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.
The suicide belt
The monocultures that now sprawl across vast areas of the world’s farmland are based on plants that are effectively genetically identical. Some of these are modified to include genes from other species, which has not only led to the loss of wildlife but has also helped to create a terrifying loss of farmers. For a long time I have been particularly concerned about the situation in India, where small farmers are encouraged to borrow money at exorbitant rates of interest in order to buy genetically modified seeds, as well as fertilizers and pesticides, all of which are aggressively marketed by multinational companies. It appears, sadly, that, for whatever reason, the failure of harvests is a depressingly common occurrence and this compounds the debts the poorest farmers face. Having to buy yet more seeds that do not reproduce does not help the situation. The farmer has no way of paying back his debts and, of course, no crop either. The net result of such a situation is too awful to contemplate. In the past decade a staggering 100,000 Punjabi farmers have committed suicide because of the economic pressures that the industrial approach has imposed upon them. The Indian Parliament reckons that 16,000 suicides a year have been added to that total since the introduction of GM (genetically modified) crops. So, it seems we have devised an approach to farming that not only kills other plants and insects, it depletes the soil and indirectly kills the farmers too. Which begs the question: is this disconnected, mechanical approach to the task of food production really a long-term, sustainable path for the world to take?
Cows in a rotary milking parlour. While modern farming has increased yields, it has often treated animals more like machines than living beings. The manner in which farm animals are reared says something rather profound about how we have come to regard Nature. Once respected as a sacred gift, the natural world is now more often treated as a mechanism that we can test to destruction.
Some would say wholeheartedly ‘yes’ – including the renowned architect of the ‘Green Revolution’ in India, Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. To call it a ‘Green Revolution’, however, is very misleading. Farms and fields were not being made greener. They were being turned into massive outdoor factories with a heavy emphasis on growing just one crop to the exclusion of all else. This kind of approach has wiped out techniques that had, for centuries, maintained a rich and vital biodiversity. Borlaug, though, believed that we must continue to use such a system because we face the pressing problem of how to feed more and more people. As he put it, ‘without chemical fertilizers forget it. The game is over.’ But in light of the sort of evidence that is coming out of the so-called ‘suicide belt’ of India, it seems to me that with chemical fertilizers and all that goes with them, the game may well indeed be perilously close to really being over.
The hefty reliance on vast amounts of energy and chemicals, as well as the wider costs these cause to society, are generally excluded from calculations of the economic viability of intensive farming. The present way of accounting does not reflect sustainability questions, and this is why the diversity of food systems and the variety of plants and animals are replaced by a way of doing things that processes farm output into a variety of brands which, being packaged, give the impression of diversity and choice when in fact they are part of an underlying tendency to uniformity and monoculture.
Driven by official policies to promote ‘cheap food’, production subsidies, cut-throat competition in retail markets, readily available fossil fuels and ever more liberalized international markets (these last, in turn, driven by deliberate policy reforms aimed at the globalization of agriculture), food production and its retailing have been subject to a progressive process of intense industrialization so that today our food is produced, processed and sold by fewer and fewer huge companies. As a result, in many countries there are fewer farmers working land that has been dramatically transformed, mostly for the worse, so that its natural diversity has become depleted, its aesthetic appeal destroyed and the livelihoods it supports made all the more meagre.
Considering how little we know about the natural world, never mind what medical, nutritional, and other benefits it might provide for us, I have reached what seems to me, at least, the only logical conclusion: that it is the height of folly to continue with such a conscious destruction of what remains. If not for our own benefit, then surely