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I’m aiming to wrap up my present blog cycle around my recent book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future shortly. My book critiques George Monbiot’s writing on the food system, specifically his book Regenesis, and I have two essays in which I’m going to further engage critically with aspects of George’s arguments, of which this is one. The other will shortly be published by Front Porch Republic. Apologies if you’re getting bored with this topic, but I’ll be done soon and in my view the issues are important.
George’s highly charged response to Saying NO…, entitled ‘The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People: the astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death’, made my own polemics against him look almost hagiographical by comparison. ‘Cruel fantasies…’ made no mention of my demonstration that in Regenesis George greatly underestimates the energy costs of bacterial protein production – the centrepiece of the food system solutions he suggests in that book. To my knowledge, he still hasn’t explained how his 16.7 kWh per kg bacterial protein can possibly be right.
I don’t think his stonewalling about his data source and calculations are a great look in terms of the basic etiquette of intellectual debate, but there we are. Perhaps the wider politics of our respective food system approaches are ultimately more important, and this is the focus of my closing two essays. In my opinion, there wasn’t an awful lot of substance in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ to engage with in this respect, but George did make some remarks about poverty, hunger and food prices, and this is my focus here.
Originally, I’d planned to write a lengthier piece about this, but I think I can summarize the key points in a few paragraphs. Then I want to put the issues into a wider context with the help of a fine recent book by Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper.
In Regenesis, George criticises the idea that food prices should be higher. The dramatic centre of this argument is a visit to a food bank where he asks its hard-pressed users if they think food is too cheap, with predictable results (pp.130-1). In Saying NO… I briefly laid out the structural case for higher food prices in the global economy, citing various authors who’ve analysed it in depth. I found George’s account of his food bank escapade a dishonourable way of engaging the issue, and my remarks about this in Saying NO… were probably the part of my book where I dug most personally at him. Maybe that’s why he chose to hit back in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ as he did:
…while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it. Is it really possible that you can write a book on food and farming and fail to grasp this basic fact? Yes, it seems it is. Saying No to a Farm-Free Future is a powerful lesson in how motivated reasoning can lead you to an utterly perverse and ludicrous position.
I see this as another of George’s many howlers about the food system which really ought to come back to haunt him, but probably won’t. Quite simply, there are an awful lot of farmers globally – more than any other single occupation – and they are disproportionately at risk of poverty. No surprise, then, that increased food prices really can have net anti-poverty effects.
For all that, this is a complex issue without cut and dried answers, and I’m certainly open to debating it – though probably only with people of sufficiently calm temperament that they don’t lard their rhetoric with phrases like ‘cruel fantasies’ or ‘mass death’. But my argument in the relevant section of my book (‘Improving the poor’ pp.110-14) wasn’t that simply hiking food prices in isolation was a good idea. The point rather is that, historically, there has been a global overproduction of and traffic in artificially cheap commodity crops. Artificially cheap because they’ve been subsidised explicitly by economic programmes in powerful countries – things like the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, and the Farm Bill and PL480 in the USA – and because they’ve been implicitly subsidised by fossil fuels and other non-renewable and inequity-promoting inputs, by the economic dividend of colonialism in the Global North, and by other so-called ‘externalities’. This means that poor, small-scale and agroecological farmers tend to get priced out of the market and/or lead lives of great poverty and precarity driven by the capriciousness of world market prices and the race to the bottom they involve. Structurally, low food prices drive poverty, precarity, overproduction and environmental degradation.
My argument, further, was that the availability of abundant, publicly subsidised, cheap, bad food in global markets helps to entrench chronic poverty and to secure a net flow of income from poor to rich people without directly starving and killing the poor people (at least in the short-term) as is the way with all wise parasitism – a modern version of Steven Stoll’s ‘captured garden’ argument that perhaps I will flesh out in the future. To change this bad dynamic sensibly in the context of the present meta-crisis – climate change, energy squeeze and all the rest – would in many places have to involve increasing the price of food, reducing disparities in the price of labour, increasing the price of energy, increasing the price of capital and decreasing the price of land and housing.
These dysfunctions of the ‘cheaper food paradigm’ – to coin a phrase used in one of the references George cites in his book, and has presumably read – are all pretty basic stuff that’s well understood within the political economy of food, and they’re explained in more detail in the references I gave in the relevant section of my book (reproduced at the end of this post – not all of them necessarily the most encyclopaedic or up to date analyses of the issue, but I think they’ll do). I understand that making a case for higher food prices on anti-poverty grounds may be a bit counterintuitive to people who aren’t versed in this topic, but somebody who’s written a book about the food system really ought to have an inkling.
A related aspect of this is that when it comes to chronic poverty and hunger, or rank starvation and famine, having a global commodity system that produces more food, cheaper food, higher yields or greater market integration doesn’t particularly help – what matters is the social and economic structures around entitlement to food where the famine is occurring, as famously argued by Amartya Sen. One thing I learned from George’s ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece that was less apparent in Regenesis is that he effectively rejects this political economy framing and embraces the kind of depoliticised, Malthusian ‘more food = less hunger’ approach long favoured by enthusiasts for capitalism, industrial agriculture and the dispossession of small-scale local agrarians.
Anyway, long story short is that there are numerous complexities involved in the nexus of food and other commodity prices, poverty, hunger and the structure of society which are worth debating – calmly. And that a defensible general position in this debate is that increased prices for farm produce have their place, alongside other socioeconomic changes, in reducing poverty and hunger.
In Regenesis (pp.187-9), Monbiot instead offers a utopia in which most agriculture is superseded thanks to (energetically implausible) technical developments in manufactured microbial food, which for some reason he believes will be shared fairly across humanity, unlike the present situation with farmed food (one example among many where he fits his own definition of ecomodernism: “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change”). Put that together with his remarks about hunger in ‘Cruel fantasies…’ and you get a kind of Malthusian self-transcendence – a cornucopian conquest of hunger through limitless clean, cheap food.
I think there’s an insatiability here, a modernist fury against limits imposed by nature or, even worse, by people. But in Monbiot’s telling, it’s all upsides:
We could withdraw our dire impacts from great tracts of the planet that we have ploughed and fenced and grazed and doused with toxins. Indigenous people could reclaim and restore their lands; ecosystems could rebound (p.189)
This brings me to Taras Grescoe’s book – a deeply thoughtful, globetrotting detective story in nine episodes that tell of foods lost or nearly lost to modern people, and why they’re still important. Other than thoroughly recommending it, I’m not going to say much here about the book except for a few remarks concerning the ninth chapter, which focuses on Illahee Chuk, where Taras grew up (more widely known as British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province).
In this chapter, Taras discusses camas, a plant with energy-rich edible roots that grows in association with Garry oak. Indigenous people managed it through fire regimes until colonization severely restricted their access to it, and out of this interrupted human ecology Taras weaves a powerful and subtle narrative about the Indigenous people of Illahee Chuk. Many aspects have stayed with me long after finishing the chapter, not least the word that some of the Coast Salish peoples used for the incoming colonisers: hwunitum – ‘the hungry ones’. Taras cites a Tsawout informant thus: “My grandmother used to call them ‘squati hwunitum.’ Crazy white people. They wanted it all. They still do. Their greed is insatiable” (p.273).
I hope to write more about indigeneity in a future post, but for now I just want to remark on the oddly contradictory way it creeps into the contemporary consciousness of many of us hwunitum, including the passage from George I cited above about Indigenous people restoring their lands (see also Saying NO… pp. 119-21).
Taras mentions the oft-cited statistic that Indigenous peoples account for 5 percent of the world’s population, while occupying 20 percent of its land area housing 80 percent of global biodiversity. So why the disparity, other than the fact that these people are living in places that the extractive global capitalist economy hasn’t yet found much use for? Generally, I’d suggest it’s because they’ve made their livelihoods with low impact and low energy methods in which they’ve recognised themselves as local ecological protagonists who are subject to biophysical limits, and have a fine-tuned understanding of their place in the local ecology.
It’s great that George is apparently behind Indigenous people restoring their lands through such approaches. Presumably, the lesson those of us in the other 95 percent of the world’s population might learn from this is that we should likewise try to make ourselves better ecological protagonists by generating low impact local livelihoods. That, at any rate, is basically what I’ve argued in Saying NO… and A Small Farm Future.
But oddly, all hell breaks loose when you argue this. Witness the kind of words that George applies to it, or to me: bucolic, romantic, nostalgia, medieval, “a Neolithic production system to feed a 21st-century population”, a cruel fantasy and so on. Low impact ecological adaptation is okay for Indigenous people, it seems, but apparently not for we hungry ones who need to leave such Neolithic/medieval trappings aside and arrow forwards into the 21st century with higher energy, higher tech, ecologically decontextualized manufactured food.
If it were the case that there simply isn’t enough land for the non-Indigenous portion of humanity to live low-impact lives built around local ecological possibilities, then criticisms of the approach I advocate would be understandable – although the mood I’d expect around this sad news that we, the non-Indigenous majority, cannot hope to restore and reclaim our lands would be rueful or elegiac, not the scornful fury that’s come my way from George and other ecomodernists. But, as I showed in my previous post, there is enough land.
Perhaps the real problem is that there isn’t enough land, or energy, or other resources for us all to keep living the kind of ‘21st century’ lives many of us seem to expect as a birthright for all that much longer in, well, the 21st century. I’d put low odds on mass intercontinental air travel, supermarket shelves groaning with meat or alt-meat and endless other delicacies, pushbutton temperature control, wi-fi connectivity and the whole caboodle by century’s end. And that, I think, is where the fury comes from. They want it all. They still do. Squati hwunitum.
Almost everybody these days is positive about Indigenous lifeways, but in my opinion too often in a kind of essentialised way that implies it’s the indigeneity rather than the low-impact localism that renders the benefit. I find George’s simultaneous approval of Indigenous land reclamation and scorn for agrarian localism flatly contradictory, and I think ultimately revealing of an implicit scorn for Indigenous people too. In any case, the historical precedents for people living high-energy, high economic-connectivity lives peaceably alongside people living low-energy, high ecological-connectivity lives for long aren’t good.
Call it Jevons paradox, call it colonialism, call it cultural supremacism, ultimately the high-energy folk are going to take what they believe they need and deserve from the low-energy ones. Taras quotes from the eighteenth-century Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel’s views about Indigenous foraging peoples: “Those who yet hold to the idle mode of life … cannot complain if other nations, more laborious and pent-up, come and occupy a portion of it” (p.267).
I think you get a sense of how this will play out all over again when you read between the lines of how George (incorrectly, as it happens) represents one of my arguments from Saying NO… in his ‘Cruel fantasies…’ piece:
Discussing his own, proudly low-yield production of wheat and potatoes, Chris states:
“there’s no point labouring for next to nothing on someone else’s behalf when you’ve already grown enough to eat for yourself.”
This is why farmers who do not share his worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people.
Leaving aside the confusions here about yield and price, beneath George’s voice in this passage I detect the chill tones of Emer de Vattel … can those who yet hold to the idle mode of farming complain if others, more energy-intensive and commercial, come and occupy a portion of their land? George’s remarks have me scrambling for my property deeds to check my legal title … though history tells that’s hardly a defence against expropriation, as many Indigenous people and small farmers have felt to their cost, per Thomas Hobbes “Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all”.
I regret that George now seems to have joined the ranks of the agricultural ‘improvers’ and appropriators (who invariably present themselves as benefactors of the poor) arrayed against those trying to figure out more renewable local livelihoods, those trying to learn to be more indigenous. As I argue in Saying NO… agricultural improvement ideology has a long and ignoble expropriative history. It’s often justified in terms of pseudo-scientific claims about efficiency increase. And it’s often fought tooth and nail by local agrarians and Indigenous people.
It seems as if a new chapter is opening in this fight. Pace Hobbes, the fight will have to be a political matter of covenants more than swords, as all fights ultimately are. And it will have to be plausibly grounded in the social structures and social tensions of innumerable local places worldwide. It’s this lack of any structural politics in favour of context-free techno-fixes and consumer choice blandishments that defines the limitations of ecomodernist visions like George’s.
Taras writes,
…though First Nations cultures were devastated, they were never extirpated. And camas, like the bones of the children buried outside residential schools, never actually disappeared. The bulbs remain in the ground, waiting for the time they can return to the light, and their story will be known … for this, we hwunitum should be grateful. Our survival as a species depends on looking to the past – and for that, we’re going to need all the wisdom and guidance we can get.
Yes, exactly this. And, yes … looking to the past – not worshipping it, or replicating it, or romanticising it, or trying to restore it, but looking to it. This seems to be something that the (eco)modernist mindset cannot bear to do. In that failure, it risks obliterating the future.
References
Eric Holt-Giménez. 2019. Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It? Polity.
Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart. 2006. A History of World Agriculture. Earthscan.
Peter Robbins. 2003. Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster. Zed.
Glenn Davis Stone. 2022. The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World. Routledge.