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.

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”.

——–

* ‘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.

Mob rule applies when there is no legal system, or the legal system is ineffectual.

Plato (427-347BC) and Aristotle (384-322BC) both argued for a rule of law to bind rulers to just principles. Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755), in pre-revolutionary France,  proposed that the legislature, executive and judiciary must be separate, to best maintain the rule of law in circumstances that are always complex and shifting. I wish these political thinkers were here today to consider how the rule of law can apply to transnational corporations, which operate across multiple jurisdictions and are thus not controllable by any nation state.

When corporations can buy lawmakers and judges, thus undermining the independence of both the legislature and the judiciary, the law is seriously weakened. In developing countries, corporations and the free trade rules imposed by their client body, the World Trade Organisation, can impede the impartial functioning of the legal system, as in Guatemala, to give one of several possible examples. In states that have imploded into chaos, like Somalia,  or which have been deliberately constructed and then deconstructed, like Iraq, the rule of law has been squashed by the law of the gun.

Guatemalan newspapers — who employ some very brave journalists — report mob beatings and lynchings and frequent assassinations. Each year about one Guatemalan in 2,275 is murdered within the country.* The legal system is corrupt and slow, and cannot begin to hold powerful corporations and organisations to account.

Here in the UK the judiciary is still notionally separate from the legislature, but is in danger of becoming a tool of government, as the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq is showing in relation to the opinion whether the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 was legal or illegal. If the judiciary becomes the pawn of the legislature, we can say goodbye to the tripartite governance advocated by de Montesquieu as essential for a just nation.  At the international level, corporations can walk all over the nation states in which they do business. Do we want a similar free-for-all within the state as well as above the state? As resources become scarcer (see ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’) the rule of law could be the only just defence against a violent free-for-all in the competition for survival.  The desperate gangs in post-earthquake Haiti, using their machetes to scythe their way  through crowds to  grab food and drink, give us a Hobbesian** preview of how alarming life can be when raw power is the determinant of individual surival.

*The population of Guatemala is about 14.02m but probably about 1.1m are resident in the USA, mainly as illegals, leaving 12.92m or so within Guatemala. The homicide rate is 43.97 per 100,000 persons, according to nationmaster.com.

**Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, English philosopher who regarded life as intrinsically solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.