Preface to a Revolution
Something is wrong with our agricultural and food
systems. Despite great progress in increasing productivity in the last
century, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry and malnourished.
Further hundreds of millions eat too much, or the wrong sorts of food,
and it is making them ill. The health of the environment suffers too,
as degradation seems to accompany many of the agricultural systems we
have evolved in recent years. Can nothing be done, or is it time for the
expansion of another sort of agriculture, founded more on ecological
principles, and in harmony with people, their societies and cultures?
This is not a new idea, as many have struggled in the past to come up
with both sustainable and productive farm systems, and have had some
success. What is novel, though, is that these are now beginning to
spread to many new places, and are reaching a scale large enough to make
a difference to the lives of millions of people.
My intention in writing this book is to help to
popularise this complex and rather hidden area of human endeavour. I
live and work in the picturesque landscape of the Suffolk and Essex
borders of eastern England, a region of small fields, ancient hedgerows,
lazy rivers and Tudor wool towns. I spent my early years growing up
amongst the sands and savannahs of the Sahara’s southern edge,
landscapes dotted with baobab and acacia, and teeming with wildlife. In
my time, I have had the fortune to meet and work with inspiring people
in many communities in both developing and industrialised countries.
Most have been swimming against a prevailing tide of opinion, often
exposing themselves to ridicule or even opprobrium. In writing this
book, I want to tell some of their stories, about how individuals and
groups have chosen routes to transformation, and how they have succeeded
in changing both communities and landscapes.
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I also want to present evidence to support the contention
that industrialised agricultural systems as currently configured are
flawed, despite their great progress in increasing food productivity,
and that alternative systems can be efficient and equitable. My
intention is to bring these ideas to a wider audience, as food matters
to us all. As consumers, we buy it every week, even every day, and the
choices we make send strong signals about the systems of agricultural
production we prefer. We may not realise these messages are being sent,
but they are. Our daily consumption of food fundamentally affects the
landscapes, communities and environments from which it originates.
In the earliest surviving texts on European farming,
agriculture was interpreted as two connected things, agri and
cultura, and food seen as a vital part of the cultures and
communities that produced it. Today, however, our experience with
industrial farming dominates, with food now seen simply as a commodity,
and farming often organised along factory lines. The questions I would
like to ask are these. Can we put the culture back into agri-culture
without compromising the need to produce enough food? Can we create
sustainable systems of farming that are efficient and fair and founded
on a detailed understanding of the benefits of agroecology and people’s
capacity to cooperate?
As we advance into the early years of the twenty-first
century, it seems to me that we have some critical choices. Humans have
been farming for some six hundred generations, and for most of that time
the production and consumption of food has been intimately connected to
cultural and social systems. Foods have a special significance and
meaning, as do the fields, grasslands, forests, rivers and seas. Yet
over just the last two or three generations, we have developed hugely
successful agricultural systems based on industrial principles. They
certainly produce more food per hectare and per worker than ever before,
but only look so efficient if we ignore the harmful side-effects – the
loss of soils, the damage to biodiversity, the pollution of water, the
harm to human health.
Over these twelve thousand years of agriculture, there
have been long periods of stability, punctuated by short bursts of rapid
change. These resulted in fundamental shifts in the way people thought
and acted. I believe we are at another such junction. A sustainable
agriculture making the best of nature and people’s knowledges and
collective capacities has been showing increasingly good promise. But it
has been a quiet revolution because many accord it little credence. It
is also silent because those in the vanguard are often the poorest and
marginalized, whose voices are rarely heard in the grand scheme of
things. No one can exactly say where this revolution could lead us.
Neither do we know whether sustainable models of production would be
appropriate for all farmers worldwide. But what I do know is that the
principles do apply widely. Once these come to be accepted, then it will
be the ingenuity of local people that shapes these new methods of
producing food to their own particular circumstances.
We know that most transitions involve trade-offs. A gain
in one area is accompanied by a loss elsewhere. A road built to increase
access to markets helps remote communities, but also allows illegal
loggers to remove valuable trees more easily. A farm that eschews the
use of pesticides benefits biodiversity, but may produce less food. New
agroecological methods may mean more labour is required, putting an
additional burden on women. But these trade-offs need not always be
serious. If we listen carefully, and observe the improvements already
being made by communities across the world, we find that it is possible
to produce more food whilst protecting and improving nature. It is
possible to have diversity in both human and natural systems without
undermining economic efficiency.
This book draws on many stories of successful
transformation. Sadly, I cannot do them full justice, and so they are
inevitably partial. Nor is there the space to provide a careful
consideration of all possible drawbacks or contradictions. I do not want
to give the impression that just because some communities and societies
are designated as `traditional’ or `indigenous’ they are always somehow
virtuous, both in their relations with nature and with each other. The
actions of some communities have led to ecological destruction. The
norms of others have seen socially-divisive and inequitable relations
persist for centuries. Nonetheless, my intention here is to show what is
possible, on both the ecological and social fronts, and not necessarily
to imply that each and every case is perfect. This is also not a book
where you will find substantial evidence and analysis. There are no
tables or figures in the main text, though the endnotes do contain much
primary data. I am convinced, though, that the stories are based on
sound methods and trustworthy evidence, and that they represent a
significance beyond the specificities of their own circumstances.
I anticipate criticism from those who disbelieve that
such progress can be made with agroecological approaches. I also do not
want to reject all recent achievements in agriculture by presenting a
doctrinaire alternative. Real progress can only come from a synthesis of
the best of the past, eliminating practices that cause damage to
environments and human health, and using the best of knowledges and
technologies available to us today
This sustainable agriculture revolution is now helping to
bring forth a new world. But it is not likely to happen easily. Many
agricultural policies are unhelpful. Many institutions do not listen to
the voices of local people, particularly if they are poor or remote.
Many companies still think that maximising profit at a cost to the
environment represents responsible behaviour. But changing national or
local policies is only one step. Governments may wish for certain
things, but having the political will does not necessarily guarantee a
desired outcome. Structural distortions in economies, self-interest,
unequal trading relations, corruption, debt-burdens,
profit-maximisation, environmental degradation, and war and conflict all
reduce the likelihood of achieving the systemic change required to
nurture this emerging revolution.
But we must not let these deep problems stop us trying.
Things change when enough people want them to. The time is surely right
to speak loudly and, with a collective will, seek any innovations that
will help overcome these problems. I aim to take you on a short journey
through some of the communities and farms of both developing and
industrialised countries where progress is being made. I hope you will
agree that these stories of success deserve careful consideration and
some celebration.
In Chapter 1 of this book, I set the scene by showing
that landscapes, and their attendant agricultural and food systems, are
a common heritage to us all. In the pursuit of improved agricultural
productivity, we have, though, allowed ourselves to become disconnected
from nature, and so tend not to notice when it is damaged or taken away.
For all our human history, we have been shaped by nature whilst shaping
it in return. But in our industrial age, we are losing the stories,
memories and language about land and nature. These disconnections
matter, for the way we think about nature and wildernesses fundamentally
affects what we do in our agricultural and food systems.
Chapter 2 focuses on the darker side of the landscape,
showing how the poor and powerless are commonly excluded from the very
resources on which they rely for their livelihoods. Modern
dispossessions have extended such actions both in the name of economic
growth, and in the name of nature conservation. Strictly protected areas
designed to protect biodiversity simply disconnect us once again from
the nature we value and need. At the same time, modern agriculture has
created monoscapes to enhance efficiency, and the poorest have lost out
again. Repossession and regeneration of diverse and culturally-important
landscapes is an urgent task.
Chapter 3 takes a deliberately narrow economic
perspective on the real costs and benefits of agricultural systems. The
real price of food should incorporate the substantial externalities, or
negative side-effects, that must be paid for in the harm to environments
and human health. Food appears cheap because these costs are hard to
identify and measure. Allocating monetary values to nature’s goods and
services is only one part of the picture, but it does tell us something
of the comparative value of sustainable and non-sustainable systems, as
well as indicate the kind of directions national policies should be
taking. To date, the fine words of governments have only very rarely
been translated into coherent and effective policies to support
sustainable systems of food production.
Chapter 4 shows how food poverty can be eliminated with
more sustainable agriculture. We know that modern technologies and
fossil-fuel derived inputs can increase agricultural productivity - but
anything that costs money inevitably puts it out of the reach of the
poorest households and countries. Sustainable agriculture seeks to make
the best use of nature’s goods and services, of the knowledge and skills
of farmers, and of people’s collective capacity to work together to
solve common management problems. Such systems are improving soil
health, increasing water efficiency and reducing dependency on
pesticides. When put together, the emergent systems are both diverse and
productive. There are, of course, many threats, which may come to
undermine much of the remarkable progress.
Chapter 5 focuses on the need to reconnect whole food
systems. Industrialised countries have celebrated their agricultural
systems’ production of only commodities, yet family farms have
disappeared as rapidly as the rural biodiversity. At the same time,
farmers themselves have received a progressively smaller proportion of
what consumers spend on food. Putting sustainable systems of production
in touch with consumers within bioregions or foodsheds offers
opportunities to recreate some of the connections. Farmers’ markets,
community-supported agriculture, box schemes, and farmers groups are all
helping to point to what is possible. None of these alone will provoke
systemic change, though regional policies and movements are helping to
create the right conditions.
Chapter 6 addresses the genetic controversy. It is
impossible to write of agricultural transformation without also
assessing biotechnology and genetic modification. Who produces
agricultural technologies, how they can be made available to the poor,
and whether they will have adverse environmental effects, are all
important questions we should ask of the many different types of genetic
modification and different generations of application. The answers will
tell us whether these new ideas can make a difference. We must,
therefore, treat biotechnologies on a case-by-case basis, carefully
assessing the potential benefits as well as the environmental and health
risks. It is likely that biotechnology will make some contributions to
the sustainability of agricultural systems, but developing the research
systems, institutions and policies to make them pro-poor will be much
more difficult.
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Chapter 7 centres on the need to develop social learning
systems to increase ecological literacy. Our knowledges of nature and
the land usually accrue slowly over time, and cannot easily be
transferred. If an agriculture dependent on detailed ecological
understanding is to emerge, then social learning and participatory
systems are a necessary pre-requisite. These develop relations of trust,
reciprocal mechanisms, common rules and norms, and new forms of
connectedness institutionalised in social groups. New commons are now
being created for the collective management of watersheds, water,
microfinance, forests and pests. These collective systems, involving the
emergence of some four hundred thousand groups over just a decade, can
also provoke significant personal changes - no advance towards
sustainability can occur without us crossing the internal frontiers too.
Chapter 8 focuses on a select number of cases and
individuals who have crossed the internal frontiers and then caused
large-scale external transformations. Our old thinking has failed the
rest of nature, and is in danger of failing us again. Could we help to
make a difference if we changed the way we think and act? Can we, as
Aldo Leopold suggested, think like the mountain and the wolf? Heroic
change is possible, yet we also need to expand from the parochiality of
these cases. Everyone is in favour of sustainability, yet few seriously
go beyond the fine words. There really is no alternative to the radical
reform of national agricultural, rural and food policies and
institutions. The need is urgent, and this is not the time to hesitate.
The time has come for this next agricultural revolution.
