From New Scientist comes news that Monsanto are planning to produce GM soya that is rich in the essential fatty acid, omega-3. Since some people are apparently short of omega-3, this seems a good thing. But life is never that simple -- and it's about time New Scientist and other such publications woke up to that fact.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Why Real Farming Needs Great Cooking: The Importance of Upland Mutton
If we farm as if we really intend to feed people then we will produce the ingredients of great cooking. If we take food and cooking seriously, we will encourage good farming. Real farming and great cooking go hand in hand -- while the landscape flourishes and the people at large eat well.
Suzanne Wynn, an outstanding cook and teacher from North Somerset, will be explaining how this principle pans out in what we hope will become an extensive series. She begins today with upland mutton -- what it's really like and how to cook it. In a country like Britain with all our hills, mutton should be high on the menu -- as indeed, for many a century, it has been.
For more details on Suzanne and her approach to cooking click here
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Absolute Importance of Peasant Farming -- and Why Science Must Seek to Enhance Traditional Systems -- Not to Sweep Them Aside
My guru in agricultural matters for almost four decades has been E R -- Bob -- Orskov of the Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen. He is an honorary professor of Aberdeen University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and one of the world's leading animal nutritionists -- but above all, he retains enormous respect for peasant farmers. Indeed, he insists, he is one himself. He was born the third child and the eldest son among eight on a mixed farm in Jutland shortly before World War II, then hopped from farm to farm to college to university, then to the Rowett Research Institute to work under the great Sir Kenneth Blaxter, which is where I first met him in the early 1970s. There he came to lead the International Feed Resources Unit, later transferred to Macaulay.
Each year for the past 25 years Bob has visited farms and institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America including Cuba -- and been more and more convinced that if we seriously want to feed everybody well and forever and create societies that are truly tolerable to live in, then we must nourish the indigenous agriculture and build on it. Absolutely not, as now, should we contrive to sweep it aside in favour of western agroindustry. Science has many a crucial role to play in this -- not to replace what's there, but to enhance it. Here, in outline, he explains how and why.
In similar vein, please look at Sir Julian Rose's article The Wonderful Farming of Poland and Nadia Johanisova's comment on Czechoslovakia following the Age of Biology
Friday, October 23, 2009
Another Damp Squib from on High
The Royal Society's latest report on farming, Reaping the benefits, fails once more to hit the spot
There are good things in the Royal Society's new report. It says that the world in general and Britain in particular must again take agriculture seriously -- whereas, just a few years ago, there were still people in high places who thought that British farming should go the way of its mining. It says that we will not solve the world's dire problems simply by leaving them to "the market" -- which again, until just a few months ago was heresy. It says that science must be publicly financed just as it was in the past (as well as by industry). It says that science has useful roles to play in all aspects of life and although it suggests -- very reasonably -- that we should not write off any technology a priori, it does not insist that genetic engineering is the saviour of mankind, as recent panegyrics have done. It speaks of the need to draw upon traditional knowledge. All in all, then, it has an air of common sense and common humanity -- rare qualities in these gung-ho days.
But still it is lacking. It does not analyse the causes of our present plight. It accepts too readily the received truths that shape present strategies -- the Malthusian view of population, the perceived need for more and more, the self-evident excellence of western ways. The world needs a sea-change, and a complete change of perspective -- what the philsopher of science Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm-shift -- in governance, in economics, in foreign relations, in our attitudes to nature; and this isn't it. It is simply as good as we can reasonably expect from an official body that can say only the kinds of things that official bodies are allowed to say.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The NFU Falls Short Again
The NFU's latest report on the future of agriculture again reveals its lack of grasp, and the sad state of world governance.
The world in general and world farming in particular is in a parlous state. But thanks to the foresight and prudence of successive governments and the NFU (National Farmers' Union), British agribusiness is well prepared for the turbulent times ahead.
Such is the message of the NFU's latest report, Why farming matters more than ever. Somehow it does not seem convincing.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Rise of Real Bread - hear Colin speak
Colin will be speaking at the LandShare event titled: "The Rise of Real Bread: Changing Britain's Daily Loaf"
To be held at St Anne's College, Oxford on 14 November 2009, 10am-5pm.
It will be an "an interactive one day conference hosted by LandShare (CIC) to celebrate the first anniversary of the Real Bread Campaign and the Oxford Bread Group.
This day looks at the food supply chain behind Britain's mass-produced bread and asks whether it could be improved. Can we support local farmers, millers and bakers to grow and bake with better crops and in turn make good, natural bread accessible to all?
The conference brings together:
bakers - William Black of The Natural Bread Company; Geoff Coleman (Cornfield Bakery); Dan and Johanna McTiernan (The Handmade Bakery); Matthew Rawlings (The Great Northumberland Bread Company); and Andrew Whitley (Bread Matters and co-founder of The Real Bread Campaign)
farmers and scientists -- John Letts (archeo-botanist, thatcher and founder of The Oxford Bread Group); Colin Tudge (biologist and writer, founder of The Campaign for Real Farming); Professor Martin Wolfe (Research Director, The Organic Research Centre)
writers, campaigners and retailers - Rob Alderson (Unicorn Grocery); Felicity Lawrence (Special Correspondent, The Guardian, author of Not on the Label); Bee Wilson (Sunday Telegraph food columnist, author ofSwindled)"
Find out all of the details at: www.landshare.org/events or book directly now.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Age of Biology
or WHY DEFRA AND THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND THE WORLD IN GENERAL WILL NEVER SOLVE THE WORLD'S FOOD PROBLEMS SO LONG AS THEY PUT ECONOMIC DOGMA BEFORE SOUND BIOLOGY AND COMMON MORALITY
We should give credit where it's due. The Defra Food Policy Unit has launched a campaign to discuss "The Future of Our Food System", intended to improve our diet and our ways of producing food, and this is a great deal more than Defra would have done two years ago. To this end the unit has sent an online circular to all "stakeholders" (that's us!) to ask our opinion. You get to it here.
But, as we might have feared, the introductory blurb makes it clear that Defra and the British government in general will never solve the world's food problems -- because they don't really put food, and human beings, and the fabric of the Earth itself, at the top of their agenda. For governments, the economic dogma comes first.
Thus Defra states its basic ambition clearly and unexceptionably enough -- to provide "reliable access to affordable healthy and safe food". (They could have added "food that is actually good to eat", but you can't have everything.) In truth, this should be fairly straightforward. It is well within our scope to provide everybody who is ever liable to be born on to this Earth with food of the highest standards, both nutritionally and gastronomically. There is still enough good land left, and we have the necessary techniques -- ideally an amalgam of ancient and modern.
But the condition that Defra imposes -- that "companies [must be] internationally competitive and develop strong and diverse trade links with EU and global partners" -- immediately puts the solutions out of reach. It is easy to farm well, in just about any country where people actually live. But farming in ways that routinely undercut other farmers in other countries working in quite different conditions against a quite different historical and economic background is, as the world has been proving this past 30 years, more or less impossible. If you add the further condition -- that whatever we do in Britain must be in line with what we agreed with the French and German governments some time ago for whatever reasons we had at the time -- then we can be sure that in a decade's time, if we are here at all, governments will still be wringing their hands and telling us that farmers are going bust because they are not "competitive" and people are hungry because they are too greedy, and "demanded" too many Kentucky Frieds.
The present, prevailing economy -- the neoliberal, allegedly "free" global market -- is particularly pernicious. It turns all world trade into a global dogfight, in which the rich are bound to get richer and the poor are bound to get poorer, which indeed is what happens. Yet even that is not the point. The point is that we -- humanity -- can never solve our real problems so long as we allow ourselves to be led by economic dogma, whether the dogma is that of neoliberalism or Marxism or any other ism. What must come first is biological reality; and equal first, although taking its lead from biological reality, comes "common morality" -- the bedrock principles of compassion and justice that are shared by all religions and cultures (though not always by religious leaders and governments). The principles of biology tell us what it is possible to do; and the agreed principles of morality tell us what we ought to do: what it is right to do.
The economy, whatever form it may take, then becomes a purely pragmatic device that enables us to translate what is possible into what we want to do. It should not (as in the neoliberal western world or the Russia of Stalin) be allowed to determine what is actually good and worth doing. Neither (as in the neoliberal west with Monsanto, and Stalin's Russia with Lysenko) should the science be twisted to fit the ideology.
In short, the world now needs a truly radical shift: not from New Labour to Conservative (goodness me!); nor from capitalism to some form of socialism; but away from a mind-set that puts economic dogma first, and then expects human beings and the Earth itself to adjust accordingly. That is the most grotesque nonsense. That, more than anything else, is what is killing us all. One of the greatest of all economists, John Maynard Keynes, said much the same thing. Above all, Keynes was a pragmatist.
So we need new economic thinking -- and that, to a large extent, is happening.
More broadly that that, however, I suggest that we need to move into what might be called "The Age of Biology"; an age in which we recognise (as many other cultures in the history of the world have done) that we are a biological species, and the taks of feeding ourselves is a problem of biology (including physiology and ecology), and then plan accordingly. We also need to recognise that all human beings matter equally, and other species matter too. No government that I know of anywhere in the world, comes close to any of this.
That is why we, humanity, -- or at least, people who give a damn -- have to take matters into our own hands; why we need a "people's takeover of the world's food supply". This is what the Campaign for Real Farming is all about.
The implications of "The Age of Biology" are huge. The grand concept of Enlightened Agriculture, which lies behind the Campaign for Real Farming, is one example of it in action (perhaps the main example). We will return to the whole idea as this blog unfolds.
Colin Tudge, Wolvercote, August 28 2009.
We should give credit where it's due. The Defra Food Policy Unit has launched a campaign to discuss "The Future of Our Food System", intended to improve our diet and our ways of producing food, and this is a great deal more than Defra would have done two years ago. To this end the unit has sent an online circular to all "stakeholders" (that's us!) to ask our opinion. You get to it here.
But, as we might have feared, the introductory blurb makes it clear that Defra and the British government in general will never solve the world's food problems -- because they don't really put food, and human beings, and the fabric of the Earth itself, at the top of their agenda. For governments, the economic dogma comes first.
Thus Defra states its basic ambition clearly and unexceptionably enough -- to provide "reliable access to affordable healthy and safe food". (They could have added "food that is actually good to eat", but you can't have everything.) In truth, this should be fairly straightforward. It is well within our scope to provide everybody who is ever liable to be born on to this Earth with food of the highest standards, both nutritionally and gastronomically. There is still enough good land left, and we have the necessary techniques -- ideally an amalgam of ancient and modern.
But the condition that Defra imposes -- that "companies [must be] internationally competitive and develop strong and diverse trade links with EU and global partners" -- immediately puts the solutions out of reach. It is easy to farm well, in just about any country where people actually live. But farming in ways that routinely undercut other farmers in other countries working in quite different conditions against a quite different historical and economic background is, as the world has been proving this past 30 years, more or less impossible. If you add the further condition -- that whatever we do in Britain must be in line with what we agreed with the French and German governments some time ago for whatever reasons we had at the time -- then we can be sure that in a decade's time, if we are here at all, governments will still be wringing their hands and telling us that farmers are going bust because they are not "competitive" and people are hungry because they are too greedy, and "demanded" too many Kentucky Frieds.
The present, prevailing economy -- the neoliberal, allegedly "free" global market -- is particularly pernicious. It turns all world trade into a global dogfight, in which the rich are bound to get richer and the poor are bound to get poorer, which indeed is what happens. Yet even that is not the point. The point is that we -- humanity -- can never solve our real problems so long as we allow ourselves to be led by economic dogma, whether the dogma is that of neoliberalism or Marxism or any other ism. What must come first is biological reality; and equal first, although taking its lead from biological reality, comes "common morality" -- the bedrock principles of compassion and justice that are shared by all religions and cultures (though not always by religious leaders and governments). The principles of biology tell us what it is possible to do; and the agreed principles of morality tell us what we ought to do: what it is right to do.
The economy, whatever form it may take, then becomes a purely pragmatic device that enables us to translate what is possible into what we want to do. It should not (as in the neoliberal western world or the Russia of Stalin) be allowed to determine what is actually good and worth doing. Neither (as in the neoliberal west with Monsanto, and Stalin's Russia with Lysenko) should the science be twisted to fit the ideology.
In short, the world now needs a truly radical shift: not from New Labour to Conservative (goodness me!); nor from capitalism to some form of socialism; but away from a mind-set that puts economic dogma first, and then expects human beings and the Earth itself to adjust accordingly. That is the most grotesque nonsense. That, more than anything else, is what is killing us all. One of the greatest of all economists, John Maynard Keynes, said much the same thing. Above all, Keynes was a pragmatist.
So we need new economic thinking -- and that, to a large extent, is happening.
More broadly that that, however, I suggest that we need to move into what might be called "The Age of Biology"; an age in which we recognise (as many other cultures in the history of the world have done) that we are a biological species, and the taks of feeding ourselves is a problem of biology (including physiology and ecology), and then plan accordingly. We also need to recognise that all human beings matter equally, and other species matter too. No government that I know of anywhere in the world, comes close to any of this.
That is why we, humanity, -- or at least, people who give a damn -- have to take matters into our own hands; why we need a "people's takeover of the world's food supply". This is what the Campaign for Real Farming is all about.
The implications of "The Age of Biology" are huge. The grand concept of Enlightened Agriculture, which lies behind the Campaign for Real Farming, is one example of it in action (perhaps the main example). We will return to the whole idea as this blog unfolds.
Colin Tudge, Wolvercote, August 28 2009.
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