World agriculture and food production is one of the great issues of our times. The global situation is, of course, a terrible mess, riddled with injustice and absurdities, but it is rare to find a clear and balanced analysis of why it should ever have come to this.
The geopolitics is familiar. For decades, western Europe and North America have been pouring huge sums into subsidising local overproduction of a wide range of crops. This has closed home markets to imports, forced international commodity prices down and held back the efficient and competitive farmers of countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand.
Agriculture, which might have been the engine of growth and prosperity for many poor countries, has failed to take off as it should. In their efforts to break into selected export markets and compete on unequal terms with the northern blocs, southern governments often resort to subsidies and barriers of their own. This is a loser's game, as they cannot hope to match the scale of support given in rich countries.
Most farmers in the developing world desperately need credit, infrastructure, training and market stability to raise productivity, which is around a fifth of what it could be (or, for the billion or so of subsistence farmers, around a tenth). Without this, they stand little chance of reversing the escalating damage to their environments, or of becoming profitable contributors to local employment and prosperity (and in due course to national exports).
The primacy of agricultural development as a route to progress is a recurring theme in 20th-century history. After 1945, the great powers embarked on ambitious programmes to ensure food security, rural employment and social stability. The Chinese and Soviet nightmares cost tens of millions of lives between them, and destroyed countless local cultures - and for all that, were only partly successful at the most basic task of feeding their people. Today those programmes have been largely abandoned.
By contrast, the American and western European projects achieved their goals within a decade or so. The problem with them is that they have not been abandoned. Over the past 30 years, the common agricultural policy (CAP) has skewed the European vision, and continues to account for half of the EU's total budget. This, despite the fact that the proportion of Europeans working the land has declined from a fifth to a fifteenth. The US system, though different in structure, is on a similar scale.
So why is it that in Europe we can contemplate an end to subsidies for shipbuilding and steel manufacture, but not for sugar and starch production? Why do we abandon Welsh coalminers to the chill winds of competition, but subsidise Welsh hill farmers? Why is it that cotton and tobacco remain "strategic" crops, but that we are dependent on the outside world for most of our electronics? The list goes on. We have ferocious planning regulations to protect our landscape, but we let the farmers off. We grudge the Argentine gaucho his living, but do not care that China has more manufacturing jobs than Europe.
Why do we continue to regard agriculture as a special case? This highly technological, highly systematised commercial activity remains immune to the normal disciplines and incentives of regulated market economies, in a way that, say, the building trade does not. If that seems like an odd comparison, consider that both industries employ millions in enterprises ranging from big business to casual labour, shape our physical and aesthetic environment and provide basic human needs. It is as if we really believe that the practice of farming ennobles the landscape it occupies and the people who work it; as if we really believed that we cannot rely on foreigners for our food; as if there were a food crisis so urgent that only a heroic centralised effort could avert it.
When our current subsidy structure was designed in the late 1950s, some of the above did still apply. National politics helped to ease the structure into place. In Italy small farmers had to be favoured to shore up the anti-communist vote, and in Germany to secure the support of powerful regional politicians. France, the dominant European producer, was concerned to protect itself from cheap North American and Australian imports. Britain, where agricultural productivity was shooting up, had to be walled out.
Now, almost 50 years later, much of the structure has been made obsolete by the massive increases in agricultural productivity and international trade, and by the replacement of agricultural by non-agricultural employment in rural areas. Yet the vested interests have changed only their outward appearance.
Why do they remain so entrenched? Partly because the jobs of thousands of local politicians and millions of uneconomic farmers depend on the continued distribution of largesse. Moreover, the cost can be made to seem almost invisible to the EU taxpayer. And besides, urban voters have got what they wanted: good, cheap, plentiful food, more diverse, more available than ever before.
Meanwhile much of articulate public opinion continues to favour the farmers. Recall the intensely pro-farmer media coverage of the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain. In France, support for farmers has been explicitly fostered. Foreigners who try to sell us cheap food are cheating (or poisoning) us. Our farmers are the hard-working guardians of our landscape. Lose them and we lose our history, our soul.
And so the CAP continues, in the teeth of all the evidence that it now works against the things it is supposed to assist. Those who might have resisted it, like late-joining Britain, have cut their own deals.
Hitherto all of the many CAP reforms have been marginal and bitterly contested, especially by France. At last, however, there is the promise of movement in the face of two big external pressures: EU expansion, and the WTO Doha round. Real reform of the CAP is still many years away but it has, at least, been agreed in principle. Yet the European future now holds the strange prospect of farmers being paid not to farm, not even to set aside farmland, but to manage the land as if it were being farmed: virtual agriculture. The Welsh hill farmer may not have to own more than one sheep, but he will have to mow his fields and keep the dry stone walls stock proof. In the future, there will be quotas for hedges and payments for butterflies. Farmers will get grants to flood their land and sow weeds. In the future, the urban taxes used to bankroll agriculture will no longer be used in pursuit of redundant postwar ideals of food security, but to deliver an aesthetic goal - to sustain an ersatz landscape, for its amenity value to a population who have long lost touch with the grubby realities of farming.
One of the main promoters of this virtual CAP are the green and ecological movements of western Europe. The European parliament is one of the few arenas (outside the German government) where this loose "sentiment" group wields formal political power, and the parliament has long been using environmental issues in its turf war with the commission. Now the greens have to hope that public opinion maintains its tacit support for the CAP, as they rush off in new directions to spend its money.
The greens are hostile to big business on principle, and agribusiness in particular. But in many other respects they stand shoulder to shoulder with the farming subsidy lobby. They both need the public to believe a number of unsubstantiated things about agriculture - not least that there is a crisis to be managed. And they both celebrate the agricultural "exception," arguing that the normal rules of business should not apply to farming and food production. While both would like the third world farmers to flourish, neither wants them participating in a globalised market. Small farmers are good, our own small farmers are best. Dependence on foreign food is dangerous.
A sophisticated version of this worldview has just been published by Colin Tudge, a respected science writer with a background in biology and a long-standing interest in food and agriculture. His book So Shall We Reap is an analysis of, and vision for, world agriculture and food, and has been heralded as "a tract for our time" by former UN ambassador Crispin Tickell. Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth, is more fulsome. He calls it a "powerful and life-changing book."
Certainly this is an unusual and surprising book, encompassing history, science, politics and philosophy. It is a bit of a tangle, but it is rooted in a strong basic premise: that agriculture is humanity's primary activity, and not in any sense an industry. Agriculture is for feeding the world and should be directed and managed towards that end. The fact that we have lost sight of this imperative lies at the root of all problems. This premise is asserted a number of times but never really explained. We are told that "all businesses are different, but farming is more different than all of the others... Agriculture is properly seen as the counterpoise of all other human activities."
To this premise, Tudge seeks to bring the perspective of a biologist. His vision of a sustainable future is justified by his beliefs that natural environments have evolved to be stable and maximally productive, that traditional agricultural systems have evolved (by natural selection) to match the local environment and to deliver the needs of the people who live there, and finally that regional cuisines have evolved to perfectly serve the nutritional needs of the people who work a particular type of land.
This is neat and tidy, but mostly fallacious. The biology is wrong - indeed heretical, because ecologists and evolutionists did once believe this sort of stuff, 30 years or more ago. The discovery that it was quite false forced the abandonment of many long-held assumptions about progress and purpose in nature.
The cultural history is also strangely wide of the mark. Tudge's invocation of a Darwinian mechanism that, like farming or cooking, optimises cultural institutions and practice for the good of the human species and aligns them to nature is indefensible. No historian would believe in such a thing. Even the theorists who speculate about the mechanics of cultural evolution are sure that it doesn't work like this. (If you went back to the social Darwinists of 50 to 150 years ago, you might find sympathisers.)
For all this, Tudge's principles are rich with intuitive appeal to those many urban Europeans who hanker for a past when farming was in tune with nature, and food was a healthy delight. He speaks to those of us who, even while we embrace its benefits, resent commerce's intrusion into so many aspects of life. We must defend our traditions, especially against outsiders, and it should not matter if it costs money; principles of free trade cannot be as important as protecting our roots.
How well does the book defend its position? Poorly, in the end, but it is instructive to see how Tudge seeks to sustain the romantic illusions.
First, there are several overlapping essays on the history of agriculture and nutrition. These are esoteric, but charming and well written fragments on a range of topics that represent the author's personal enthusiasms - the prehistoric origins of wheat, Gregor Mendel and his peas, the discovery of DNA, the first synthesis of nitrogen fertiliser, and suchlike.
But this fragmentary history scarcely connects with the present day. Tudge's Rip van Winkle tendencies exclude many recent developments. Given that agriculture and food production have changed as much in the past generation as they did in the previous century, it is odd that so few dates and references are post-1970 - probably half are 19th century or earlier. Pesticides, for example, are described as if they were still persistent and bio-accumulative - as many were in the early 1960s. All the modern chemicals named by Tudge were actually banned from European agriculture decades ago (apart from the ones that organic farmers still use). The revolution that delivered today's armoury of sophisticated and comparatively benign agrochemicals is not described. Nor is the huge regulatory infrastructure that enforces it - meaning that today there are no significant residues in our food, no more accumulation of poisons in our environment. Why leave out the success story?
Many of the problems we face are in fact the consequence of success. In the west, food is now too abundant, too alluring to children, too sanitised, too cheap; people have been cut off from the exigencies of season and locality, there is too much choice, too much information, too much on the shelves. Public concern about food additives is higher than ever, although (or perhaps because) they are these days so ostentatiously regulated. E numbers have to be declared on packaging, and are banned if evidence (the requirements for which have become increasingly stringent) is not available to demonstrate their safety. We have come to think of them as dangerous, but they may be the only component of the food that has been systematically demonstrated to be safe at the concentrations present. Perhaps the world is a better place for this heightened concern. But Tudge's lengthy descriptions of food adulteration in Victorian times again fails to extrapolate to the highly regulated present.
And Tudge's history simply leaves too much out. The Irish potato famine and the reform of the corn laws are there. But there is nothing on the agricultural banks, farmer credit, land tenure rights, the overthrow of feudalism, bonded labour, land reform. Nor on women's role in the home and the farm or the rise of consumer power. Most startling of all, there is nothing on the CAP. The EU is mentioned only in a passing jibe about rare breeds of pig. Japan's sustained postwar protection of its small farmers is left out. Curiously, it is early (not late) 20th-century America that is presented, using the words of contemporary novelists, as the model to illustrate the closed markets, unfair competition, and criminal practices of today's supposedly free markets.
More coherent is Tudge's book within a book on the future of agriculture: "Enlightened Agriculture." Here he sketches a future world with a population stabilised for maybe 1,000 years at 10bn, and something over half of all people living as farmers. There would be capitalism of sorts, and even a global trade in manufactures like cars and computers. But agricultural production would be strictly localised, with each area growing and eating the bulk of its own excellent food (cooked with traditional local recipes). International agricultural trade would be conducted only in exotics, like spices, not in staples, like grain.
Science (government funded) and the latest technology (perhaps even some GM) would inform the traditional crafts of farming. Farms would be small, mixed, kind to livestock and wildlife-friendly. Competition would be constrained, there would be only limited local surpluses, and policy would ensure that labour was not shed from the land.
In this democratic world, farmers' work would be meaningful and fulfilling, but not desperately hard. The agrarian majority would be well paid for their labour, secure into old age, educated and healthy. They would be content to stay on the land because the rest of the population would lead lives that were not markedly better paid or more attractive than theirs. In this way, over the centuries, there would be no net migration to the towns and cities.
But who will pay for this arcadian vision? These farmers are not peasants, remember. There is social justice and equity, education and healthcare. There is no rich urban or professional minority to support the majority through taxes and high food prices. Moreover, what kind of work are these happy agrarians doing? How do they keep their yields so low? What is there about this agricultural life that will ensure youngsters (for the next 30 generations) choose to stay and grow old on their farms? What social values will sustain the preference of consumers for home-grown produce and cement their aversion to the food and cooking of foreigners?
One usually builds future visions by projecting forward the most consistent historical trends. Of course, the trends you choose shape the vision. But it would be hard to avoid considering the following points in sketching the next 50 years of agriculture. The growth in potential yield - the upper limit of what can be harvested from a given piece of land - can be seen to double every 25 years or so. People continue to get better access to information, and to act upon it - widespread adoption of today's best practice in agriculture and food production could probably treble the productivity of the world's existing farmland. In almost everything you can think of, the rule is that production moves from the richer to the poorer world. The rich world then concentrates on the specialist high-value end, and old technologies become lifestyle statements (Swiss watches, Scotch whisky, steam trains, organic farming). As the intensity of production rises above a certain level, and economies grow wealthier, so the environmental damage per unit of production tends to decline. Irreparable environmental damage (such as erosion, desertification, salination) happens mostly where social systems are on the point of collapse, or where grandiose plans and subsidies distort local conditions (African civil wars, Soviet irrigation projects).
Put that together and you can quickly imagine a future in which, by 2050, the world is producing over twice as much food as today (to feed more livestock and people), on less than half the land; in which countries like Brazil grow the bulk of the world's staples, but France still produces the finest wines; in which hobby farming has become a rich man's lifestyle choice in the west, and Africa's subsistence farmers don't have to struggle to grow enough to eat. Get the policy right, and you could start to hope that all fragile land is taken out of agricultural use, that soils recover, rainforests expand, and wilderness becomes a profitable amenity.
Which is not to say this will happen - we cannot predict the future - but something along those lines would be expected to be in the base case. Tudge's picture scarcely intersects with it at all.
The third strand of this book is Tudge's polemic against the forces that have driven world agriculture into its current predicament. This is passionate writing, light on data but rich with moral judgement. In places it is powerful and eloquent: his attack on the iniquities of intensive livestock farming, for example. Occasionally it is refreshing, such as his (possibly unintentionally scathing) demolition of organic farming and vegetarianism as world models. But mostly it is little more than a tirade against the forces that have "Monetarized, Industrialized, Corporatized and Globalized" world agriculture. He targets a swathe of people and institutions, ranging from the obvious industrialists, corporations, politicians and the WTO, to technocrats, all forms of expert, "bad" scientists, accountants and even Clare Short.
He is certain that the development of third world agriculture can only lead to disaster. International trade - the export of high-value vegetables from Africa to Europe, for example - is singled out as a particularly cruel delusion, that will impoverish any country tricked into attempting it. To him, the "war on poverty" is doomed to failure, because wealth is a finite commodity, trade a zero sum game, and the markets are already full. The poor should stay at home and till their fields, grow only what they need, and stay away from the cities.
Some of his attacks are fair, if intemperate. The BSE and foot and mouth epidemics exercise him, though he brings no fresh insight to either. Ironically he underestimates the costs of those two disasters, and the range of victims, because he has a blind spot about most of the non-agricultural sectors of the rural economy (there is no mention of tourism).
Throughout his book, Tudge's discourse is free from any serious discussion of trading blocs, subsidies or tariff barriers. Information technology and "traceability" are transforming the food industry, but they barely register as topics here. In Tudge's eyes, global supply chains are long, complex and impossible to police. In the real world, most of those involved are alarmed by just how short they have become, and how terrifyingly accountable suppliers now are.
Tudge is stubbornly ignorant about finance, although he attacks its practitioners with great ferocity. A few minutes in a bookshop would have told him that cash and profit are very different motivators, that a balance sheet is not where agricultural wages appear, and that a low-margin, high-turnover business is absolutely not what everyone wants.
What comes through is Tudge's - and by extension his supporters' - contempt for business. For Tudge it is a "dogfight." His is a world populated by distant hate figures and shadowy organisations, but he shows little understanding of the concerns of the small farmer. Nowhere in the book is there any objective reference to what farmers actually think and feel. The vast dataset on farmer opinion - tens of millions is spent each year on surveys - remains untouched. Perhaps the hugely diverse values and personal ambitions of billions of people fit poorly into his romantic assumptions about the nobility of their calling.
So why are we told that this is "a tract for our times?" How can those who articulate the green case possibly be comfortable with such a curiously unbalanced mix of myths and beliefs, such a partial view of the world? Is it because it suits their interests to have the deracinated urban middle classes believing these things about food and agriculture? Without such a myth, the public would not allow them to transfer the vast CAP budget to their plans for a managed landscape - the game of virtual agriculture that they hope to play across Europe.
Much of their philosophy is not new. I was particularly struck by Tudge's citation of John Ruskin. Ruskin's nostalgia for a pre-industrial, Christian, feudal society, his hatred of commerce, and his belief in aesthetic rather than materialist values was considered too reactionary by most of his fellow Victorians. However, his deep aversion to competition did have an influence on early socialism. After reading this book, I suggest he may be coming back into fashion.
Tudge quotes extensively from Ruskin, as if his views were current. He hankers for a new Enlightenment, and grounds his morality in aesthetics. Religiosity and mankind's fall from grace are recurring themes. Like Ruskin, Tudge worries about God, and elevates nature to a quasi-divine status. Christian language, if not doctrine, litters the text. Monasteries constantly crop up too, always in a positive light.
So perhaps we should read this book, as Porritt urges, and for two reasons. First, to understand the myths and legends of an emerging philosophy that threatens literally to reshape our planet. Second, to set ourselves a challenge. How would we answer the concerns Tudge raises? And how ought we to communicate with an articulate and concerned minority that rejects the achievements of the past 30 years, and refuses to understand business, money or trade?
