British agriculture is notable for being the most mechanised in the world. There are more tractors than farm-workers. A smaller proportion of the working population — about 1 per cent as opposed to 4.5 per cent in the United States — works on the land and is responsible for two thirds of all our food and drink. Yields are among the highest in the world; wheat at more than five tons to the acre, for example. This compares with North America where one ton is the norm, curiously enough not much more than the average yield in Medieval England. But this arises from the extensive agriculture of Canada and the US with their limitless plains. Europeans have to squeeze more out of their plots.
Historically this was effected by good husbandry; manuring, marling, liming. Now it is achieved by spreading ever increasing amounts of chemical fertiliser on the fields. Equally, increasing amounts are washed off into the watercourses creating new problems, causing the Health Ministry to warn mothers in East Anglia, for example, not to make up their babies' feed with tap water on account of the sodium nitrate in it.
In the middle 1980's Britain again became, after a gap of two centuries, a net exporter of grain. British agriculture had, during those two hundred years, been the plaything of governments. The split in the ruling oligarchy between the landed interests and the new industrial magnates, between the old Tory interest (which incorporated the State Church) and the new Whigs, had made agriculture a political football. The most outstanding expressions of this struggle were those Corn Laws which were passed from 1815 onwards and repealed after a bitter struggle in 1846.
Driven off the land
The Tories favoured protection: high tariffs on imported corn, so guaranteeing them as landowners a high price. The Whigs wanted free trade in corn so that bread and beer for their workers were cheap and would result in cheaper labour.
After the repeal of the Corn Laws, imported grain from North America, but also from Russia, Argentina and Australia kept British agriculture in an almost permanent state of depression.
It is interesting to examine the nature of this competition that British farmers faced from overseas:
The very cheapness of our public lands, and the facility of purchase and transfer, tended to a system of bad farming, or strip and waste of the soil, by encouraging short occupancy and a speedy search for new homes, entailing upon the first and older settlements a rapid deterioration of the soil, which would not be likely to be arrested except by more thorough and scientific knowledge of agriculture and by a higher education of those who were dedicated to its pursuit. (Justin Smith Morell, quoted by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, p. 145)
So much for the doctrine of Comparative Advantage of David Ricardo in which each nation is supposed to concentrate on what it does best. The Americans, once the Red Indians were got out of the way, took over a continent stuffed with good things: thousands of square miles of timber, some of it many centuries in the growing; oil in the South West so abundant that a pipe had only to be banged into the ground and oil would gush out; mountain ranges of high grade iron ore in Minnesota; and the loess soil of the great plains, wind blown alluvium which had built up over geological time to the equivalent of a topsoil thirty and forty feet deep in places.
Most of these comparative advantages have lost some of their edge. The soil was the first to go. From the first settlers on, the technique of farming was little different from the crudest slash-and-burn agriculture of primitive peoples. The land was "pumped" as the French say. It was cultivated until exhaustion set in, often no more than four harvests, and cultivators moved on to a fresh patch. It was cheaper to do this than replace the nutrition in the soil as European farmers had been obliged to do for thousands of years. It followed the doctrine of Comparative Advantage as enjoined by the new Market-based economics with highly satisfactory results — in the short term. European — particularly British — agriculture could not compete and the result was the economic destruction of small and medium farmers. The continuing Enclosure Acts scooped up the small farms into the properties of the big landowners and social disaster was added to agricultural chaos.
In our own time the process is being extended to Third World, in this case Brazil:
The big trouble is a steady flow of migrants from the countryside. Squeezed off the land by the rapid advance of mechanised crop farming and by the spread of huge ranches raising beef cattle, millions of families swarm into the cities. Under pressure to survive, they turn to crime and so provide more than their share of the jail population.
The civilian Government that took over in Brazil last year, after 21 years of military rule, is trying to clinch a programme whereby millions of acres of land still sloppily farmed by big landlords are to be split up into family smallholdings. That way, the human tide flowing into the cities would be reduced to a trickle, even reversed, Ministers hope.
But many landlords are digging in their heels against the scheme, some using hired gunmen to keep wandering landless families from settling on estates where they try to build huts, plough and plant.
Landless squatters are being murdered by paid triggermen at the rate of about four a week across Brazil. But you don't see many of the gunmen, or their bosses, in jail.
(Observer, 11 May 1986)
Needless to say the majority of these huge ranches are owned by foreign-based multinationals and the bulk of the meat is intended for junk-food in the West — hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages. Agronomists have predicted ecological catastrophe in the cutting down of tropical rain-forest and replacing it with grazing in the fragile soil of the area.
In the United States this catastrophe has already been visited upon huge areas. The soil was deprived of the organic material which bound it together and the wind and weather just blew it or washed it away again. The dust bowls and dust storms of the United States are part of world history and the process is continuing. Chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides are being rushed up into the battle to get food out of the land, yet every time the solution seems short-lived, the cure worse than the disease.
The chorus of warning from biologists and agronomists fills the reading lists and the newspapers. Massed against them is the power of the multinational agrochemical industry and the stubbornness of farmers who are struggling to avoid foreclosure by the banks. Thousands of farmers in the Mid-West have been turned out by the bailiffs in the present depression, and the big interests have taken over.
The Average British Diet
There was a major crisis in British fanning in the late 1870's and 1880's which was only interrupted by World War I when foreign food imports were almost cut off by German U-boat attacks. The stimulus to cultivation and stock rearing did not last much longer than the end of the war, however. By the middle 1930's there was less land under the plough in England than there had been in the Domesday Book, nearly nine hundred years before, when the population was one-thirtieth of the size!
Those who do not learn from the lesson of the past are doomed to repeat its errors, says George Santayana, and the British government again found itself in World War II with the prospect of starvation for the people. All talk of market forces was forgotten. Backyards, tennis courts, lawns, public parks and golf courses were dug-up and planted. A medieval cottage economy took over great areas of the country with people keeping chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs in back gardens and in London, even on their roofs.
The tendency to import Britain's food and drink requirements rather than rely on home-produced goods had begun early. Large quantities of wine were imported in the Middle Ages but it was not a staple of diet, despite the quantities involved, three million gallons annually in the fifteenth century, one for every man, women and child in the country.
From the eighteenth century on, however, exotics like cane sugar, tea, and coffee were imported to join potatoes as new and important items of diet, to the chagrin of commentators like
Cobbett. He felt that tea and potatoes were no substitute for the bread and ale of old England.
The deleterious effects of sugar in the diet were far greater, especially when cane sugar from the West Indies met competition from the new home grown beet sugar. The greatly reduced cost, together with advertising and the confectionary industry have produced the highest sugar consumption and the worst teeth in the world. The dental profession's efforts to do something about it are stultified by the fact that the government is beholden to the power of pressure groups like the sugar and confectionery interests who dominate all food committees and ultimately Parliament itself. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the sugar interest pays a lot to politicians, particularly Conservative politicians.
The move to the steel-roller milling of flour in the latter half of the nineteenth century reduced still further the quality of the average British diet. The new mills could not deal with the germ and the bran of the wheat as the old stone mills had done and these elements were disposed of as animal feed or sold to the public as cures for the diseases created by the deficient flour.
The resistance which might have been offered to the continuing debasement of British diet by a peasant population was missing; the peasantry had finally been got rid of by the General Enclosure of 1845. The "allotments" offered as a sop might have enabled a worker to survive on a lower wage; they would not enable him to thumb his nose at an insufficiently generous wage offered by a prospective employer. As
Professor Thorold Rogers wrote of earlier Enclosures: "Two acts of government had effectually delivered the English labourers into the hands of their employers and left them helpless. These were Henry's crime of base money and the confiscation of glebe lands. "(
History of Agriculture and Prices in England, Volume V)
The period between World Wars I and II must be reckoned among the worst years for British diet. True, there was not the picturesque squalor of Victorian England nor the comedy of the Union-Jack-waving freaks who offered themselves for service in the Boer War, two thirds of whom were rejected as unfit even for the army. The scraps and leavings with which Dickens' characters fed themselves had been replaced by a diet of weak tea, turnip jam, and a bread which might have been made from plaster of Paris for all the nutritive value it contained. The consequence was a race of dwarfs with blackened teeth and rickets. When the Second World War broke out a vast industry was called into being to fit up these degenerates with sets of false teeth and spectacles and to sew up their piles and hernias. As Mayhew, Engels and the Hammonds had exposed the terrible diets of the nineteenth century, so another group of reformers, Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, Sir Jack Drummond, were calling attention to the condition of British agriculture and the terrible diets of British citizens in the twentieth century.
The Second World War brought death to 40 million Europeans and privation to the survivors, but to the British working class the war-time rationing of foodstuffs meant, paradoxically, an improvement in diet, so bad had standards been before. Official statistics reported increased height and body weight of children and dental decay was reducing. This was despite a generous ration of confectionery which at the end of the war stood at seven ounces per person per week. The conclusion this suggests is that the body can deal with a certain amount of sugar and other rubbish provided general levels of nutrition are kept up — which had not been the case pre-war.
The end of sweet-rationing was strongly opposed by the trade — another paradox. But they knew what we have always argued: that free access to a good or service, or to all goods and services, does not mean increased consumption, but usually the opposite. The illusion or reality of limited supply creates a false demand. At all events, sweet rationing was ended, average consumption fell from seven ounces per person per week to five ounces and the confectionery trade went into recession. Limitation of demand by price was never an issue; sweets were and still are comparatively cheap in Britain.
Nasty things on the food front
During the 1950s a new group of factors entered the diet of people over the whole world served by the market. Artificial fertilisers were brought in to replace the animal manures which were disappearing with the move to a mechanised agriculture. Chemical herbicides were introduced to eliminate the need for hoeing and good tilth which had always been regarded as the sine-qua-non of good agriculture. Insecticides were being increasingly used to deal with problems created by, among other things, monoculture: the giving over of large areas to a single crop with the consequent build-up of huge concentrations of parasites like potato eel-worm, carrot-fly, codling-moth, aphids. This problem was not entirely new. In the nineteenth century the phylloxera vine-louse from North America had devastated the European vineyards. After desperate attempts to deal with the invader by chemical means had failed, the growers decided to go nature's way. The European vines were grafted onto North American roots. These had evolved along with the phylloxera and were unattractive to the insect, interrupting its life-cycle.
No such wisdom has taken hold of the world's cultivators in the twentieth century. According to the Economist, in November 1984, a study of 3,000 Americans revealed only 30 of them without at least one kind of insecticide in their blood. And that is the good news. In Britain, while Labour governments have been complacent about such matters, the Thatcher administration was active in conspiring to prevent public health action on the subject and even to deny information to those outside government and the agrochemical industry. The final horrors are reserved for the Third World where chemicals are freely used which are banned even in slovenly Britain. The consequences are that up to 10,000 people a year there die from pesticide poisoning (Economist, 12 April 1986).
But where warning voices from the 1930's onwards have not been needed, the disciplines of the balance-sheet are beginning to be felt. To quote the Economist again:
Chemical solutions are expensive. Those that come from fossil fuels cost a small fortune to develop. Third world countries spend huge sums subsidising their use. In Egypt, for instance, agrochemical subsidies work out at an annual $5 a head.
Recently, the pace of agrochemical invention has slowed, while the evolution of resistance has accelerated. In the 1940's the United States lost 7 per cent of its agricultural crops to insects. Today it loses about 13 per cent.
Exeter University has a number of fast selling lines in insects which eat other insects. Name your enemy and they will try to supply you with an enemy of your enemy and therefore your friend. In Essex, an octogenarian,
Lawrence D. Hills, who had been sending out warnings for decades about the way farming was going and being ignored or denounced as a fool for his pains, acquired a new intellectual respectability and was being listened to. Apart from his research into nature-based means of combating pests, Hills drew attention to the dangers inherent in concentrating agriculture on too narrow a genetic base, allowing thousands of plant varieties to disappear. On the Cotswolds farmer
Joe Henson has set aside a reserve for rare and disappearing animal breeds. They will be needed.
A glance through any of those magnificent Victorian gardening manuals will remind the interested person of the specimens which have been lost, leaving only those varieties which fit the needs of the market fruit and vegetables which travel and store well and look good on the supermarket shelves, never mind that when you get them home they taste awful.
Nasty things happening on the agricultural front have been paralleled by equally nasty things in animal husbandry and poultry keeping.
During the latter part of the last century unwelcome amounts of fat were being urged on the public by the meat trade. The drive to intensive rearing of birds and animals had increased fat by decreasing mobility. At the same time the move from candles and rushlights made of animal fats to lamps fuelled by mineral oil increased the surplus. During the 1930's a sausage-maker Thomas Walls and Company solved the problem of mounting surplus fat by converting it into ice cream. Fifty years later nutrition experts were complaining that British sausages contained as little as 5 per cent meat, the rest being made up of fat and "rusk", a flour based absorber for the fat.
The problem of animal fat surpluses was brought to a crisis point by the development of petroleum-derived synthetic soaps — detergents — after World War II. This virtually ended the career of animal fats which for thousands of years had provided mankind with uses ranging from lighting, soap, and grease for his axles to waterproofing for his clothes and boots.
Another development of the decades following the War was the dosing of poultry and animals with chemicals, first to control disease, later to increase body weight. In the nineteen fifties a number of Swiss men had gone to their doctors complaining of strange symptoms: loss of facial hair, incipient breasts. These were found to derive from canned chicken imported from the US which contained significant residues of female hormone used to promote growth.
The Swiss promptly banned a wide range of American goods and a bitter commercial squabble developed. Since then the use of hormones has been extended to beef cattle and similar symptoms have shown up in places as far apart as Italy and Puerto Rico including mature breasts on baby girls of four years.
A corn and beef farmer of Truro, in Cornwall explained the circumstances to me like this:
If you inject a hormone pellet into the ear of a bullock, you can bring him to market in twenty months. If you don't, it will take twenty-four months to bring the animal to market, you will go bust and the bank will send the bailiffs in. The cost of feed will wipe out what you get for the beast. But I know a man who puts a pellet in each ear and one up the arse. He markets his animals in eighteen months and he is making a fortune!
A significant development for British agriculture at the beginning of the 1970's was the UK entry into the Common Market. This economic union began after the war with the linking up of some of the smaller countries into the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) Agreement and was then joined by Germany, France and Italy. At the beginning it was mainly an agricultural arrangement — the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy. British governments first ignored it, then tried repeatedly to sabotage it, then finally applied to join it.
The European Economic Community, to give its correct title, set about stimulating its agriculture to ensure European self-sufficiency, but also to protect its smaller farmers and thereby reduce social chaos. This ran counter to the trend of British thinking, which was that the market must decide and if the remaining peasants were driven to the wall, too bad. But the British were outvoted and an endless series of financial squabbles ensued.
Build-up of surpluses
Another consequence was the build-up of huge surpluses of every imaginable foodstuff. In 1986 nearly a million tons of beef, Fifteen million tons of grain, butter mountains, wine lakes, olive oil lakes, the dumping of millions of tons of fruit and vegetables. This was not new. In the thirties wheat was being dumped in the sea and fish was being dumped on the land and the Brazilians were firing their trains on coffee beans, but the surpluses were not on anything like the same scale. What was not new was that these surpluses were building up alongside massive deprivation among the people.
Good food was being destroyed while people were being driven to consume junk food, because it was cheaper (and because more housewives were being driven out to work because of economic pressures: unemployed husbands, debt, etc.) Canned, frozen or dried soups, dinners, instant mash, ready hash, custard without eggs, ice cream without cream, lemonade without lemons, fruit jelly without fruit, meat loaf without meat. And to make this rubbish palatable, a veritable witch's cauldron of chemical dyes, flavourings, and smells, entered the food industry. The consequences for health are still being discovered.
The consequences for the undeveloped world of the trade in food have been no less disastrous. In the Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840's people starved while wheat was being exported to England. In the great Ethiopian Famine of the 1980's fruit was being exported to Europe, fruit which could have saved lives.
Throughout the Third World fruit and vegetables are being produced by multinationals like United Brands of Boston, Massachusetts, and Unilever of Holland and Britain, on the best land in Central America and Africa for export to North America and Europe, while the local population is forced to survive on poor land, or worse, to become labourers on the latifundia of the big foreign companies. The power of these companies to influence, form, or destroy governments led in the inter-war years to the phenomenon of the Banana Republics, governments which were mere puppets of western multinational fruit companies.
It is difficult to find any aspect of food production in the modern world where the market can be said to exert a good influence. The mere fact of production for sale and not to satisfy needs, promotes an urge to grab the money and run, in all industries and services, but in food the results seem to be more catastrophic than anywhere else. Unfresh vegetables containing toxic chemical residues, meat with dangerous levels of antibiotics and hormones, fruit and vegetables which do not taste like fruit and vegetables used to taste, chocolate where the cocoa content has been reduced to the point where the Common Market Commissioners will not allow it to be called chocolate. The list is endless and depressing.
Another revealing development is a growing tendency for stock farmers to keep a particular animal for their own family which is raised the old way, without chemicals, and for fruit and vegetable growers to raise plants for their own consumption separate from those they send to market.
The good news, what little there is, lies in the discovery of the smarter entrepreneurs that "health" food, "organically" grown fruit and vegetables, chemically-free meat and poultry, is a growth market. White bread is a disaster area, commercially speaking, whereas the market demands more "stone-ground 100 per cent wholewheat" flour and bread than is available.
Ken Smith (Britain)
