Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] It's time to get back to the land

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] It's time to get back to the land
  • Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:35:56 -0700


more from the Brits
Prof Sir John Beddington, the Government's chief scientist, forecasts "a
perfect storm" as population growth, diminishing resources and climate change
create shortages in food, water and energy. Our generation may be the last,
as well as the first, to be able to take food supplies for granted.


It's time to get back to the land
Over the last 20 years, the proportion of food that we grow for ourselves has
slumped. Finally, the Government has taken note, says Geoffrey Lean.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/6952912/Its-time-to-get-back-to-the-land.html

By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 7:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2010

My mother was a Land Girl, one of the 80,000-strong Women's Land Army that
dug for victory during the Second World War. One of the family's most
cherished photographs is of her young self wielding a spade as she helped
grow vegetables on what had been an immaculate lawn.

The picture seems a world away from today's mechanised, computerised,
industrialised, depersonalised agriculture. But if a growing number of
experts are to be believed, my children's generation will increasingly go
back to the land to dig not for victory, but for survival. For once again,
our food security is at risk. Then, German U-boats menaced the imports on
which Britain had become reliant after decades of neglecting agriculture.
Today, domestic food production has again been declining, just as world
supplies look like getting much tighter.

Prof Tim Lang, of City University, perhaps Britain's top food academic, says:
"We are sleepwalking into a major food crisis." Prof Sir John Beddington, the
Government's chief scientist, forecasts "a perfect storm" as population
growth, diminishing resources and climate change create shortages in food,
water and energy. Our generation may be the last, as well as the first, to be
able to take food supplies for granted.

"We need to produce more food," Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, told
the Oxford Farming Conference this week. A statement of the obvious? It
actually signals a change in policy. For decades, ministers have seen
agriculture as unimportant since, as Benn's own department put it less than
two years ago, as a developed economy, "we are able to access the food we
need on the global market": manufacturing and the City would earn us enough
to buy in supplies.

Over the last 20 years, the proportion of food that we grow for ourselves has
slumped: we produce just three fifths of what we need. The gap between
imports and exports doubled between 1995 and 2005, and is now the largest in
Europe.

The alarm bells went off three years ago, when wheat and maize prices more
than doubled, and those of rice more than tripled, in just 12 months,
creating the first steep and sustained rise in world hunger for decades. Most
ominously, it happened at a time of record global harvests, and was largely
caused by soaring demand from the mushrooming middle classes in China and
India, and by the rush to produce biofuels. How much worse will things be if
world production falters?

Beddington's perfect storm may ensure just that. Global warming is expected
to hit harvests worldwide, even if some countries may initially benefit.
Agriculture uses vast amounts of water – 20,000 litres goes to produce just
one kilogram of beef, including growing feed, watering the cattle and
processing the meat – which will get much scarcer as populations and demands
grow. Supplies of fossil fuels will also become more limited and expensive,
yet farming depends on them, too: in the US, 10 calories of fuel must be
burned to provide just one calorie of food. And the financial crisis and
declining earnings from manufacturing cast doubts on how easy it will be for
Britain to buy food on tight world markets.

So we need to produce more. But food security will depend as much on how we
grow it as on how much we harvest. The oil-soaked, water-gulping,
soil-denuding, nature-destroying intensive agriculture that has marched
across the country – spurred by the Common Agricultural Policy – may soon
look as dated as my mother's photograph, as we realise we have no choice but
to farm sustainably. As a Cabinet Office report concluded two years ago,
"existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more
resource-constrained future".

That will have to mean taking more care of the soil, the very foundation of
farming; about half of our arable land is thought to be at risk of erosion,
with intensive farming the main culprit. It will involve conserving water and
fuel, and almost certainly increasing organic agriculture as artificial
fertilisers and pesticides become scarcer and costlier.

And it will probably mean reversing the decline in the numbers working the
land. When the Second World War broke out, 15 per cent of the workforce was
employed in agriculture; now it's less than two per cent, and the average age
of farmers has risen to an alarming 56.

This week, the Government produced a new food strategy, which tentatively
points towards a more sustainable future. It is well overdue, although long
on goals, short on specific action, and coy about spending money. But it may
yet prove a turning point, as Britain finally starts to fight a peril
surprisingly similar to the one that led my mother to pick up her spade.




  • [Livingontheland] It's time to get back to the land, Tradingpost, 01/12/2010

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page