Colin gave evidence to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee for their report on “Sustainable Food”. But he is mortally disappointed by the report’s conclusions.

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee begins the summary of its new report on “Sustainable Food” in fine style: “The government must develop a joined-up strategy to change the UK’s unhealthy and environmentally damaging food system”, it declares in its opening paragraph. Absolutely! Precisely the sentiments of the Campaign for Real Farming! And since this present writer, CT, co-convener of the Campaign, presented evidence to the Committee on June 22 2011 (pp 23-31 of Volume 1 of the report, newly published and embargoed for May 13 2012) I had high hopes that the Campaign’s sentiments would be reflected. Enlightened Agriculture and all that goes with it, based on common sense, common morality, basic biology, with proper appreciation of good farming, good retailing, and good cooking, would prevail.

I was the more deceived. The thinking that emerges from this new report is just as disjointed and generally frayed as ever. The central dogmas remain in place – that the neoliberal global “free” market is a given, like a law of nature, on a par with gravity; that science is what the best-paid scientists say it is; that people at large need “strong” government, even if the government palpably doesn’t know what it is doing; and so on and so on.

What the food chain really needs, after all, in Britain as much as anywhere (far more than in Turkey or Romania, say) is a radical re-think from top to bottom. A major committee on sustainable farming should be asking, for example: “What is agriculture really for? (feeding people, perhaps?). “How much of our own food we should be producing? (perhaps 100 per cent of the temperate crops and livestock, or its equivalent?) How many people should be working on the land? (perhaps 5-10% of the total workforce?) Do we really need to cut the GHG emissions of agriculture and if so now? (use less agrochemicals?) Who should control agriculture? (the people rather than the corporates?)” And so on.

But it raises no such questions. Instead it makes six recommendations of which the first is a plea for “stricter advertising limits [to] protect children from junk food”. OK. But there’s no suggestion here that the farming and the entire food chain should not as now be controlled by a few mega-companies which therefore have the wealth to control vast reaches of all the media. More generally, if we don’t want commercial companies to flog sugar and fat and salt and miscellaneous additives to our children, then we should not have installed an economy that more or less obliges them to do so since they are obliged to maximize profit.

The second item on the committee’s wish-list is a goodie – “Food skills, such as cooking and gardening, should be part of the curriculum of all schools”. So indeed they should and they commonly were until the political dogma of the 1970s declared that domestic science (by then known as “home economics”) was sexist (even if boys did it too) and it was dropped. At least, if it did carry on, it became an exercize in opening packets of frozen peas.  But there is no intimation here that good cooking, sound nutrition, and sustainable farming go hand in hand; or that sustainable farming needs serious food culture, because people need to know good food when they see it; or that farming itself – not just hobby gardening on the side – should be a serious career option for all schoolchildren – up there with engineering, medicine, building and teaching, and certainly well ahead of, say, advertizing and media studies. There is no intimation either that sustainable agriculture must be skills-intensive – which means there’s a bonanza of jobs is waiting to be done: or that if we did restore the agrarian economy, then society would also be improved in many other ways as well.

Thirdly, the Committee tells us, “Local Authorities should ensure communities have access to healthy food and land to grow their own produce”. Again, this may sound good. But what we really need, is to return the control of agriculture to the people at large. To this end, government could and should be finding ways to help people back to the land not as weekenders but as serious producers, and helping communities to set up various forms of Community-Supported Agriculture. At least, if active support is too much to ask for, the government should at least try a little harder to stay out of the way. All encouragement should be given too to small-scale ethical investment in farming and the general food chain (although perhaps it’s best if government stayed out of that). People growing their own veggies for a hobby is largely a way of leaving the status quo intact. It seems to be taken for granted that the serious stuff – arable and livestock – must be handled as now by the industrialists, on the largest possible scale, with the least possible labour, and with all the high tech needed to keep such a system running.

Fourth: “Government Buying Standards for food must be improved on meat and dairy and extended to cover hospitals, prisons, and schools”. This of course sounds sensible – but it depends very much on what is meant by “improved”. For example, current dogma has it that fat-free meat is always preferable, and that it doesn’t really matter how animals are fed (never mind the quality, feel the weight), and so on and so on. The question that Juvenal is generally supposed to have asked in a slightly different context surely applies: “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (But who will monitor the monitors?)

Fifth: “The Office of Fair Trading’s remit should be amended so supermarkets are not blocked from cooperating on sustainability initiatives”. Or perhaps Britain should shift the balance of control from the present the oligopoly of mega-supermarkets, towards people at large — who should be free to pursue their own initiatives.

Finally: “Government should examine the scope for simple and consistent labeling on the sustainability of food products”. But then again, of course, if there were shorter food-chains and people at large had more contact with the producers, we wouldn’t need labels at all.

The more I read of government reports (and indeed am invited to take part in shaping them) the more I realize that Renaissance really is the only way forward. We, people at large, Ordinary Joes, just have to do what needs doing ourselves despite the government and its selected entourage of experts and intellectuals. If only we had a hundredth of the resources that are at the government’s disposal (actually, a thousandth would go a long way), what might we achieve?

Colin Tudge, May 17, 2012

The series has been produced by Jonathan Kent.

He writes:  ”It’s been an adventure.  I’ve met some great people.  I’ve had enormous fun.  I also think that this is probably the best piece of radio I’ve ever made – a lot of love has gone into this”

“The series is really about what bread tells us about us.  It struck me as something sufficiently universal that it has something to say about almost every aspect of our lives.  Rather than try and explain it all try to listen in – either live or via iPlayer.  I’ve also blogged about the recording extensively at my blog Land of Oak and Iron and as the series progresses there will be daily updates with further interviews, pictures, thoughts and so on…”

The episodes run as follows:

Episode 1 – A Half-Baked History of the World in Seven Loaves (Monday 21st) – about bread as a marker for human development.

Episode 2 – Bread Kills! (Tuesday 22nd) – bread and health.

Episode 3 – The Bread of Life (Wednesday 23rd) – faith

Episode 4 – The Bread of Nations (Thursday 24th) – bread and European culture

Episode 5 – Companionship (Friday 25th) – bread and human relationships

The National Trust have just launched a report What’s your beef critically examining the assumptions behind the calls for intensification of agriculture — necessary we’re told to increase production levels in the light of climate change and population rise, and thus government policy.  The focus of the report is on their beef cattle.

A review from Natural England (March 2012) includes a section on food summarised by Alan Spedding in the attached document: Environmental economics – food

Well worth looking through the original review.

Thus:  “The low value of food is caused by its abundance”. The danger is that pursuing maximum yields of high intensity crops now may undermine longer term food-security by degrading the ecosystems that agricultural production ultimately depends on. So the costs (and benefits) for the environment from food production should be internalized within the food system. Reducing food waste and changing diets would support population health and provide nutrition more efficiently – 30% to 50% of food is wasted worldwide.

It would be easy to conclude, from all that has been dinned into us from all directions and not least from our government and its expert advisers, that the number one enemy of humankind, the prime cause of food shortages and a principal driver of climate change, is cattle; and particularly, cattle fed on grass. I have even heard it suggested by an influential scientist that Britain should get rid of all its grazing – which accounts for five sixths of all our agricultural land — and grow crops for biofuel instead.

But the facts, the rawest statistics, give a very different impression.

For in Britain, the growing of food contributes just 10 per cent of our total carbon emissions. Since we might reasonably argue that nothing is more important than growing food; that food is a sine qua non; that if we get food production right then all other problems become soluble; then we might conclude that to spend a mere tenth of our total carbon budget on it, is a very good deal. We might also observe that even if we halved the agricultural carbon output – a tall order! – we would lower the country’s total budget by a mere 5%. Indeed we might reasonably ask – “What’s the problem?

Of course, farming is only part of the total food chain, and the rest of it adds another 10 %, and what is summed up as “land-use change” adds another 10%, so the total that might loosely be called “food-related” is 30%. Even so, farming accounts for only one third of that – and common sense says that it’s the most important third. Certainly, one might feel, it is not the first in the firing line for cutting.

The 10 % spent on farming itself contains many interesting twists. Thus it is often suggested that food should be produced as locally as possible. Indeed it should, for all kinds of reasons. Food chains for all kinds of reasons should be as short as possible; consumers and producers should know each other, and interact; the principles of enlightened agriculture tell us that farms that are truly sustainable and resilient should be mixed and generally small to medium-sized – and such farms are best suited to local delivery; and so on. But the reason that’s often given to encourage local food – to save carbon and reduce global warming – doesn’t really stand up. Transport in all directions, in and out of the farm, accounts for only 10% of the total farm carbon bill – which means it accounts for only 1 % of Britain’s total carbon budget. Again, it hardly seems a prime target.

What really does soak up the carbon in Britain’s farming is the massive inputs of oil-based industrial agrochemicals. Nitrogen fertilizer and the rest account for 30% of farming’s carbon bill – 3 % of the whole. The principles of enlightened agriculture demand that all farming should as far as possible be organic: that organic should not be an absolute requirement but should be the default position – what farmers do unless there is very good reason to do something else. Several projections show that if Britain was organic it could still fairly readily be self-reliant in food (as of course it isn’t at present) – and that an all-organic Britain need not be vegetarian. So if we really want to reduce the carbon bill of agriculture, we should reduce the fertilizers. Agriculture as a whole is also the prime source of nitrous oxide, also a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) – although, of course, if doesn’t contain carbon. Much of that nitrous oxide derives from artificial N.

Where does this leave grazing cattle? Well, cattle worldwide are the prime source of methane, and methane is another very potent GHG. It’s because cattle produce methane that they are accused of wrecking the climate. The agricultural industrialists argue that we need as many cattle as can be produced (to satisfy market “demand”) — but that they should be kept indoors and fed on cereal and soya. If we keep animals indoors (the argument goes) then we can trap all the carbon-rich gases that they generate (and establish more high-tech jobs). Also, when cattle are fed intensively, indoors, they generate less surplus carbon over a lifetime than they do when feeding on grass outside (not least because they don’t live so long when they are raised intensively indoors, so have less time to emit). Politicians tend to favour industrialization in general, which is designed to maximize wealth and is easy to control and has connotations of high-tech which they equate with “progress”. They favour industrial methods too because they are so relentlessly lobbied.

But there is a whole string of arguments in favour of pasture-fed livestock.

First, there’s the general argument given above — that since the total emission of carbon from agriculture is a mere tenth of the whole, and agriculture is so important, we shouldn’t be too worried about it.

But if we are going to reduce GHGs in general and carbon in particular from agriculture, then surely the prime target must be agrochemicals? They after all account for almost a third of the whole carbon surplus – and in principle we could do without them altogether, if we really wanted to.  The cereals and soya that are fed to intensive cattle kept indoors require enormous inputs of fertilizer. The carbon load of soya is further increased, massively, because it is grown primarily in Brazil in what was the tropical rainforest of Amazonia, or the dry forest of the Cerrado – both of which (and especially the rainforest) were massive carbon sinks.

To be sure, if cattle are raised on custom-bred, monocultural rye-grass, as has become the custom this past half century or so, then that too requires massive inputs of fertilizer (ICI started the trend in Britain). But the members of Britain’s newly established Pasture-fed Livestock Association (PFLA) seek to raise cattle and sheep organically on natural pasture: mixtures of grasses with local herbs and browse (which contribute wonderfully to their micronutrients and hence to their health). Here the carbon load from added agrochemicals should be zero.

So, you might reasonably ask, how does the total GHG-load of pasture-fed cattle stack up against the total GHG-load of cattle raised indoors on soya and cereal? The answer is that I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else does either because I don’t think the calculation has been done. This is a very important question (insofar the GHG load of agriculture is important at all). It’s of national and global significance and therefore is the kind of question that should be addressed by government scientists. But government scientists these days don’t ask that kind of question. On the whole, like government itself, they work for big industry; and big industry assumes that the answers are already known, and that they are bound to favour big industry. My own common sense guess, however, would be that the total GHG load from pasture-fed cattle is less than that from intensively-raised factory cattle. The factories could indeed (in theory) trap the methane and other GHGs from their captives; but they cannot control the inputs of carbon required to produce their feed.

Then there’s the point that Graham Harvey drew attention to in The Carbon Fields: that when grazing cattle are properly managed (in the system known as mob-grazing) the fields could act as a net carbon sink, despite the methane belched out by the cattle. Here is yet another issue of key importance that has not been properly explored.

To conclude, then:

1: Agriculture – meaning the actual production of food — is not a huge problem for the global climate; certainly not relative to its importance.

2: Within agriculture, the major culprit is agrochemistry – which we could, largely, do without.

3: Pasture-fed cattle have been made a scapegoat, with a series of spurious arguments shamelessly spun in the interests of industrial farming.

4: In all discussions surrounding agriculture over the past 40 years successive governments, the NFU, and all their paid experts and intellectuals have routinely sided with the industrial lobby, primarily because they are committed to the neoliberal economic model which focuses on visible, short-term profit; partly because they are committed to “progress” and equate progress with high-tech; and partly because agro-industry has tremendous lobbying power. One consequence is that government research boards have neglected most of the prime questions surrounding agriculture, including detailed breakdown of its contributions to climate change, so that much of what needs to be known remains unknown. This is dereliction of duty.

5: We are told, repeatedly, to put our faith in “science”, and recent governments have made a virtue of doing so. But the best and subtlest science, the kind that takes most account of nature’s complexities, has been routinely sidelined in favour of science that presents us with agriculture as a simplistic exercize in industrial chemistry with the maximization of profit and concentration of power. In short, the science that now prevails is of very dubious utility indeed.

People at large need to wrest control of the food chain from the government-corporate complex. But research of fundamental issues has to be conducted at government level. Government has to consider the possibility that in it its attitude to agriculture, it has been seriously misguided, and that it needs to re-think from first principles.

Colin Tudge, May 15 2012