permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

A Food Renaissance - The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/magazine/features/2987007/a_food_renaissance.html
Colin Tudge reports on The College of Real Farming and Food Culture; a
project designed to tackle the current issues in global food production.
The current system is not fit for purpose but through a holistic approach
and an overhaul of current mainstream agriculture, achieving a balance
between feeding the world and conserving the environment is within grasp.

The Agrarian Renaissance must not be a top-down affair. It should be led
and driven by ordinary people – a giant exercise in democracy.

The College of Real Farming and Food Culture
<http://www.campaignforrealfarming.org/the-college/> (CRFFC) aims to
kick-start the Agrarian Renaissance - a complete rethink and recasting of
farming and cooking and all that goes with them.

Since farming and cooking sit right at the heart of all the world's
affairs, this in turn requires a complete rethink of absolutely everything,
from growing beans and feeding cows to the philosophy of science, to
economics, politics and moral philosophy, and into the depths of
metaphysics.

Then, or at the same time, the ideas must be translated into action. In
effect, we need to start the world all over again - but not through
step-by-step reform of the status quo, because that won't get us where we
need to be; or by revolution, a head-on fight with the present
powers-that-be, because nobody wants that, and the outcome of revolution is
far too uncertain.

This must be achieved by creating the kind of world we want to see, in
situ, and allowing the present methods and the institutions that are
serving the world so badly to wither on the vine. Hence 'Renaissance'. But
the Agrarian Renaissance must not be a top-down affair. It should be led
and driven by ordinary people - a giant exercise in democracy.

The ambition may sound too vaunting, even ludicrous - yet it is all quite
doable. All the ideas that are needed to transform the fortunes of the
world are out there. They need further refinement - no idea is ever perfect
- but all are essentially benign, many, if not most, have arisen through
democratic movements, and all have been shown to work when given a chance.

*Do we want to survive beyond 21st century?*

Billions of people worldwide are dissatisfied with the current inequality,
the injustice, and the destruction of our fellow creatures and the fabric
of the Earth. Many millions are trying to farm according to the principles
of what I have been calling enlightened agriculture - aka real farming -
rooted in the methods of agro-ecology and designed expressly to provide
good food for everyone without wrecking the rest.

Others are setting up related, complementary enterprises, from charcuteries
to micro-breweries and bakeries, and many thousands of NGOs, clubs and
institutions are trying to help them on their way, from the Slow Food
movement <https://www.slowfood.org.uk/>, which began in Italy in 1986, to
the global peasant movement Via Campesina <http://viacampesina.org/en/>,
which began in the 1990s, to consortia seeking to acquire land to be farmed
along enlightened lines, including Britain's Ecological Land Co-operative
and Biodynamic Land Trust, and France's Terre de Liens.

All that is needed to turn the global frustration into a critical mass is a
little more coordination - which the College will help to provide.

The rethink is certainly necessary. The UN tells us that a billion out of 7
billion people are chronically hungry
<http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/food/>, while another
billion suffer from food that is not fit for purpose - the world population
of diabetics is now more than twice the total population of Russia, and
diet is almost the sole cause. Biologists estimate, conservatively, that
half of all our fellow species are in realistic danger of imminent
extinction.

All wild habitats, and a large proportion of the world's farmland, are
degraded. As the coup de grâce, we face climate change. The Pope,
archbishops, senior scientists and enlightened economists have warned us of
late that we will be lucky to survive the 21st century in tolerable form if
we go on as we are.

Yet if we farmed as if we really cared about the human race and our fellow
species, and adjusted our eating to match - not necessarily austere
veganism, but traditional cooking - our descendants and most of our fellow
species could still be here in a million years and have a far better time
than most people do now.

*Enlightened agriculture must be the norm*

Though agriculture is a prime, and sometimes the sole, cause of all these
disasters, the corporates and governments like Britain's, and their chosen
advisers who run it, simply offer more of the same: more high tech (with
GMOs the latest gizmo), and the neoliberal global economy that is supposed
to promote efficiency - and all, of course, with the present oligarchy
still in charge.

Yet it is easy to show that if only we farmed as if we really did intend to
produce good food for all, without destroying the rest, and if only people
reacquired the skills to turn what grows best into great cooking, as shown
over centuries in Italy, France, Turkey, India, China, and so on, we could
all live well.

The world already produces enough for 14 billion people - twice as many as
are now on Earth - and 40% more than will ever be needed, since the UN
tells us that numbers will level out at around 10 billion. Yet still the
powers that be advocate more production, because that is profitable. ("Pile
'em high!" as Tesco's founder, Jack Cohen, used to say.) We need instead to
acknowledge that enough is enough, and focus on quality and provenance.

But nothing of a robust kind can be achieved ad hoc. Enlightened
agriculture needs to be the norm, but it can't be if the land is owned by
banks that seek only to maximise their short-term profits. All countries
need to focus more than they do on self-reliance - not to be confused with
total self-sufficiency - but all are pressured instead to treat all crops
and livestock as commodities to be sold on the world market to the highest
bidder, and to hell with the home population.

The world has drifted so far to the Right that those who suggest that we
should cooperate to make a better world are seen as dangerous subversives.
Neoliberalism rules - a form of brute Darwinism that says that the world
will be better if we all compete, ruthlessly - and those with the most
power still believe Margaret Thatcher's dictum "There is no alternative."

*A curriculum for a different worldview*

So the curriculum of the College of Real Farming and Food Culture, the
CRFFC, must be broad. I've summarised it in tiers:

The top tier - the goal - defines what we want to achieve: convivial
societies in a flourishing biosphere.

The second tier - action - is the core of the whole endeavour: enlightened
agriculture matched by a true food culture - people who truly appreciate
good food and encourage farmers to produce it, as we may still find in
rural Italy.

Tier three shows what's needed to support real farming and good cooking:
politics that is true democracy; economic democracy; and law that is truly
just. Britain's most recent governments, from both big parties, have sent
young men and women to war in the name of democracy, but none has been
truly democratic. Economic democracy is neither far Right nor far Left, but
embraces the mixed economy.

Traditionally, this meant public and private ownership side by side, but
now, as Martin Large discusses in his book Common Wealth, we need a
tripartite mix, with private, public and - perhaps most of all - community
ownership. All should be conceived as social enterprises, intended to pay
their way but designed primarily for the general good of humanity and/or
the biosphere. The final strut, the law, needs constant reform. It needs
above all to be just, and often it is not.

But we will not install the kind of organisation we need unless we really
want to - which means we need to address the zeitgeist, the spirit of the
age. This, as I see things, has four major components. Science aspires to
tell us how the material universe works and what is physically possible.
Moral philosophy seeks to define what is good - not mere
cost-effectiveness, but compassion, humility, and a sense of oneness with
all of Nature.

Science and morality both are rooted in metaphysics, which is now much
neglected in the Western world although it asks what Sayyed Hossein Nasr of
George Washington University calls the "ultimate questions". I take those
questions to be these: what is the universe really like? (Is the material
world all there is?) What are the roots of morality? How do we know what's
true? And - the great unanswerable, but key nonetheless - how come?

Finally, the zeitgeist, and hence all life, is shaped by all the arts. With
Schubert, or indeed John Lennon, we look at the world differently.

*Building an online forum for collaboration and cooperation*

So what have been the origins of the CRFFC, and how will it work? In 2008 a
group of friends and I set up the Campaign for Real Farming, from which, in
January 2010, sprang the first Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC),
conceived by the agricultural writer Graham Harvey as the antidote to the
Establishment's Oxford Farming Conference (OFC).

Graham has now moved on to other things, but we have expanded the ORFC and
now it is bigger than the OFC. At the 2012 conference we launched Funding
Enlightened Agriculture to help farms of an enlightened kind, and related
enterprises, to get going. The CRFFC completes the circle.

The College itself will begin in virtual form - as a website, an edited but
otherwise open forum. So it will be a college in the true sense of the
word: a meeting place for like-minded people. At the same time - already
well in train - we will run 'pop-up' events wherever we are invited, from
one-off lectures to weekend courses, to (some time in the future!) a
full-blown MSc.

If, somewhere down the line, someone leaves us a country estate with land
on which to create a model farm, that will definitely take us to a new
plane. But just in virtual and pop-up form the CRFFC can achieve a great
deal. At the very least, it will help to coordinate the endeavours of
others, and cooperation is all.

By the time this piece is published, our website should be up and running.
Please watch this space and join in.


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*This article* was first published in *Resurgence & Ecologist*
<http://www.resurgence.org/> magazine, January / February issue 293. To
find out more about the magazine download a free sample copy
<https://www.resurgence.org/membership/sample-download.html>.

*Colin Tudge is (with Ruth West and Graham Harvey) a co-founder of the
Oxford Real Farming Conference
<http://www.oxfordrealfarmingconference.org/> and writes at the Campaign
for Real Farming <http://www.campaignforrealfarming.org/>. His l**atest
book is Six Steps Back to the Land (Green Books, 2016).*