Читать книгу Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World - Tony Juniper - Страница 15

The monocultures that now sprawl across vast areas of the world’s farmland are based on plants that are effectively genetically identical. Some of these are modified to include genes from other species, which has not only led to the loss of wildlife but has also helped to create a terrifying loss of farmers. For a long time I have been particularly concerned about the situation in India, where small farmers are encouraged to borrow money at exorbitant rates of interest in order to buy genetically modified seeds, as well as fertilizers and pesticides, all of which are aggressively marketed by multinational companies. It appears, sadly, that, for whatever reason, the failure of harvests is a depressingly common occurrence and this compounds the debts the poorest farmers face. Having to buy yet more seeds that do not reproduce does not help the situation. The farmer has no way of paying back his debts and, of course, no crop either. The net result of such a situation is too awful to contemplate. In the past decade a staggering 100,000 Punjabi farmers have committed suicide because of the economic pressures that the industrial approach has imposed upon them. The Indian Parliament reckons that 16,000 suicides a year have been added to that total since the introduction of GM (genetically modified) crops. So, it seems we have devised an approach to farming that not only kills other plants and insects, it depletes the soil and indirectly kills the farmers too. Which begs the question: is this disconnected, mechanical approach to the task of food production really a long-term, sustainable path for the world to take?

Cows in a rotary milking parlour. While modern farming has increased yields, it has often treated animals more like machines than living beings. The manner in which farm animals are reared says something rather profound about how we have come to regard Nature. Once respected as a sacred gift, the natural world is now more often treated as a mechanism that we can test to destruction.

Some would say wholeheartedly ‘yes’ – including the renowned architect of the ‘Green Revolution’ in India, Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. To call it a ‘Green Revolution’, however, is very misleading. Farms and fields were not being made greener. They were being turned into massive outdoor factories with a heavy emphasis on growing just one crop to the exclusion of all else. This kind of approach has wiped out techniques that had, for centuries, maintained a rich and vital biodiversity. Borlaug, though, believed that we must continue to use such a system because we face the pressing problem of how to feed more and more people. As he put it, ‘without chemical fertilizers forget it. The game is over.’ But in light of the sort of evidence that is coming out of the so-called ‘suicide belt’ of India, it seems to me that with chemical fertilizers and all that goes with them, the game may well indeed be perilously close to really being over.

The hefty reliance on vast amounts of energy and chemicals, as well as the wider costs these cause to society, are generally excluded from calculations of the economic viability of intensive farming. The present way of accounting does not reflect sustainability questions, and this is why the diversity of food systems and the variety of plants and animals are replaced by a way of doing things that processes farm output into a variety of brands which, being packaged, give the impression of diversity and choice when in fact they are part of an underlying tendency to uniformity and monoculture.

Driven by official policies to promote ‘cheap food’, production subsidies, cut-throat competition in retail markets, readily available fossil fuels and ever more liberalized international markets (these last, in turn, driven by deliberate policy reforms aimed at the globalization of agriculture), food production and its retailing have been subject to a progressive process of intense industrialization so that today our food is produced, processed and sold by fewer and fewer huge companies. As a result, in many countries there are fewer farmers working land that has been dramatically transformed, mostly for the worse, so that its natural diversity has become depleted, its aesthetic appeal destroyed and the livelihoods it supports made all the more meagre.

Considering how little we know about the natural world, never mind what medical, nutritional, and other benefits it might provide for us, I have reached what seems to me, at least, the only logical conclusion: that it is the height of folly to continue with such a conscious destruction of what remains. If not for our own benefit, then surely we should act for the prospects of future generations by trying to stem the loss of unique and irreplaceable life forms?

But beyond even the consequences of eliminating ever more species of animal and plant, and beyond the continuing erosion of agricultural biodiversity, there is another level of natural variety that is perhaps of even more importance to us.