The British countryside is in danger of becoming split between two extremes: industrial agriculure and protected ‘parkland’. Planning laws perpetuate the division, by rigorous zoning of  ‘permitted development’ away from rural areas and the small villages within them, unless of course development is undertaken by very large businesses that can sway the views of  local authority planning committees, whose job it is to ensure compliance with planning laws. One planning objective is to preserve the look of the countryside, to prevent it changing to meet new challenges.

We are going to need a new smallholder movement to repopulate the countryside, produce food in sustainable ways, and generate custom for all sorts of skilled craft enterprises, as inevitable consequences of Peak Oil. Yet the planners put no end of barriers in the way of people keen to experience and demonstrate low-energy lifestyles. We only need to look at the determination of planners in Shropshire, England, to close down Karuna, a permaculture project that offers training in sustainable food production and low-energy lifestyles.  Permaculture refers to sustainable food production in accordance with the natural local ecology:  see www.karuna.org.uk for a dossier on Karuna’s long-running battle with the planners who see no value in a permaculture settlement, only a visual intrusion into lovely leafy countryside.

On the other side of England, in Lincolnshire, there is a planning application for a huge agribusiness development that may well be given permission, although it would be far more visually intrusive than Karuna. North Kesteven Council is mulling over application no. 09/1040/FUL, for a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) on 19 acres at Nocton Heath. On those 19 acres there would be between 8,000 and 9,000 cattle, a density of up to 474 to each acre. They would be inside, of course, their food would be transported to them, and the ‘farm’ would include a staff dormitory  — who wants to sleep in a dormitory? — as well as five houses for farm workers.

The application, from Nocton Dairies Ltd, is dated December 17th 2009. The men steering Nocton Dairies (www.noctondairies.co.uk) are Peter Willes, of Parkham Farms in Devon, David Barnes, who manages a dairy unit that Mr Willes has in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and Robert Howard, an arable farmer.

North Kesteven Council aims to decide on the application by April 12th 2010, and has set a deadline of May 3rd. The fact that the development would create over 80 jobs almost immediately is an important consideration for the planners.

The dairy unit would have eight buildings for cattle housing, two maternity/hospital buildings, two milking parlours, holding areas, a feed store, a lagoon for excrement, an anaerobic digestion unit, weighbridge, staff dormitory, five dwellings for workers, internal roads and paths, and a new vehicular access to the B1188. It would be a very large factory development.

By May 3rd, we will know if this mega dairy is to be constructed. If the planners say ‘yes’, they will be reinforcing the double standards that reject small, sustainable, low-cost ventures but accept wasteful and unnatural but very expensive ones. Money talks.

Surely we need to campaign to change planning laws, so that they favour development which is small-scale, local, and environmentally aware?

To comment on Nocton Dairies’ application, go to http://planningonline.n-kesteven.gov.uk.

My lifetime has seen the commercialisation of everything except — for the present — the air we breathe.

Has this made us demonstrably happier? A rhetorical question, maybe, but one that deserves more thought than we are often willing to give.  I do not mean to suggest that there was anything resembling a golden age in the past, merely to draw attention to the consequences of incorporating all aspects of life in the ‘market’. Child care, care of the elderly, leisure activities, even arts, have all been drawn into the money economy.

The money economy, in fact the whole superstructure of civilisation, depends on agriculture.  Agriculture marked the end of hunting and gathering and the start of settled communities, which in turn led to the concept of land as private property. When land ownership and management were vested in the same people, in the same locality, sustainability was a concern, because unless the land could be kept productive, it would not keep the community stable. There were other ways to obtain food — by conquest and by trade — but conquest created animosity, even hatred, in the conquered, and trade required the sustainable production of commodities wanted by those with food to spare.  We know that trade was often the prelude to conquest, as in North America when immigrant settlers traded with the indigenous populations, established permanent settlements and then deprived native peoples of their communal lands as they expanded westwards.”Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, as the saying goes.

Agriculture was the foundation of the nation state, but now depends on the decisions made by the elites who run business and politics through the mechanism of the revolving door that connects corporations and nation states with each other. This week I decided to look at the headlines and stories in the ‘Farmers Weekly’, a magazine for farmers in Great Britain.  I wondered whether Farmers Weekly today would reflect the different possibilities for agriculture, such as the promotion of local food chains, community farms, permaculture, and of course organic farming.   I had more than a passing interest because I was a reporter and then a feature writer with Farmers Weekly from 1972 to 1979. Then there was strong pressure from advertisers like Shell (oils) and ICI (agricultural chemicals) to concentrate on high-energy technology-heavy farming as the only possible way ahead. If you wrote about organic farming, or the preservation of rare livestock breeds, or the occupation of farming from perspectives other than that of maximum profit per acre, it was an indication that you were soft in the head, a dimwit. Thus the use of paraquat to kill off crop residues to allow direct drilling of the next crop was greeted as a triumph of agronomic research. Paraquat — 1,1′-dimethyl-4,4′-bipyridinium — has reported half-lives from 16 months in laboratory conditions to 13 years in the field. It is poisonous to the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, cornea, adrenal glands, digestive system and skin. Humans and wildlife suffer from the toxicity. (See http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/paraquat.htm for a summary.)

The power of advertisers to persuade publications to take a specific editorial line remains an issue. Farmers Weekly is full of adverts for herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics and the like, the essential ingredients for industrial farming, but contains undercurrents of potential resistance to the big-business model. Apparently there are plans to build, in Lincolnshire, a dairy for 9,000 cows.  While farmers seem to think this is inevitable — “…the economy is such that this is the way of things…”, “…I guess this unit will be replicated across the UK as smaller family units cease production…” — approval is far from unanimous.  ‘Old mcdonald’ commented: “This is not farming. It is factory production of milk. Cows should not be kept like this, to me it is a far worse scenario than batery-caged hens”. A farmer called Matthew Naylor commented: “I find it hard to think of a practical objection to continuing agricultural industrialisation. My problem is an emotional one. Deep in my tummy I have a growing sense of unease about the direction in which agriculture is moving. My issue is with the principle of corporate agriculture. It takes responsibility from individual proprietors and places it in protocols and technical procedures.” He continued: “Small-scale milk producers are mightily expensive in comparison to large-scale operations, but they tend to understand their business and their animals intimately. They have principles, they are accountable. I can’t help thinking that ultimately cheap food will end up costing us the heart and soul of the countryside.”

Three cheers for the word “principles”. Farming in accordance with ethical principles, farming as a way of life, still means swimming against the tide, though, and needs our support. Farmers Weekly reported that one farming family in every four in the UK is living at or below the poverty line. Their future in farming is at risk. Do we want food production in the hands of families who care about long-term sustainability, or controlled by corporations looking to expand their businesses in their quest for maximum immediate profits? If we can encourage farming as a way of life, maybe it will be a step towards limiting the corporate power that strives to make business the foundation of the modern state.

It all began with farming, and farming remains the key to our survival.

See Farmers Weekly, February 26th 2010, page 31 for comments on the 9,000-cow dairy plan, and for the issue of poverty in farming (’Forget the politics, let’s work together’).  See page 32 for Matthew Naylor’s comments, ‘Corporate agriculture gives me a bad feeling’.

The redundant steel worker wore a black armband. He was 58, he said, and would never find another job. He was one of 1,600 in Redcar, on Teesside in North East England, whose jobs have been axed by Corus, which since 2006 has been owned by the Tata Steel group of India. On Thursday evening this week I watched ‘Question Time’ on BBC TV, coming from Teesside, and felt that an impotent anger afflicted the audience. Teesside makes high quality steel, but the Redcar plant does not fit into Tata’s strategic plan.

The steel industry has been globalised. Who are the winners? The owners of Chinese factories making metal goods for sale around the world? The directors of the most aggressively profit-seeking steel companies? The bankers who lend them money? I cannot think of many other ‘winners’, but there are millions of losers. Just on Teesside, 1,600 lost jobs mean at least 2,250 or so more people affected in the immediate families of the redundant workers, on the basis of the national average 2.4 people in a household. So we have about 3,850 people directly affected. Then there are the enterprises that depended on the steel plant for their livelihoods. A typical multiplier in manufacturing is 2.35 or so. That would mean 3,760 consequential job losers, in turn affecting about 5,265 more people in their households,  an additional total of 9,025 persons experiencing the repercussions of the plant closure.

So the end of steel manufacture at plant employing 1,600 may well result in the economic impact of worklessness affecting, in a short time, the lives of 12,875 people.

We are told that our future as a nation depends on us offering a highly skilled workforce to the world. We are successful in weapons manufacture, but that is because  security and defence are the only industrial sectors exempt from the free trade — no quotas, no tariffs — mandated by the World Trade Organisation. It’s no surprise that the defence company BAE Systems is the UK’s largest manufacturing company, because BAE and similar defence (weapons) companies are exempt from the open competition rules.  This means that our economy, and jobs, become over-dependent on the arms business.

We have been conditioned to accept global free trade as both desirable and inevitable, but it is neither. It has proved to be an excellent method for transferring resources from the majority to a tiny minority of global super-rich. As a supposed democracy, we have the capacity to challenge the ‘common sense’ that unfettered free trade benefits peoples and nations. That ‘common sense’ was carefully constructed, and can be deconstructed given sufficient effort and will. A first step may be to elect politicians who will scale back the World Trade Organisation, to allow nations more control over their own economies.

The major political parties in the UK still accept subordination to the WTO, and thus acquiesce in the diminution of democracy that makes us into victims rather than active citizens. The steelworkers in Redcar understand only too well what it feels like to be economic victims, in a system that does not give them a voice.

‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’ has a chapter called ‘False Dawns’ in which I wrote about dubious magic solutions to energy and food scarcity such as the hydrogen economy, nuclear fission and fusion, abiogenic oil, carbon storage, and genetic modification of agricultural crops. The section on genetic modification is headed ‘Genetic modification benefits big business, not small farmers’.

The alarming concentration of power over seed supplies, which worried me when I wrote the chapter, is portrayed in detail in ‘Seeds of Destruction’*, by F William Engdahl. ‘Seeds of Destruction’ catalogues the capture of world seed breeding by corporations, principally Syngenta, Dow, DuPont and, the most powerful of all, Monsanto.

Monsanto is the world’s dominant supplier of genetically modified seed. The seeds are ‘modified’ to improve Monsanto’s income stream, because the farmers purchasing them are contractually prohibited from saving any to re-use in a future planting. Many GM seeds are engineered to tolerate specific agrochemicals, such as Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. GM seeds are at the base of a corporate-controlled column that extends through cultivation technologies to the  sale, processing, manufacture and distribution of the crops farmers grow. In a further twist of the screw, the technology now exists to engineer seeds that self-destruct after a single use: they are sterile or terminator seeds.

Around three-quarters of the world’s farmers save their own seed for use the following year, a practice that terminator seeds would halt, forcing those farmers to buy fresh supplies every year. Generally, farmers’ own saved seeds come from plants well adapted to their local environments. The mega breeders like Monsanto are, for commercial reasons, concerned more with their seeds’ suitability for their own agrochemicals than with their fitness for local conditions.

Corporate control of seed production became far simpler after 1994, when the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade  (GATT) created the World Trade Organisation. One of the early outcomes was the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which allowed corporations to patent plant and animal life forms. The rush to patent genes, and gene combinations, began. F William Engdahl comments (’Seeds of Destruction p.221) that:

“The WTO marked a step for the globalization of world agriculture, under terms defined by US agribusiness. WTO rules would open the legal and political path to the creation of a global ‘market’ in food commodities similar to that created by the oil cartel under the Rockefeller Standard Oil group a century before. Never before the advent of agribusiness had agriculture crops been viewed as a pure commodity with a global market price. Crops had always been local along with their markets, the basis of human existence and of national economic security.”

The US administrations in the 1990s — under George Bush senior and then Bill Clinton — backed the WTO’s constant pressures on nations to open up their markets for free trade that benefited corporations first and foremost, as they expanded and policed procurement and supply chains. George Bush senior decreed that genetically engineered or modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to their non-engineered counterparts and therefore do not require any special regulation. The WTO adopted this ruling as a binding Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (Engdahl p.221), which commands that food standards and measures aimed at protecting people from pests or animals can be potentially used as a deliberate barrier to trade . This meant that governments could not ban genetically modified foods because that would be a deliberate barrier to trade. Furthermore, even the labelling of crops and foods as genetically modified was outlawed as a ‘technical barrier to trade’ (Engdahl p.222).

Engdahl summarises the issue thus: “The doctrine of the WTO was simple: free trade — on terms defined by giant private agribusiness conglomerates — was to reign supreme above nation states and above the concern for human or animal health and safety. ‘Free market uber Alles’ was the motto”. (p.224)

GM crops have other potential uses apart from making profits for the organisations holding patents on them. The US government holds the patent for terminator gene technology, jointly with a major cotton-breeding company called Delta & Pine Land, which Monsanto acquired in 2006. It doesn’t require much imagination to see how terminator technology could be incorporated in covert operations to destabilise a regime. Engdahl includes a quote (p.xiv) from Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and then  Gerald Ford. The quote is  “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food and you control the people”.

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* ‘Seeds of Destruction’, by F William Engdahl, was published in 2007 by Global Research of Montreal, Canada. The ISBN is 978-0-9737147-2-2.

Sorry, I just deleted a couple of genuine comments by mistake.

The Royal Bank of Scotland’s loans to Kraft Foods of the USA, to finance the purchase of the British chocolate company Cadbury,  raises all sorts of issues about national identity and the role of the nation state.  Kraft raised billions of pounds for its £11.5 billion acquisition of Cadbury, from the Royal Bank of Scotland and other supportive financial institutions. The money talked so loud that Cadbury’s shareholders voted for the deal. The Royal Bank of Scotland, let us remember, is 84% owned by the UK government.

Kraft lost no time in announcing job losses at Cadbury. The Somerdale factory at Keynsham, Bristol, is to close, resulting in 400 lost jobs. The work is transferring to Poland. True, Cadbury was itself planning to to stop production at Somerdale, but workers hoped that Kraft would — as business secretary Peter Mandelson had apparently pleaded — protect British jobs.

The migration of jobs to lower-cost locations is all too familiar now, an inevitable consequence of our global capitalism in which certain corporations have become more powerful than the elected governments of nation states, through methods that include the ‘revolving door’ for senior personnel, who move between business and government and back again.  The development of global busno-politico networks threatens to make the views of national populations almost irrelevant. How many British taxpayers would have supported Royal Bank of Scotland in its venture to aid Kraft take control of Cadbury, which was an iconic British brand, founded by a Quaker family for whom social justice was crucial? After all, the UK government owns Royal Bank of Scotland on behalf of the UK population, doesn’t it? For me, the fact that a bank controlled by the UK government can lend what is in effect our money to a company that is destroying our jobs poses a big question: who exactly is government working for?

It seems to me that we have lost control over our national life. If we are to feed ourselves adequately in future, to return to the theme of ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’, that control needs to be regained. To a great extent, a government’s freedom to act in the interests of its own citizens has been circumscribed by the free-trade rules of the World Trade Organisation. Who, exactly, benefits from the World Trade Organisation? Your answers, please.