Our farming activities have been on a bit of hiatus since last autumn, largely as a result of the planning situation, and I’ve seriously contemplated trying to find a less stressful and more remunerative line of work. But once an improper farmer always an improper farmer so we (that is Spudman and the long-suffering Mrs Spudman) have decided to recommit to our small-scale farming vision, and have therefore appealed to the Planning Inspectorate against Mendip’s decision.

If you’re minded to write to the Inspectorate in support of our plans, this page on our website tells you how. If you live locally, or have agricultural expertise and can vouch for our view that intensive small-scale horticulture requires an onsite presence, then so much the better.

I’ll keep you informed of Mr and Mrs Spudman’s progress.

Meanwhile, after our exertions producing last week’s mammoth posting, the Small Farm Future team is going to take a break next week. But please don’t forget about us – we’ll be bringing you more pearls of wisdom from the frontline of sustainable agriculture soon, including ‘ode to a wheatfield’, some features on organic farming, a wry look at the permaculture design certificate, news of Small Farm Future’s growing academic respectability, another look at perennial agriculture and breaking news of an agricultural techno-fix that may just solve all humanity’s problems in one dig. So see you soon…

I was prompted to post on Lynas’s talk because of what struck me as his blatantly rhetorical use of the word ‘science’ to discredit GM opponents – indeed, the rhetorical efforts of GM proponents to position GM as ‘scientific’ and its opponents as ‘unscientific’ is beginning to attract some critical academic scholarship[6]. GM proponents (such an unwieldy phrase…henceforth in this essay I shall label them ‘Genomic and recombinant advocates, triumphalists and enthusiasts’ or GRATEs for short –enthusiasm is endearing and advocacy is expected, but it’s the GRATEs’ great triumphalism that grates)…er, where was I, oh yes the GRATEs use the irreproachable cachet of science to smuggle in a whole series of essentially political commitments to their favoured agricultural choices, in a process that Kinchy aptly calls ‘scientized politics’[7]. A glance at the fairly risible scientific content of Lynas’s speech – his inferences from the German E. coli outbreak, his comments on Australian transgenic wheat, his analysis of food safety – should be sufficient to convince the informed reader that it is scientized politics and not science that’s at play here. Indeed, anyone propounding the notion that public policy can be decided by ‘science’ rather than ‘ideology’ would be well advised to take a course in political science or sociology to find out what ‘ideology’ actually means – and if that doesn’t work then really there’s no hope for meaningful debate. Even the geneticist Adam Rutherford has described synthetic biology as being like a ‘political movement’[8].

Still, we all use rhetorical devices – it’s not as if the GRATEs are alone in this. So it may be that beyond their rhetoric they do have sound reasons for their positions. That’s what I’m going to look at in the rest of this essay, mostly in relation to golden rice – “the poster crop for the potential of the private sector to help the poor”[9] – which undoubtedly for that reason seems to be the main focus of debates on the ethics of GM and certainly has been in my case, but also touching on other GM issues. So the remainder of the essay falls into eight parts:

• Throwing (pre)caution to the wind
• The arms race accelerates
• Ms Carson’s anthrax and Herr Haber’s allotment
• The white man’s burden
• Golden promises
• Let them eat broccoli
• But it’s free!
• Conclusion

Throwing (pre)caution to the wind

The precautionary principle places the burden of proof that a new technology is not harmful upon those seeking to implement it, and so enjoys an obvious popularity with anti-GM activists and an equally obvious notoriety amongst the GRATEs. Clearly it’s impossible to be 100% sure about the future consequences of any new technology so a rigorous interpretation of the precautionary principle would mean that no new technology was ever implemented – hardly a tenable position.

Bjorn Lomborg[10] doubtless had this issue in mind when he suggested that if the humble potato had to jump through the extensive regulatory hoops applied to modern GM crops then it probably wouldn’t pass muster. It’s a fair point inasmuch as one can’t assume that conventionally bred crops are necessarily safer than GM ones. But potatoes weren’t in fact grown on any significant scale as food crops for well over a century after their introduction into Europe precisely because people considered them poisonous[11] – their rise reflected a process of slow acculturation. In the world we now inhabit, once a crop has passed its regulatory hurdles it has the potential to quickly reach millions of stomachs, whose owners may not even know that they’re eating it.

A transgenic crop like golden rice (engineered to have additional Vitamin A in order to address the disabling and potentially lethal effects of Vitamin A deficiency) is essentially a medical intervention targeted at large numbers of impoverished people with highly compromised health and few choices over what they eat. Therefore, as with any medicine, I think we need to be pretty sure that the cure is better than the disease. In common with many GRATEs, Ingo Potrykus, co-inventor of golden rice, complains that the regulatory burden for GM crops like golden rice is too great and has delayed its implementation by 10 years[12]. I suspect many drug companies feel the same about their products, and would prefer a lighter regulatory touch. Well, they would wouldn’t they… But even if they’re ultimately proved right it’s only really with long historical hindsight that anyone can judge whether the application of the precautionary principle was too stringent or too lax in any given case. And there are surely grounds for erring on the side of stringency.

The GRATEs make much of the delays to the implementation of transgenic crops, but by any historical standards their spread has been astonishingly rapid. Less than twenty years after the first commercial GM crops were grown, the latest figures show that there are over 170 million hectares globally planted to GM crops[13] (or at least to GM ‘events’ – but why not use the industry’s own figures?). I’d be surprised if any other new agricultural technology in human history has spread so far, so fast. I don’t think the GRATEs are on firm historical ground in suggesting that transgenic technology has been subjected to inordinate delay.

The GM debates of the 1990s were much concerned with the safety of GM crops, in which context the label ‘Frankenfood’ was coined. Interestingly, a recent study has shown that the term ‘Frankenfood’ now occurs more frequently in GRATE treatises as a way of ridiculing anti-GM activism than among anti-GM treatises themselves[14]. The debate has moved on, and it’s probably true that some of the original fears over the risks to human health of GM crops were unfounded – though uncertainties do remain about the safety of GM crops, and the GRATE shibboleth about GM being a safer, less ‘scattergun’ approach than conventional breeding is not well founded[15]. On the other hand, it seems pretty likely that the prodigious ingestion of soya and maize, key GM crops, in modern diets is unhealthy whether we’re talking about transgenic varieties or not[16]. The larger health issues are about the grain and grain-legume rich diet furnished by modern industrial agriculture, to which the GM industry is accessory.

The arms race accelerates

Indeed, it’s this uber-industrialisation, not specifically caused by GM crops but further potentiated by them, that seems to me the main problem. Every agricultural intervention invites a response from the natural biota that we term ‘pests’ (typically weed plants or insects that directly or indirectly compromise crop growth), but generally speaking the more monolithic the intervention the quicker and more thoroughly it will be neutralised by the natural response. The advantages of pesticide tolerant GM crops are already being negated by the emergence of pest tolerance and secondary pests[17], to the extent that some farmers no longer see any economic advantage to their GM seeds[18]. This isn’t a problem specifically of GM crops, although it can be compounded by the direct transfer of resistant transgenes to wild pests, which is GM specific, and for which there is now clear evidence[19]. But it is a problem of large-scale GM monocultures. There are ways to try to get around it – pest refugia, high lethal doses, new varieties to outsmart the resistant pests. Some of them may work for a while, depending on a vast range of wider agronomic factors. But the way GM technology is being implemented represents an acceleration and a narrowing of the agricultural arms race which leaves an increasingly large number of people at the mercy of technical agronomic innovations whose future success we cannot guess. Perhaps there’s an unlearned lesson here from the green revolution of the 1960s and 70s, where the initial high yield increases have often dwindled away largely in the face of pest response[20] . Meanwhile there are serious concerns about the impact of GM crops on biodiversity, both cultivated and wild[21] – which has been the scientific basis of the EU ban on GM crops.

Ms Carson’s anthrax and Herr Haber’s allotment

This is a bit of an aside, but a recent GRATE meme (though not, I submit, a great meme) is that Rachel Carson – pioneer of environmentalism and whistle-blower on the environmental damage of postwar industrial agriculture – would have approved of GM crops, typically on the grounds that they are a bio-smart and not a chemo-dumb approach[22]. Perhaps she would also have favoured anthrax over Trident as her preferred weapon of mass destruction for the same reason. It’s a neat rhetorical strategy to recruit a hero of your opponents to your own cause, and of course it’s a great help that she’s dead and cannot speak for herself. Personally I think she might be pretty narked that after the first generation of agri-technophiles tried to destroy her reputation, a later generation is invoking it for their cause. Anyway, I reckon Fritz Haber would have been a strong supporter of organic agriculture. As a nationalist who devoted most of his life to the technological glorification of Germany, he was sacked by Hitler for being Jewish and died shortly thereafter a broken man[23]. Had he lived longer and seen the ultimate course of German nationalism, I think he would have recanted his erstwhile politics, recasting them into a more internationalist conception of food sovereignty, and devoting his prodigious skills to working for local self-reliance to become an outspoken advocate of municipal allotments and green manuring. But of course I could be wrong. Perhaps we should let the giants of the past rest in peace and conduct our contemporary arguments in our own names, not theirs.

Golden promises

I’m going to move on now to talk mostly about Golden Rice, a GM crop that – as mentioned above – has been engineered to contain high levels of Vitamin A in the hope that it might treat Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in susceptible populations – a condition that causes blindness and the death of an estimated 250,000-500,000 children annually[24].

I have no reason to doubt that the people working on Golden Rice are genuinely concerned about this appalling disease and that Golden Rice may eventually have some role to play in lessening its impact. However, the emotive issue of children’s deaths from VAD is often used by GRATEs as a kind of moral high ground with which to berate GM critics[25] – disreputably in my opinion, firstly because the facts scarcely bear out their case and secondly because their approach usually reveals a much greater concern for advocating GM crops than for tackling poverty and disease. Indeed, even Gordon Conway, an unequivocal supporter of GM technology, wrote that “the public relations uses of golden rice have gone too far”[26] when he was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded some of the golden rice research. A while back, Jeremy Cherfas wrote “Golden Rice, as a poster child for engineered biofortification, has come a long way. Those promoting it have become much less strident and have sought to build alliances”[27]. Well, stop the press, the latest news is that they – or at least their camp followers – are getting strident again…

It’s worth pointing out that a child can get all the Vitamin A it needs by eating the equivalent of half a carrot a day, and that people suffering from VAD are basically people who are too poor to eat anything much other than rice, or other Vitamin A deficient staples[28]. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not currently known whether golden rice can actually reduce the burden of VAD – this is the subject of currently ongoing trials[29]. Nevertheless, it’s widely claimed that golden rice can save thousands or millions of lives, and do so more cheaply than other interventions.

As far as I can see, there’s little evidence behind these claims – the most convincing I’ve found is the economic evaluation undertaken for India by Alexander Stein and colleagues[30], who suggest that the implementation of golden rice could save somewhere between 8 and 59% of the burden of ill health (disability and death) from VAD in India (which is quite a big margin of uncertainty really…) at a price that may prove cheaper than Vitamin A supplementation programmes. I’ve looked at this study and as far as I can judge it’s competently done, but it’s based on ex ante analysis (which is economist jargon for ‘we made the numbers up’) rather than on what’s actually happened and inevitably it makes various simplifying assumptions that are questionable – these include not incorporating the full costs of developing golden rice, not incorporating the full benefits of other remediation programmes, and simply assuming that golden rice will reach those most in need of it through the Indian public distribution system (PDS) and other routes.

I wrote to Professor Matin Qaim, one of the study authors, on this latter point. His view is that the price of golden rice would be the same as ordinary rice so there’s no reason to expect differential access by income level. Plausible perhaps, but I’m not so sure…other research has suggested that PDS rice goes disproportionately to the better off[31], and indeed there is a mass of similar such issues about the distribution of VAD and its remedies that requires proper analysis before anyone can draw firm conclusions about its efficacy and cost-effectiveness. For example, the main thrust of the golden rice project is to give the seeds to poor farmers in rural areas where other interventions have been less successful. However, some studies suggest that the main burden of VAD falls upon the rural landless rather than rural farmers[32], and there seems to be little analysis of how the rice will reach the plates of the landless. Nor is there much analysis of institutional problems in the distribution of golden rice to rural areas. The lesser success of other VAD treatments such as Vitamin A supplements in rural rather than urban areas has been to do with factors such as poor transport and communications infrastructure, the limitations of rural extension services, conflict and conservatism among rural communities and so on. I don’t see any reason to suppose that these will not equally afflict the implementation of golden rice – a point made by Jansen and Gupta in their analysis of ‘biotechnology for the poor as unrealised promise’[33]. Moreover, if we don’t even currently know whether golden rice can actually reduce the burden of VAD, we certainly don’t know its capacities after several generations of seed saving and replanting by poor farmers in a variety of local conditions.

None of this suggests to me that golden rice has no potential role in tackling VAD. I find it fairly easy to agree with Stein et al’s modest conclusion that “Golden Rice should therefore be considered seriously as a complementary intervention to fight VAD in rice-eating populations in the medium term”[34] – although it would be nice if there were some economic evaluations of the many other lower tech interventions that are recommended by the WHO and other public health experts such as supporting breastfeeding and community gardening so that we could do some proper comparisons.

At any rate, seriously considering something as a complementary intervention is a very far cry from tendentious claims that golden rice is obviously the best intervention[35], or even more hysterical accusations that its critics are morally culpable for VAD-related child deaths[36]. As I mentioned above, the GRATEs like to raise the spectre of children’s deaths to impugn the moral standing of golden rice sceptics[37] but there’s no evidence behind their claims and (memo to self) no need for sceptics to rise to their bait.

Let them eat broccoli

As far as I can see VAD is caused by poverty, and most especially by the kind of grinding, abject and politically powerless poverty that is the special misfortune of the rural landless. This is something that the GRATEs gloss over far too readily – the approach is exemplified by Lynas, who writes “No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term soluton to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general. But achieving this requires the elimination of poverty (which is why rich countries do not have this problem), something which will take time and decades of economic growth in the developing world.”[38] Note the slippage in those words between the absolute dietary privation of VAD and the total ‘elimination of poverty’. Note the rhetorical closure to the possibility that poor people may have Vitamin A adequate diets.

People who actually know and care about poverty in the ‘developing world’ do not gloss over the issues in such a way. They take seriously the question of rural infrastructure development, land rights, extension services, and access to diverse diets. They do not shrug their shoulders and point to evidence that commercial vegetable growing is economically difficult, but consider why it’s difficult, what can be done about it, and consider carefully the differences between commercial and self-provisioned vegetables. The reason that a GM enthusiast such as Gordon Conway devotes relatively little attention to GM in his book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World[39] is because he cares more about tackling poverty than he does about trumpeting GM – which is not something that can be said about most of the GRATEs who have jumped on the golden rice bandwagon.

GRATEs often say, apparently quite reasonably, something along the lines of ‘it needn’t be either/or – why not both golden rice and other interventions’. Well, no reason really – except that the funding and policy environment supportive of the former is often explicitly antithetical to the latter[40]. Other interventions usually involve a more explicitly political foregrounding of poverty as the problem and more unglamorous legwork in poor communities. The attraction to funders, governments and scientists of doing cutting edge biotech research in a well-appointed institute rather than community advocacy and development in squalid squatter villages are fairly obvious – a criticism of the older biotech ‘green revolution’[41] that still holds true[42]. But if the proposal is genuinely to examine the potential contribution of golden rice alongside other possible interventions, then yes – why not?

However, often that isn’t the proposal. The giveaway phrase is ‘let them eat broccoli’[43]. Intended as a put down to golden rice critics who suggest that the priority solution to VAD must be dietary diversification, this phrase lays bare the real concerns of those that use it, which are (1) to ridicule GM critics and (2) to promote a GM solution as the only viable one. In so doing, I think they reveal their ignorance of development issues and their lack of any real concern over the pathologies of poverty, which are not ultimately going to be solved by supply side interventions, as Edward Carr has nicely argued[44]. Biofortification (GM or not) normalises poverty in much the same way that many drug therapies normalise pathology. Of course, that’s not an argument against using biofortification or drug therapy, but it is an argument against the deep bias our political culture displays in favour of acute and remedial high tech interventions that tackle only proximate causes, rather than low tech preventive interventions[45] . This bias stalks the ‘let them eat broccoli’ phrase.

The phrase is obviously a reference to Marie Antoinette’s much-misunderstood ‘let them eat cake’ but I wonder why ‘broccoli’ has been chosen as the substitute term…

The white man’s burden

…ah yes, it must be because broccoli is redolent of fancy, middle-class, European cuisine, so the term implicitly locates anti-GM sentiment in the effete organic sensibilities of comfortably-off Europeans. Indeed, various GRATEs are pretty explicit in their attempts to portray anti-GM sentiment as an outmoded affectation more or less exclusively restricted to wealthy Europeans[46], an accusation that has been effectively criticised by Jansen and Gupta[47]. The contrary and rather obvious truth is that there are supporters and opponents of GM crops in every region of the world and among rich and poor alike. It’s certainly possible to dispute the arguments of anti-GM activists from the global south, but it’s not possible to dispute the fact that these activists exist[48].

I think the GRATEs’ attempts to portray anti-GM activism as an elite European phenomenon is at best patronising, and in some respects implicitly racist. What they’re effectively saying is that people in the global south are incapable of making their own reasoned judgments about GM crops and are hoodwinked by western activists. The GRATEs’ argument then becomes a version of the ‘white man’s burden’, that venerable apologetic for colonialism which held that it was the weighty but necessary responsibility of the colonizer to liberate the colonized from their poverty and ignorance by recourse to the superior technology and wisdom of the colonizing power. There’s a pretty long history in the global south of colonial projects dreamed up by western experts – often very well intentioned – which go badly wrong, usually to the detriment of the people who were supposedly to be helped rather than to said experts[49]. Suspicion over golden rice is historically rational, however much certain (other) wealthy westerners wish to peddle it as their latest act of selfless benevolence.

Chief contemporary betrayer of this revamped white man’s burden in the eyes of the GRATEs is Greenpeace, which campaigns globally against GM crops, including golden rice. To be honest, I’ve struggled to find out exactly what the GRATEs’ case against Greenpeace is, other than simply disagreeing with its stance. Specific allegations are rare. Ingo Potrykus himself concedes that anti-GM activism hasn’t actually slowed the development of the golden rice project[50]. It’s often remarked that Greenpeace is well resourced financially[51], though I can’t see what that has to do with the arguments for or against GM crops. Possibly some Greenpeace campaigns have understated levels of Vitamin A in golden rice, which is perhaps reprehensible, though of course nobody yet knows what impact golden rice would actually have on the burden of disease. And Greenpeace blew the whistle on a golden rice trial in China which indisputably wasn’t following proper research protocols[52] – no case to answer there, as far as I can see.

If anybody can point me to the smoking gun that shows how Greenpeace is responsible for the avoidable deaths of children from VAD, then I’d be interested to take a look at the evidence. Personally, I think it’s no bad thing for civil society to have pressure groups lobbying for causes, and if we want to allocate blame to international organisations for causing avoidable suffering among the global poor I’d suggest that the callous protectionism of EU and US agricultural policies, the one-sided free trade agenda of the G8 and the WTO, the many anti-poor policies of the World Bank and the IMF, and the foreign policies of the major global power blocs are orders of magnitude above Greenpeace in the gallery of shame.

But it’s free!

The GRATEs make much of the fact that Syngenta has licensed golden rice to be distributed freely to poor farmers. Of course, nothing is ever actually ‘free’ – there is always an opportunity cost involved, and it would be nice to see a serious analysis of how alternative investment strategies in community development might stack up in comparison to the total costs of the golden rice project.

Still, on the face of it Vitamin A packed rice seeds given away to poor farmers sounds like a pretty good deal (though I suspect it may seem less so to such farmers themselves for the reasons outlined above – western corporations have previous). Perhaps it’s true that eco/lefty opinion is overly suspicious of such corporate largesse, which may be actuated by genuine humanitarian motives rather than being the Trojan horse that many on the eco-left suspect. Equally I suspect the GRATEs are often underly suspicious. But it’s not really about one’s personal politics. The whole discourse of political economy in the west over the last thirty odd years has, very explicitly, taken the line that social interests are best served by the pursuit of private profit and that maximising shareholder value is the fundamental corporate duty – it’s been a political embodiment of Adam Smith’s dictum “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good”. And yet in the case of golden rice, all of a sudden we’re expected to believe precisely the opposite.

Even if there are genuinely humanitarian motives at play in the actions of the biotech corporations, the fact is the global economy is not structured to accommodate them – a point that Potrykus makes in complaining about the lack of institutional structures to support public good biotech initiatives, though bizarrely he blames this on a regulation-obsessed public sector rather than a deregulation-obsessed public sector[53]. Witness, for example, Monsanto’s smallholder programme which “represented an attempt to ‘mainstream’ the values and principles of sustainability into Monsanto’s operations, but…this led to the distinctive philanthropic and developmental aspects of the programme being undermined by competing commercial and financial pressures”[54]. As somebody who has likewise tried to run a business along ethical and sustainable lines but ultimately came to grief in the face of such pressures, I sympathise. But not too much. The basic model on offer here is the same one that says it’s best to let rich people generate wealth without limitation, and then – if they so wish – allow their wealth to trickle down to the poor. Curiously, that model always appeals most to the rich, and the trickle just never does quite seem to put a stop to poverty. The point is not that large corporations are evil – they’re just doing the job that we expect of them. The evil is in the way that we have structured the economy to depend on their largesse.

I have no idea how all this will play out over the coming years. I doubt anyone does. I don’t see any basis for supposing that GM technology will put the control of seeds back into the hands of farmers and small local companies when the whole thrust of the seed business has been precisely in the opposite direction, GM or no (witness the latest EU seed law)[55]. The big sociological story of our times is urbanisation in the global south: UN projections suggest that by 2025 there will be 454 million extra urban dwellers in China, India, Bangladesh and the Phillipines compared to 2010, and 173 million less rural dwellers[56]. I’m sure that will spell upward mobility for some, but not many – the other big sociological story of our times is rampant land grabbing and slum expansion[57]. So in the future there may well be a big urban market for golden rice provided by large mechanised commercial farms who are paying their dues to Syngenta, and Syngenta shareholders would probably demand nothing less.

Or maybe golden rice will tick along as an intervention for the rural poor from which Syngenta make no money, vindicating their decision to ditch biofortified rice as a commercial venture and earning them corporate brownie points for continuing their support. Maybe somebody will develop a non-GM crop with high Vitamin A levels, and make it freely available through third sector routes so that the bottom drops out of the golden rice (non)market[58]. Presumably the GRATEs would have no problem with that.

Conclusion

GRATEs are wont to say that GM technology is just another tool in the box, and what’s so wrong with that? My feeling is nothing, probably. I don’t think the technology as it stands will greatly revolutionise agriculture, and I think we may already be seeing the diminishing returns kicking in of the kind that happened with the earlier green revolution[59]. Maybe future generations of GM technology will have more to offer than the present one which, despite its undeniable cleverness, is not really genetic engineering but merely ‘genetic tinkering’ in Ford Denison’s phrase[60]. All I really have to say is that despite blustering assertions to the contrary the evidence isn’t there yet on golden rice or on most other GM technologies, so the GRATEs really ought to scale back on the strident self-righteous moralism that all too often afflicts them. Of course, I’m well aware that most people don’t give a flying fuchsia about what I have to say on GM crops or on anything much else besides, but if you’ve read this far you’re obviously not among them, so thanks for coming along.

The idea was prompted by River Cottage chef Mark Diacono’s book A Taste of the Unexpected. Diacono argues that life’s too short to grow unremarkable food like the three aforementioned vegetables, which are cheaply available from the shops anyway and taste no better when grown at home. Why not, he says, grow unusual things that are hard to find in the shops, no harder to grow, and utterly delicious?

I appreciate his logic, but I want to put the case for unremarkable veg. Here’s my eight point manifesto:

1. More often than not, even unremarkable veg simply does taste better when you grow it yourself. So there.
2.  And wacky vegetables don’t necessarily taste better, they’re just less familiar. I think there’s at best an element of ‘the grass is greener’ in the view that, say, mashua tastes better than potato, and at worst perhaps a hint of foodie snobbery. If you ate mashua as your everyday staple, maybe you’d be lusting after potatoes. Though I gather that if you eat too much mashua you cease lusting after anything…
3. There’s a wealth of varieties of the familiar vegetables available to home gardeners that you can’t usually get in the shops – so if you’re fed up with bog standard Desiree potatoes, then grow something more unusual like Pink Fir Apple, and help to keep the diversity of our key crops alive.
4. It may be just as easy growing unusual vegetables as familiar ones, but actually it’s not that easy growing vegetables at all. Propagation, irrigation, pest control etc can all cut into your time, especially with fancy leaves and transplants. If life’s too short to grow potatoes, then it’s probably too short to grow red komatsuna too. But if you’re that busy you’re probably pulling a big salary – so buy the fancy stuff at the shops and give yourself a workout by getting those potatoes in the ground early in the spring, and then more or less leaving them be.
5. Become your own food security expert – grow as many potatoes as you can in your urban garden, and then work out how much you’ve grown as a proportion of your annual calorific intake. Makes you think, huh? But then if everyone’s growing basic veg in their gardens, just think how much more food secure we’d be…
6. Measure how much time you spend growing your veg, and measure your fertility inputs. Seems like a lot? Go to point 7. Doesn’t seem like much? Go to point 8.
7. Damn right it’s a lot! Think of it as a wakeup call to figuring out how to wean yourself off industrial agriculture.
8. Damn right it’s not much! Think of it as a wakeup call to figuring out how easily you can do without industrial agriculture.

Hey, it’s been a late spring. Maybe it’s still not too late to get some of those unremarkable vegetables in the ground. You might just find the results are remarkable…

Conway is an agricultural ecologist who’s been heavily involved in agricultural development work throughout his long career and has held all sorts of senior positions at places like the Rockefeller Foundation – so he’s well qualified to write on the subject, but also has a few blindspots. Unlike me in both respects, then.

Conway’s basic story is that more people go hungry today than ever (although slightly less proportionately than before), that most of them are people living in the rural areas of poor countries, and that previous attempts to tackle hunger such as the green revolution have only partially worked and in some respects have made things worse. He recognises that if we’re going to tackle hunger then policies are needed to support small farmers, whose sheer numbers mean they’re going to play the dominant role in development for decades to come – a refreshing change from the rubbishing of small farmers and the blind enthusiasm for urbanisation expressed by the likes of Stewart Brand and other self-styled ‘eco pragmatists’.

But I’m not sure what Conway really thinks of small-scale farmers. He sometimes seems to display a sneaking admiration for their skills and resilience, but even in a chapter on ‘farmers as innovators’ which is explicitly critical of ‘top down’ development projects that ignore grassroots perspectives, only a few sentences in he can’t help discussing how experts can help farmers be better grassroots innovators. Maybe not an unworthy sentiment, but revealing of a certain mindset. What I think Conway ultimately wants is for small-scale subsistence farmers to become something else.

He has a point. Producing a bare subsistence with little cash income makes you vulnerable – you need cash for health care, for education, to tide you over crop failures and so on. Therefore much of the book discusses, with some subtlety, issues like improvements to rural infrastructure, access to markets, rural-urban linkages, cash crop options for small-scale farmers, and above all yield improvements which is a key motif throughout the book. Higher yields, more cash income and better connections to urban centres create a ‘virtuous circle’ that can lift the rural poor out of poverty and secure their livelihoods. So Conway gives short shrift to ‘simplistic’ arguments that the world already produces enough food and merely needs to distribute it better.

Well, he’s clearly right that a perfect, equitable distribution of global resources is an impossibility – we will always have to produce more than is strictly ‘needed’ on a resource per capita basis. But how much more? How much is enough? On the one hand, small-scale farmers tend to take risk averse decisions because they’re ultimately gambling with their lives in ways unimaginable to most of us in the wealthier countries of the world. As Edward Carr has pointed out in an excellent blog post, too much market exposure isn’t necessarily a good thing for small-scale farmers – and though Conway knows this and looks at ways of insuring small-scale farmers from market risks, persuasive ways of doing this in a context where people are poor and powerless seem to me to be thin on the ground. In fact, a lot of the economics in the book are decidedly rickety. Conway spins a rather predictable neoclassical line, in which the private sector is always good (albeit suitably supported by the public), protectionism is always bad, global trading really does proceed on the basis of comparative advantage, and there seem to be no gluts or commodity price instabilities, no centres and peripheries in global trading. To be fair, he does allow reality to intrude into this picture quite often, but his analysis nevertheless bears the hallmarks of someone who’s spent so much time in high level meetings at the IMF that he’s started confusing the model of reality for the reality of the model. So yes, some market engagement may not be a bad thing for impoverished small farmers, but faced with global economic prescriptions of this kind it’s no wonder that they stick so grimly to their yams and millet.

How about an alternative assumption – that small-scale, subsistence-oriented farming is actually worth preserving, not as an interim measure until small farmers find better paid things to do like rickshaw pulling, but potentially as a long-term and globally widespread attempt to address many of our current problems? I don’t think abject poverty should be part of that vision, so again we must think in terms of surpluses, cash incomes and so on. But again, we must ask how much is enough – possibly less than what’s needed to kickstart an urbanising industrialism, which currently seems to be humanity’s unilinear Plan A, B and C for producing wellbeing?

This is where I find Conway’s analysis quite deeply flawed, for nowhere does he properly consider tenure patterns or the politics of landownership (he is also dismissive of the concept of food sovereignty without, I think, really understanding it). Consider this: in reprising the fictionalised story of Calcutta slum dweller Hasari Pal from Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy Conway discusses how Hasari’s family had originally owned over 3 hectares of good rice land but lost all but half a hectare when a rich landowner bribed a judge in a court action. Eventually Hasari and his family give up farming and move to Calcutta, living on the pavement, and Hasari manages to get a job as a rickshaw puller. Conway writes “It is a hard life, and Hasari eventually dies from the strain of the work, but he has saved enough for a dowry for his daughter, and his family survives. The opportunity is there, for some at least, to slowly progress from the pavement to the slum and to the beginnings of a decent livelihood”.

Well, no doubt. But the opportunity might have been there for Hasari to continue farming if his family hadn’t lost nearly all their land through corrupt local powerbrokers, and if government policies had supported such small farmers. When people dismiss rural life as being one of hopeless poverty, they rarely distinguish between landless or nearly landless rural dwellers and those with more land – and it’s generally the landless who suffer the most. They rarely analyse how landownership is distributed in rural locales. And they rarely consider how tenurial arrangements and rents affect rural poverty. Suppose that instead of trying to double grain yields, governments devoted themselves to halving the rents paid by poor rural dwellers, how would that affect global hunger? Doubtless in all sorts of highly complex ways, but I think it’s a major flaw of Conway’s book that he doesn’t bother to ask the question.

Conway argues that the way forward lies not in either small or large farms, but in both, not in either hi tech or low tech, but in both. I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but it doesn’t persuade me to abandon my ‘small farm future’ focus, because so much of the money and the policy attention globally is focused on large farms, or at best on supporting small farmers in the hope that they’ll become large farmers or urban workers. One interesting statistic: the Kenyan fresh vegetable market was reorganised in the 1990s in order to meet the quality demands of European supermarkets, leading in one district to a decline in the number of growers supplying a key green bean exporter from 1,200 in 1991 to less than 400 in 2004.

Conway’s book is orders of magnitude more subtle than most of the ‘eco-pragmatist’ literature on the situation facing small farmers and the pros and cons of high tech innovations in agriculture, but I think his lukewarm endorsement of small-scale farming is ultimately problematic. How much is enough? We still don’t know, largely because we’re still not asking.

It’s way too early to present any results from the experiment, which will be some years in the coming if indeed they ever do. But I’m aiming to offer a running commentary as time goes on about how it’s going. I’d welcome any thoughts on what I’m doing, and what I might do better.

So I’ve now pretty much got thirty 10x1m beds in various stages of establishment. Charles Dowding told me that it would be a lot to take on, but having previously being cultivating over an acre I was inclined to disregard him. I must have forgotten the horror of it all, because all of a sudden I fear he was right, and I’m feeling overwhelmed at what I’ve taken on…

Anyway, I chose an area tucked away in an upland corner of my holding for the experiment, reserving the established market garden plots for a time when hopefully they’ll be in full production again. The topsoil is a bit thinner where I’ve established the experimental plots, and the subsoil is chock full of rubbly limestone. Actually, that’s not quite true – there seems to be a band of seriously rubbly subsoil a few metres wide running across one of my two rows of 15 beds, with the rest of the area rather less stony. It’ll be interesting to see if there are any yield or other differences associated with the rubble. Still, at least I’ll be rotating across the plots so it shouldn’t compromise the comparative results too much. It’s probably not the greatest land for growing veg on, and I’m probably not the greatest grower either. At least this way the kind of yield figures I’m likely to get will seem within the reach of ordinary mortals, unlike the terrifying quantities that John Jeavons reports from his Californian veg factory.

The history of this bit of land is that it had been down to long-term permanent pasture until 2010, when I put four pigs on it. The permanent pasture didn’t last long after that! I then tilled it and grew wheat in 2011 (a bit of a disaster – but that’s a story for another day), then tilled it again and sowed a mixed ley of red clover, chicory and cocksfoot in spring 2012, which I meant to grow on for a couple of years but came up with this crazy plan instead.

To establish the beds in this largely preparatory year, I took a no till approach with the Dowding no till beds by simply mulching them with phormisol. I’ll put some compost on in the autumn and start growing something on them next year. The Tolhurst and Jeavons beds I started off by rotavating them. It takes approximately 1 minute to do one pass along a 10m bed with the rotavator, which I’d estimate is at least 100 times faster than hand digging. I ain’t sayin’ it’s right, I’m just sayin’. Having first rotavated the Jeavons beds I then initiated a programme of double-digging (by hand, obviously). I’ve only done two beds so far. The first one took me 4 hours to do the 1x10m, the second 2 hours – the difference I think being largely down to variation in the stoniness of the subsoil. Just goes to show how different a couple of bits of land can be even when they’re just a few metres apart.

I’ve left 50cm paths of the untilled ley around the beds, which I guess I’ll have to scythe or strim. The paths are absolutely chocka with docks. Maybe I should have tilled in the whole damn ley, though that would probably only have brought temporary relief. I’m not sure the pigs did me any favours on the dock front, and as an aside I think I’d like to register a slight scepticism about the usefulness of permaculture ‘pig tractors’ (also a topic for another occasion…). Then again, perhaps I should blame my poor weed management rather than my poor pigs. Anyway, I think the docks are going to be a bit of a problem – lots of hard work with a lazy dog? I’ve never really figured out the optimum way of making paths around vegetable beds on largish scales.

I’ve been late getting going with establishing any crops in the beds – let’s just blame it on the cold spring. Still, I never planned to go full tilt in the first year and at least I’ve now got potatoes in one of the double dug Jeavons beds, and in one of the Tolhurst beds. It took me one minute to ridge each bed with – yep, you guessed it – my trusty Honda, and about twenty minutes to plant each one up by hand (22 Sarpo Mira seed potatoes per bed). The potatoes went in nice and deep into the loose soil of the double dug Jeavons bed. It will be interesting to compare yields with the Tolhurst bed.

Having been advised by various folk not to overdo it and mess around with a polyculture bed as originally planned – wise words, I think – the illicit thought occurred to me that I might just grow one of my six rotation crops in the bed originally earmarked for polycultures using conventional methods. It would be my own little contribution to the sustainable intensification debate. Anyway, more on that another time.

Four of my ten Jeavons beds are for carbon-and-calorie/biomass crops. I sowed a mix of four parts wheat (Tybalt – it was all I could get…), one part buckwheat, almost one part lucerne (which turned out not to have any inoculant with it when I opened the package, despite the seed company’s assurances – oh well, I just sowed it anyway), almost one part red clover, a one-tenth part broad beans and a tiny bit of grain amaranth. Seems hard to get grain amaranth in large quantities. Perhaps I’ll rethink that mixture in future years. Anyway, then I raked it, rolled it and put Enviromesh over it to keep the corvids off until it’s germinated. It’s pretty late to be sowing wheat, so I probably won’t get much of a grain crop. I suppose for this year at least the carbon/biomass is more important.

I’ve already made various stupid blunders in establishing the beds, most of them to do with complex technical issues such as my inability to count, tell left from right etc. But I don’t think they’ll compromise the results – the main thing is to make sure that I do the same things year on year across my three different systems, other than the key variables of interest which are basically tillage and fertility. I want to keep inputs as low as feasible, so I’m avoiding irrigation, transplanting etc as much as possible. I’ll see how it goes.

And your reward for reading this far is to see the first official picture of the Vallis Veg Experimental Trial. Don’t it just look lovely? I sent it in to Homes and Gardens Magazine, but I’ve not heard back yet.

But dammit, I just can’t help dwelling on the political side of things when it’s this that’s the main impediment to a just and sustainable food system – and given the upcoming political event on Wednesday, I feel obliged to post something political today. No, no – not that event. I mean the international day of peasant struggle.

It’s a funny coincidence – the present neoliberal era that Margaret Thatcher helped usher in seems about as unpropitious as possible for small-scale farming here in the UK, and just about anywhere else for that matter. Still, the demise of the small farm has long been predicted but remains unrealised, and according to Via Campesina there are still around 2 billion people in the world today making at least part of their living from small scale farming and allied occupations.

There seems to be a fair amount of Thatcher revisionism doing the rounds even in liberal circles at the moment – she was right to take on the miners, British heavy industry was a dead duck etc etc. The tragedy is that, even if that’s so, she had no bigger vision for a sustainable economy, using oil revenues to fund tax cuts and speculative growth, and we’re now reaping the bitter harvest of those policies.

But perhaps therein lie the seeds of a small farm renaissance. Surveying the scene in Britain, there seems to be an ever-smaller proportion of the population in secure employment, the steady dismantling of welfare provision, and the digitally-enhanced atrophy of all sorts of ways that people used to be able to employ their creativity for financial gain. Meanwhile, the Waitrose chief executive is saying that we should brace ourselves for massive food price hikes, the UK is importing wheat and potatoes for the first time in years, allotment gardening has never been so popular, and a dedicated band of British small-scale growers are heading off to the European Via Campesina meeting in an attempt to found a British branch. Small things, I know, but perhaps portents of the increasing impotence of ‘liberal-democratic’ government to deliver what people actually want, and of our own capacity to start rebuilding for those wants ourselves, at home. So perhaps there’s some scope after all for realising a small farm future.

David Runciman recently decried our ‘staid and unadventurous politics’, writing ‘there have got to be better ways of working for a living than we currently manage’. Amen to that – so I think I’ll go and plant out some potatoes. As the daughter of a grocer, a firm advocate of self-reliance and a no-nonsense battler, I’m sure Margaret Thatcher would have approved if only she hadn’t lost her inner peasant somewhere in the corridors of power.

My delight at this outcome is mingled with anger that Mid Devon District Council spent an alleged £40,000 that they could presumably have devoted to something of actual use to their residents on contesting an application that their own planning officers had recommended for approval, while the dedicated people at the Ecological Land Co-op have had to devote a huge quantity of time, money and emotion into fighting for the simple right to farm a patch of land.

One of the council’s arguments was that the application would set a precedent for other similar ones. If only. The inspector rightly pointed out that each planning application is treated on its merits, so although this is great news for the Greenham Reach project, the sad fact is that people throughout the country will continue to have to fight their own long and lonely bureaucratic battles for the right to farm when they could be much more usefully employed actually farming.

I’ll post something on this blog in a while about my own long and lonely battle against Mendip District Council. But for now, let’s raise a glass to the Ecological Land Coop!

I hate to be cynical (no, really I do), but here’s a few wild top of the head punts on my part as to the lack of new entrants: agricultural land costs way more than anyone can ever make back by farming it, old farm buildings have been converted into residences for people who don’t farm, the planning system prevents people who do farm from building new residences, many farmers get paid less than the costs of production for their produce and have to rely on the CAP subsidy regimen to stay afloat, the CAP subsidy regimen systematically favours large scale existing farms and farmers, global trading rules systematically favour areas of cheap labour, modern farming systems typically require huge investment in expensive and labour-shedding capital equipment, the food chain is structured so that farmers take most of the risks but gain few of the rewards, the county farm system is in ruins, with many councils selling off their farmland assets on the open market, and meanwhile farming faces persistent stereotypes of being back-breaking, menial or anti-ecological. The result of all this is that farmers generally have to work long hours for little reward, job creation is minimal, not many people want to enter the sector anyway, and there are few opportunities to do so for those that do.

Owen Paterson at DEFRA has gone on record as saying that he wants to do everything in his power to make it easy for rural businesses to thrive, but there seems to be very little policy movement on any of the above points which could actually make a difference. Still, there’s no point just moaning – fill out the survey and let DEFRA know your views. Perhaps collectively we can bring the whole rotten edifice of the existing farming system crashing down, making it possible to farm properly in Britain again and making farming an attractive career – at any rate, we have nothing to lose but our claims chains. You have until 5 April. Go forth!

The basic problem is that peat is pretty much the best substrate for seed compost, but you can only get it from the slowly accumulating vegetable detritus of wet moorlands, which are rare and sensitive habitats, and also ones that sequester carbon. So digging it out for gardeners at rates far greater than it’s being deposited isn’t a sustainable practice.

Reclaimed peat is peat that has been eroded out of moorland habitats and washed into lakes and reservoirs, from where the enterprising folks at West Riding Organics filter it out, fiddle about with it a bit and then sell it to the likes of me. The West Riding Organics website states “It must be stressed that this is a result of natural erosion with man playing no part in its formation”, but according to one customer I spoke to views of this kind are ‘weasel words’.

Why? Well, I can’t speak for my customer but one possible problem is that the erosion is only partly ‘natural’, with at least some of it (how much?) resulting from human practices that exacerbate the erosion. Another possible problem is that there’s nowhere near enough natural erosion to satisfy the demand for seedling compost.

Actually, I don’t think the second objection stands up. No, there isn’t enough peat to go around, but if some of it is knocking around on the bottom of a reservoir then there’s a good case for filtering it out and doing something more useful with it. The same argument applies to the recycled chip fat that I use in my van – we can’t fuel the entire global vehicle fleet with chip fat, but that doesn’t mean that a few of us shouldn’t make use of the resource. The first objection is potentially a problem though. On reflection, my view is that it’s still worth making use of the eroded peat – it’s not doing any good where it is, and it can’t be put back. But if it could be shown that the market for reclaimed peat was in some way directly incentivising land management practices that contributed to the erosion of moorland, then I think I’d avoid buying it. I don’t think using reclaimed peat is ethically tainted just because it’s peat, but if its use is directly contributing to moorland erosion then I’d have to accept that it is ethically tainted. And I don’t know whether it is or not – it would be good to find out.

For me, there are three wider issues of interest here encompassing (1) trust (2) farm economics and (3) growing practices. A few brief comments on each in turn.

My customers bought the compost without researching the details because, touchingly, they trusted my ethical integrity as a sustainability-minded grower. I don’t suppose they’ll be making that mistake again, dammit. And I suppose I in turn bought it without researching the details because it’s organically certified, so implicitly I placed my trust in the Soil Association to have researched the details for me. That’s basically what third party ‘ethical’ certification is all about, as when we buy fair trade coffee in the supermarket for a few pence extra and feel like we’re good people. But since my whole ‘small farm future’ schtick is basically about direct relationships of trust between producers and consumers then I’m somewhat hoisted by my own petard on this one. The only thing I’d say in my defence is that I was pretty explicit in my message to customers about the source of the compost, which just goes to show how much people’s trust of individuals can obscure attention to the fine print. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe peat compost will have to go the way of cigarettes, with ‘PEAT COMPOST KILLS WETLANDS AND CAUSES DISEASES OF UNSUSTAINABILITY’ marked in huge letters on the bag. Maybe people will go on buying it anyway, just like cigarettes.

Oh what the hell, I’m going to say two other things in my defence as well, which come under the rubric of the other two wider issues – first farm economics. As a ‘direct producer’ I would love it if I really could produce everything directly. When people visit our holding they often ask, ‘do you save all your own seeds?’ or ‘do you make all your own seed compost?’ In fact, we do try to do a bit of both, but the honest answer is ‘I’d love to but I can’t even earn a living wage spending all my time just growing vegetables’. As I’ve said before on this blog, the economic reality of farming is that fossil energy is cheap and human labour is dear, and this fundamentally distorts the social ecology. Whether it’s possible to farm sustainably at all in the long view of human history is a moot point, but it’s certainly not possible to farm sustainably in contemporary Britain. Which means all of us have to make personal decisions about what we will and won’t do for the sake of our sustainability principles, decisions that are endlessly open to the scrutiny and criticism of others.

And so to the final interesting issue, growing practices. One decision I’ve made is not to import any manures or composts onto my holding…well, er, other than seed compost that is. There are various reasons for that, but the main one is that even supposedly ‘organic’ compost relies directly or indirectly on fossil fuel intensive synthetic nitrogen, and I think we need to experiment with other ways of producing our food. It’s worth bearing in mind that organic growers have to use something like 25 tonnes of soil-building compost per hectare, as compared to something like 250kg of seed compost for the transplants that go into the same area. I think importing the seed compost is a lesser evil. Of course, seed compost doesn’t have to be peat-based, but it pretty much does if you use a soil blocking system for transplants, which I’ve found to be the most effective way of establishing transplants – and effective germination has sustainability implications of its own. Seedling substrates are a big issue for organic growers, because there are very few products available that do a good job without having sustainability implications of one kind or another (coir being the main alternative to peat). If you don’t buy organic it’s pretty likely that there’ll be peat in them thar vegetables, the transplanted ones anyway. What are the solutions? Well, I’m open to suggestions, but everything I can think of involves greater costs, and – if my customer surveys are anything to go by – people think organic veg costs too much already.

Conclusions:

1: I ought to have found out a bit more about the erosion processes associated with reclaimed peat, and whether the market for it incentivises poor land management, rather than relying on the Soil Association to do it for me. I’ll invite West Riding Organics to comment on this.

2: it’s a lot easier to be a sustainable domestic gardener than a sustainable commercial grower, and it probably pays better too

3: but if you really want to be a sustainable gardener don’t import compost of any kind. Period. Or much of anything else for that matter.

I’d be interested in comments on this post, or thoughts on other dilemmas of sustainability facing growers and gardeners.

The original context was Mark Lynas’s notorious speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, which I really don’t want to dwell on too much more (for now anyway…) except to mention his comment that the Amish in Pennsylvania “froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850”. Now, I know very little about the Amish, other than thrilling to the will-they-won’t-they romance of Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness as a young man – surely the truest picture of Amish social mores ever committed to celluloid in a Hollywood movie of 1985 – and also reading an interesting essay on Amish farming by Wendell Berry in his fascinating book The Gift of Good Land. Perhaps it was the latter that had led me to realise the Amish did not in fact freeze their technology in the 1850s, but instead chose actively which technologies they wished to embrace – a point I made in my post on GM when I said that maybe we have something to learn from cultures that deliberate about which technologies to use, rather than simply assuming that any new technology is for the best, as in our addled modern ideology of ‘progress’.

I already knew, for example, that the Amish used synthetic fertiliser, but not tractors or computers. It turns out that they also use certain GM crops, at least according to GM enthusiast Graham Strouts. I don’t doubt he’s right, and it’s not very surprising. While I don’t necessarily agree with the particular choices the Amish have made, I like the fact that they are making such choices. If nothing else, their actions undermine the simplistic conflations of the ‘eco-pragmatists’ and techno-fixers of the form ‘GM crops = science = progress: anti-GM crops = anti-science = reactionary’.

What the Amish seem to be doing is asking first what kind of society they wish to inhabit – their answer being a land-based, localised, small farm one. Then they ask which technologies can help them deliver their vision, and which are inimical to it. I think us non-Amish ‘westerners’ would do well to follow their example. We might then realise that ‘science’ or ‘efficiency’ are not ends in themselves but means to ends, and we might then spend more time thinking about what we actually want our societies to look like rather than simply assuming that science and efficiency will deliver it. So ironically the Amish’s decision to use GM crops, but not other modern technologies, tends to confirm the distinctions I was making in my earlier post (and also in this letter in the New Scientist) between social and technological progress, and between ‘science’ understood as an epistemological practice and ‘scientism’ deployed as a social ideology. These subtleties seem lost on the ‘eco-pragmatists’, who are far too mired in sanctifying technological development as an end in itself, an embodiment of the Good, to ask complex questions about the relationship between modern technology, farming, sustainability and a globally just society. Still, one can but try.

The cheerleaders for biotechnology are quick to oppose the romanticisation of peasant life, but equally quick to replace it with a romanticisation of urban slums as the route out of poverty for the global poor (if you don’t know what I mean, take a look at Chapters 2 and 3 of Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline… “Let no one romanticize what the slum conditions are….but the squatter cities are vibrant”). I plan to post more on this in the future, but I suspect for most people in most places this peasant to slum route out of poverty will ultimately prove illusory. So instead of enthusiastically sounding the death knell for small farmers globally and wishing them into a new life as landless slum-dwelling proletarians, I think we’d do better to ask what innovations would help improve the lives of the world’s 1.5 billion peasants on the ground, doing what they’re doing, which is farming – a point that I’ve argued in greater detail here. Biotechnology has a role here, to be sure. So do other high tech, but rather less heralded innovations, such as mobile phones (thanks to my friend Emily for this link). However, I suspect the most important innovations by far are people-focused: agricultural extension, security of tenure, education for children, especially girls, simple improvements in rural infrastructure. They’re the kind of things development specialists have been banging on about for decades, but they rarely figure in eco-pragmatist treatises since the latter are really more interested in painting techno-utopias than seriously addressing global social problems.

Be all that as it may, figuring out exactly how to ask these grand questions about what kind of society we want (or, more to the point, what kind we can realistically have) is a puzzle. It’s relatively easy for self-isolating groups like the Amish with strong religious convictions and hierarchies, but what about the rest of us? Those of us living in the western democracies would have to overcome the Panglossian tendency in modern politics in which our leaders use the palpably fraying dividends of oil and accumulated postcolonial power to convince us that we’ll keep getting richer. The eco-pragmatists merely sing the same song for the whole world, with sustainability thrown in as an extra bargain.

But supposing we wake from that dream, what then? In his utopian vision for a sustainable farm community of the future (‘Outside the solar village’ in New Roots For Agriculture) Wes Jackson discusses a land trust system in which a board of retired farmer-elders prevents misuse of the land. Well, I agree that it’s worth paying more attention to what old farmers have to say, but I’m not sure that the rule of village elders has a great track record – whether we’re talking about tribal councils in Afghanistan or Mendip District Council here in Somerset. Somehow, we need to find ways of asking sharper civilizational questions about farming, technology and society – which, to his credit, Jackson tries to do – and then find the political institutions to make them work on the ground. But these are generalities. I have to admit I’m a bit stumped when it comes to the details. I don’t feel the need to apologise, because it’s plain enough that existing political systems have failed to ask these questions too, let alone to answer them. But it’s something we do need to do, so I’d like to reflect on this further. I’ll be writing some posts shortly on agrarian populism and twentieth century politics as a way of doing so, but the path remains elusive so I’d welcome any thoughts…