food and to live lives independent of the crushing conformism of corporate greed. Food sovereignty is the absolute right of every citizen and every human community on this planet, and those historically most actively engaged in defending this sovereignty are the world’s peasant farmers.

They are a breed of humanity professionally engaged in the maintenance of permanently evolving living seed banks, set in the fields and community plots that are responsible for feeding the great majority of the world’s ever expanding population. And it is for this reason that, for the corporate controlled status quo, they remain amongst the most denigrated working peoples of our divided planet.

Peasant farmers are the last line of absolute resistance to the global corporate take over of the food chain. The red blood that runs through their prominent veins is the
most valuable human asset mankind possesses – it is quite literally the key to our survival as sentient, loving, humane beings. No wonder then, that the World Trade Organisation, The International Monetary Fund, The United States Department of Agriculture, the European Union and virtually all national governments and self declared dictators
wish to see the last of them. They are, infuriatingly, holding up the ultimate submission of mankind to the great genetic experiment with its accompanying tool kit of overt and covert mind control techniques and technologies, mindless materialism and psychopathic, unbridled megalomania.

We need, at this point, to be fully aware that the devil’s brew does not stop at genetic engineering of our crops and animals, it is about to embark on the genetic modification of human babies. The British government is now debating “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill” which is being introduced with one of its aims being legalising production of genetically modified human embryos – a techno-science that can lead on to the unrestrained creation of patented GM babies. Without a major outcry, this bill will pass into UK law sometime this year. Where is the resistance?

Should it fail to be blocked, the passing of this act will constitute another big step towards establishment of the Orwellian society familiar to readers of ’1984′. It is currently by-passing most opposition by making claims of eradicating otherwise untreatable sicknesses. This is the reasoning that can open the Pandora’s box for unrestricted eugenics.

In the meantime, in the sky above our heads, another highly visible weapon in the armory
of ‘advanced human control syndrome’ is regularly manifesting itself. “Chemtrails” – congealing high flying (military) jet fuel particles that remain stuck in the sky failing, unlike normal jet trails, to disperse and disappear into the atmosphere. ‘Chemtrails’ stick in the sky and form thin veil-like clouds that filter sunlight and release on those below, an as yet not fully diagnosed cocktail of chemicals including aluminium, silicon and barium; chemicals with neuro-toxic side effects, including disturbance of the human neocortex as well as climatic modification capabilities.

Fogging the human mind and altering the weather are two useful adjuncts to the imminent introduction of a new generation of ‘climate engineered’ GM seeds, currently awaiting a green light from the European Commission, incuding the infamous ‘terminator’ self destructing seed. A host of new patent applications are currently awaiting official clearance which, it is claimed, will provide a whole new range of novel, patented GM seeds capable of providing our ‘food future’ in the oft’ predicted extreme conditions of drought, flood and salinity. The European Commission, in the mean time, is winning some muted public applause through pretending to declare a certain level of opposition to first generation GMO.

Joining forces with peasants, as has happened in France, India, South America, Poland, Romania, Turkey and all across the world, helps form a powerful alliance against these forces of sterility and destruction. Indigenous farmers often have very little contact with the outside world and easily become victimised by smooth talking seed salesmen and government primed subsidies. Civilian activists, who have been resolutely defending the
future of GM free “Real Food”, can offer crucial support to peasant farmers; not least by informing them of the tactics of predatory transnationals and helping to link them in to the international resistance movement. Via Campesina has set an excellent example in this field, but much more can be done and needs to be done by a wide cross section of NGO’s.

In Poland, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland are jointly engaged in confronting government and corporate covert – and sometimes overt – attempts to slip GM seeds and plants into the system under the cover of darkness. The current Polish administration is playing with adopting classic EU ‘co-existence’ rules of the game. Faced with a Commission fine for failing to lift the
current GM seed ban, introduced by the previous administration in 2006, the Polish government’s Environmental and Agricultural ministers are juggling consumer resistance with corporate and Brussels based pressures to accept the ludicrously described “safe” adoption of barrier zones that, it is claimed, would prevent cross pollination between GM and non GM crops. All this, long after science and common sense have shown that pollen travels hundreds of kilometres on the wind and via bees, insects, birds, human feet
and lorries.

Poland’s 1.5 million small scale peasant farmers are only dimly aware of the battle going on above their heads, including a call upon the Black Madonna, made at a conference (April 24th) organised by the Coalition for a GMO Free Poland in the famous shrine at Jasna Gora, to (once again) support the cause of the defence of Poland against the forces of repression. The conference was presided over by a Franciscan Father and marked what we hope may be a more open intervention by the Church in what is clearly a critical test of
the fortitude of classic Judeo Christian moral and ethical beliefs. So far,signs of solidarity from the church have been few and far between, but how can sentient human beings, who also claim religious guidance, ignore the fate of the gene pool which is our common inheritance and whose health and welfare is our incontrovertible collective responsibility?

As we all battle on to expose the grinding poverty being exerted upon the world’s food producers by the GM monoliths, cotton farmers in the Indian province of the Punjab and elsewhere on the continent have been taking their lives, tragically unable to cope with the repeated failure of their much hyped (Monsanto) GM Bt cotton crops to produce a viable harvest. Left with no home saved seeds to fall back on, these farmers have been exposed to the ultimate betrayal of their human dignity and right to life. Their death constitutes a direct ‘crime against humanity’ perpetrated, as it has been, upon innocent farmers struggling to earn just enough income to support their families from day to day.

How much worse does it need to get before the ‘passive’ resistance finally rises up to join the fight for the freedom of mankind and our liberation from the forces of global repression?

Julian Rose (President, The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside)

July 2008