1,300 – 2,000 miles from farm to customer.
A truly durable farming system – one that has kept things going for 10,000 years – is the one that is commonly called ‘organic farming’. In a sense this is an unfortunate term because it has the ring of an alternative approach, or even a new one, when it is actually how farming was always conducted before industrial techniques came to dominate agriculture. It means farming in a way that preserves the long-term health of the soil, which comes down to giving back to Nature organic matter to replace what has been taken out. It means maintaining microbes and invertebrates in the soil and good moisture. It means using good water catchment management, planting trees that prevent the soil being eroded and maintaining the teeming biodiversity, including the beneficial and essential insects, such as bees.
It has become ever more apparent to me that the ‘food miles’, the degradation of soils, the chemical pollution and the massive consumption of oil and natural gas add up to a way of producing food that acts without any concern for the harmony found in Nature and the natural order. This approach abandons the fundamentals that should sustain food production. But it is the increasing demand for land that poses the biggest challenge.
I should be clear, though, that this is not in my view merely a competition between technological approaches and different methods of farming. Once again it comes down to that fundamental question we will address in the following chapters of how we have been persuaded to look at the world and regard our place within the great scheme of Nature. Looking at the way we treat the natural world and produce our food raises questions far deeper than those of how it will be possible to save charismatic birds like albatrosses or to grow food without destroying the land.
Forest
We are all personally involved. Take what is happening in the middle of remote rainforests. Thousands of species are being destroyed every year as large areas of natural habitat are cleared to make way for farmland. This may seem so far away that it does not touch us. And yet a quick glance along an average super-market shelf reveals that this is not so at all. From the supply of coffee and beef to the soya and palm oil that are ingredients in a huge range of processed foods, our modern world is presently fed in a highly destructive manner.
New roads are being driven into ever remoter areas of the rainforests to keep pace not only with the demand for food, but also to extract minerals and timber. A case in point is a new road that links Boa Vista in Northern Brazil with the Atlantic coast of South America at Georgetown in Guyana. It cuts through some of the most diverse and undisturbed rainforest in the world, and in doing so it threatens to unleash massive deforestation, which will in turn produce carbon-dioxide emissions and cause both the loss of vital biodiversity and huge disruption to the culture of the indigenous societies who still live there. The President of Guyana has told me how he sees little option but to allow the opening of the remote interior forests. His country needs income and the international community presently places a clear financial value on soya, beef, and timber, and so his country must clear the space to produce it. I have been very concerned about this but I am pleased to say that, in part, as a result of work undertaken by my Rainforests Project in bringing people together, a ground-breaking deal between Guyana and Norway has been concluded. The new agreement sets out to cut forest loss through providing Guyana with alternative economic strategies that will promote and enable low-carbon development, rather than the destructive changes in land use that have occurred in some other countries in that region.
It is not only in the tropics that the last wild forests are under threat. Even in the European Union some of the most extensive natural forests that remain are being cleared, especially in the East. In Romania, for example, where I have travelled extensively, agricultural expansion is leading to the clearance of wild forest. The forests are also being plundered for timber in ways that are quite unsustainable, in part because of the way in which the forests have been privatized, so that they lack proper governance and management.
These trends have alarming implications. Human activity has already altered by different degrees nearly one half of the Earth’s land surface. In the next thirty years this proportion is expected to rise to above 70 per cent. I learned recently that by 2050 it is expected that a further 11 per cent of land worldwide will be converted from natural habitats, either to become farmland or to become urbanized. That is about equivalent to the area of Australia.
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My
Services are bound.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
And to compound the situation, the relative intensity with which it will be farmed is also expected to increase dramatically. This, in turn, will cause a range of related problems. The rampant use of artificial fertilizers will continue to cause an excessive build-up of nutrients. This is already causing huge problems for the way natural ecosystems function, from grasslands to marine environments. These and other systems are also struggling to cope with the large quantities of manure produced in intensive livestock-rearing units. It may seem contradictory with so much talk of reduced fertility, but the progressive enrichment of the environment by animal waste, artificial fertilizers, and industrial sources of nutrients is one of the most serious ecological challenges we face. More and more fertility does not produce balance.
I have no doubt that taking land that at the moment is under the rainforests and converting it into ever more intensively productive farmland might meet the short-term demand for food and so create a source of income and development, but we should pause to remember that the biodiversity that we are depleting with such abandon is of fundamental importance to our welfare. Many of our modern medicines, a great number of industrial and chemical applications, and all of our food are derived from species that were once wild or still are.
As someone who takes an immense interest in farming, I am acutely aware of how people have shaped Nature to meet human needs. Working with the raw material of natural genetic diversity, farmers have, for thousands of years, conducted selective breeding, in the process creating and maintaining an incredible array of agricultural biodiversity. Some 10,000 years ago Mexican farmers began to domesticate maize from a wild grass. Since then they have generated thousands of varieties suitable for cultivation in the numerous environments in the Mexican landscape – from dry, temperate highlands to moist, tropical lowlands. And so it is with many other crops, such as rice.
In India alone it is estimated that there are around 200,000 varieties of rice. This is a vast number, but it is only half as many as are believed to have existed in pre-industrial times. Much of this rice diversity has been lost recently because of the introduction of modern, commercial varieties that are better suited to modern intensive techniques. The same thing is happening to maize, and in some areas genetically modified varieties are cross-breeding with traditional ones, in the process further diminishing the traditional strains.
I cannot help but conclude that what was once a harmonious relationship between farmer and Nature is fast turning into an industrial process built on the flimsy foundations of exploitation, rather than what I would regard as the sounder footings of nurture and partnership. And this is of more than passing interest. The depletion of crop varieties is leading to the loss of different traits that could be of huge importance for people in the future – varieties that ripen at different times, for example, or ones that can withstand drought or are disease-resistant and that respond in different ways to manure. As we face many challenges, including climate change and the depletion of oil reserves, it might well be that traditional crop strains will once more underpin our food security – if they are still around to be deployed.
