Thinking radically

Colin Tudge

Stalin saw farms as collective rural factories. In the EU, farming is still built around the post-war ideal of the Common Market, established to make European countries interdependent so they did not fight each other. The World Trade Organisation pulls another way – serving the global, ‘free’ market. But what we need is agriculture that’s designed to feed people, not to meet whatever is the currently fashionable economic model.

The task is to grow staple crops, fruit, vegetables and spices, and raise livestock without trashing the landscape, while creating societies that are agreeable to live in. The ground rules should not be those of maximum profit and GDP, but of biology. Grow crops where they grow best and fit the livestock in where they may: cattle and sheep on grass, and pigs and poultry on surpluses and leftovers. As things are, our livestock eats what we should be eating ourselves – half the wheat, 80% of the maize, 90% of the soya. Biology-based, ‘enlightened’ agriculture would produce a lot of plants, not much meat and maximum variety – which is precisely what nutritionists recommend, and is the basis of the world’s finest cuisines from Italy through Turkey to India and China.

We don’t even need to be austere. But we do need good sense and good husbandry and the rudiments of morality. The present food economy is not only destructive – it is cruel. One billion starve, one billion can expect heart attacks and/or diabetes and one billion live in urban slums because the world economy is expressly designed not to cater for us all but to be maximally competitive; and competition, by definition, produces losers. The reason I call my latest book Feeding People is Easy is because it ought to be.

Colin Tudge is a writer and broadcaster with a special interest in food and agriculture. His new book is published by Pari Publishing.

11 October 2007