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.

‘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.

Governments faced with food shortages at home have been slapping on export restrictions. Export taxes in Argentina have so angered farmers that they have gone on strike. We know that populations are rising and the availability of fertile land is falling. China, already a major food importer, faces so many environmental disasters that it will be forced to accelerate foreign food purchases. Chinese companies are scouting for agricultural land in South America and Africa to grow soyabeans, edible oils, vegetables, bananas and other food crops for export back to China, where food prices in the first quarter of 2008 were 25% higher than a year earlier. (more…)