We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion-plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution or much benefit for many beyond themselves.
An increasing realisation of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialised food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.
From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.
The other side of the agriculture coin has also been doing us harm: an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we benefiting from unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.
Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity – of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralised fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive – all of us – we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy human food.
We feed far more, and live far better, than past Malthusians predicted because we grow more food and store and transport it more effectively than they thought we could. That is not an ‘elitist’ thing, it is quite the opposite. Like the rest of life, we need to continue to progress, but keep that progress in all our hands rather than a greed-driven few – which is the unavoidable challenge of all human progress, and a challenge our agencies are now failing. But in fighting for food freedom, we must still feed over eight billion. This means investing in large-scale farm machinery and supply and food management infrastructure – in large agricultural enterprises.
Living the rural dream
I live on a few acres, and this produces about 70% of my family’s food thanks to a lot of trudging through mud. We eat mostly our own meat, our own eggs (chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys), vegetables, and in season our own fruit and milk. If you have a good external income, and a few acres of well-watered fertile land, you can do this and still go to restaurants, drive a car, and travel for conferences and holidays. We are very fortunate. By the standard of most people on earth, highly privileged. It is hard work and stinks after rain, but it’s rewarding. It feel good to eat the fruit of your own labour.
We grow most of our own food partly for health reasons, partly to have something to rely on if things get really bad. We also do it because it is, at times, fun. In good months we also save money. Recently, a hurricane came through followed by three weeks of near continuous heavy rain. The cost of recovery just for the little land and fences we have is going to be well above the total market value of all our livestock, and probably negate two years of savings on groceries. We will recover because, in keeping with a minority of humanity, we have good external resources to draw on.
Hurricane aside, we have lost two breeding stock and one intended for the table in the past two months due to parasitic worm infestations (a curse of warm humid environments). We would have lost more without modern pharmaceuticals and supplementary (i.e., externally-purchased) stockfeed. If we could not afford the fence repairs, we would have no livestock at all. Our in-soil veggies and two fruit trees are also rotting due to the exceptionally wet weather. Last week another tree fell onto a fence, adrift in the hyper-saturated soil.
If we were really subsistence farmers, like most small-scale farmers are globally, we would now face starvation or the loss of our land and future income – like people in the West also did before the industrial revolution transformed agriculture, and as hundreds of millions in other countries still do. This is why we now have large farms with a lot of equipment: so that they can be resilient.
A friend nearby farms 6,000 acres of cereals. They plant out genetically modified seed, treat them with herbicides and pesticides at certain intervals and harvest when they are ripe and dry. This farming is extremely fossil fuel and labour intensive – ploughing, seeding, spraying, harvesting. Even with this, corn can grow fungus in the cobs or large acreages can be lost due to rain. They are completely at the mercy of the weather. Enough but not too much rain, and sun at the right time. With 6,000 acres owned or leased, a couple of families make a modest living. None, if it rains at harvest time.
Last year, they lost about $20,000 of crops simply to blackbirds. This year, with the hurricane, they lost an entire crop of sorghum. Unpredicted rain this week wiped out the entire rice crop, just as it was drying enough from the three weeks of rain to be fit for harvest. But they still have to pay for the seed, the fuel, the installments on their machinery and everything else a family needs. They will not have an income this year, which is something most salaried people ─ fed through the farmers’ precarious efforts ─ will never experience. If they can muster the resources, the farmers will buy seed, fertiliser and thousands of gallons of fuel, to try again next year. Or they will lose it all. They will probably never get rich and are always in debt. A combine harvester costs almost half a million dollars. Modern cereal croppers must live on debt. There is no prospect of the windfall farming boom that software and biotech engineers hope for.
Surviving the urban dream
An hour north, there is a city of over three million people. Most live on small suburban blocks or in apartments and work much of the day in an office or factory, or even a shop selling food. To eat, they rely on a huge network they are barely aware of. This network drills the oil, builds the machinery, acquires the harvest or livestock, processes it and preserves it, and transports it close enough, at a low enough price, for them to buy. They can supplement it with backyard or hydroponic vegetables or a few eggs, but without this vast network the city could not exist.
Without this and other vast cities, organic hobby farmers could not fly to conferences on freedom and self-sufficiency, drive cars or post on the internet. There would be no fuel, no smartphones and no colleges for their kids. None of the medicines that sometimes stop kids dying and adults going blind, as they often used to. This is why, over hundreds of years, we have expanded cities and increasingly differentiated occupations. Because we can only have these things if most of us don’t have to spend most of our time growing food, and if we don’t have mass human die-offs when the weather turns bad.
New York and Greater London are roughly three times the size of our nearest city, and the world has a dozen of more cities of over 20 million people. They are packed – more than half of humanity lives in urban areas – and they all need feeding, or they will die. They cannot grow their own food – at least nowhere near enough to live on. They are busy doing those things the rest of us rely on, and they have almost no space. They can dabble for fun and health, but their survival hinges on a massive industry of growing, transporting, preserving and delivering vast quantities of food.
Long ago, most people in the West subsisted off the land. Life was generally confined to the local village, women commonly died in childbirth and children before their fifth birthday. Many never left the vicinity of their village, as they had no savings, means of transport or free time in which to do so. Consecutive bad seasons often meant mass starvation. Over the past couple of hundred years our population has massively increased, and we have, despite the predictions of Malthusians, actually managed not only to feed ourselves, but increasingly to over-feed ourselves.
Today, in many African and Asian economies, small-scale low-tech farming still remains the norm. It uses low levels of fertiliser, minimal machinery or fossil fuel and few anti-parasitic medications or pesticides. The families that run them lose children to easily preventable diseases, mothers to childbirth and daughters to child marriage. Walking through mud all day bent over under the hot sun, with your child lying with fever in the two-room hovel, is not a good life. Watching stunted children crouched on a floor eating white rice and few leaves for their main meal causes the rural ideal to lose its romance. It is why so many young people leave at the first opportunity. Otherwise, they can never, on their meager small-holdings, get out of poverty.
Cars, air conditioning, overseas holidays and cancer surgery may be things traditional small-holder farmers read about, but the technology revolution that gave them to us remains inaccessible. They will need fewer people farming per acre, as small farms simply cannot provide the capital with which to purchase such things that we, writing and reading articles such as this in the West, consider quite basic to our lives.
Serving more than eight billion
Tens of millions of people receive external food aid to prevent them starving to death in normal years and with 350 million in acute food insecurity, this goes up when there are bad seasons. The Green Revolution – the increase in agricultural output over the past several decades – has kept this relatively constant as the total population increased massively, confounding the Malthusians. But it remains precarious as long as the technologies and fertilisers driving it are concentrated in few hands, as long as genetically-modified crops can be owned by a few companies. Much of the Green Revolution remains poorly accessible where populations are increasing most rapidly – in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia. These growing populations need high yield agriculture to be expanded, rather than hobbled by distant and wealthy idealists.
This is not an argument for corporate takeover of farming – farmers should have the right to kill and sell their own stock (obviously) and local sourcing should be encouraged. We will continue drinking raw milk and eating red meat and a natural human diet. Our society has done well because our food industry was generally diverse and competitive, and fossil fuels keep our food safe and accessible. The five-year plans of Mao, Stalin and Khrushchev, like the centralised madness proposed by the UN and WEF today, served only the few whilst bringing famine, and the promise of future famine, to the many.
But, if we are to live as most would like, and not die unnecessarily young, and feed our massive cities, we will need to expand most of the trappings and innovations that have proven former Malthusians wrong. Local sourcing by itself brings local starvation when things get bad, unless there is an alternative to come to the rescue that is able to preserve and transport food from elsewhere. The people who make our aeroplanes and maintain our internet also have to eat – cheaply enough that they too can fly and surf the web as we do. If we believe in basic equality and freedom, then we need to also support the aspirations of struggling semi-subsistence farmers in poorer countries who dream of doing the same.
Embrace reality
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive – a competitive market can support local sourcing for those where food is grown, feed cities and disseminate wealth. Destruction of big agriculture is starvation for many, while centralised control by the rich WEF oligarchs who currently seek to destroy smaller farmers and force us onto highly processed factory food will eventually do the same. To steer a middle and rational approach, we first need to keep our feet on the ground.
Otherwise, natural food advocates will look like the Malthusians they seek to oppose. We can all try self-sustainability if we only have a billion or so on the planet, as our forebears did. Life will be rather feudal, but the rich and the big landowners, who will rapidly accumulate others’ land during droughts and floods, will be happy. However, if we value the lives of all of us here and now, we had better be serious about feeding all of us.
Food freedom should mean open markets, farmer rights and ensuring this absolutely vital part of supporting humanity remains in the hands of many, not a few. We need big productive farms, and we need them run by people who understand the land rather than distant investment funds, software entrepreneurs or sycophants of the latest Davos-fascist group-think.
Hobby farming will continue to be a viable and good alternative for those fortunate and wealthy, but aiming to dismantle the agricultural ‘Green Revolution’ is dangerously close to willful depopulation . We should fight to reduce its environmental harms, wherever we can show this will not leave millions hungry. But the fight should primarily be for a path out of poverty and the freedom to choose, not a fight for the utopia of a privileged few.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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just an impression but the author seems very pro GMO and possibly pro vaccine.
meaning i do not trust him!
The logic is, that without either GMO or vaccines the production of food stuffs would not be as it is today. In all areas of food production we have kept ahead food shortages by improvement and modification to processes and systems, by people who have a vested interest in doing so, a direction and vision for the future. The WEF & UN have an agenda
What point are you making?
I am neither pro vaccine or GMO, but I enjoyed the article because the author wrote about the true nature of food production, transportation etc. The enemy are the Gates, the Millibands, the Davos creatures who see Food, and Water as a means of control, power and ever more money, the fact that their belief system will result in the deaths and suffering of millions mainly in the 3rd world is by the by, their belief being there are too many of the wrong sort of people anyway.
I think we need a wide range of Farm production from the people who have their allotments, few chickens etc, the local small producers both organic and those that use fertilizers. I disagree with the ability of the Monsanto’s etc of this world being able to patent and control seeds and fertilizers, just as I abhor the interference of the public sector in the pay of the large corps who stop raw milk production, small scale producers and who try and wipe out small holders by locking down birds for flu, meanwhile the logic that wild birds are still flying around the planet escapes them.
The problem we have and must resist is the latter, the EU, our own Government and of course the billionaires who are anti farming unless its under their control. He who controls the food controls the world.
I liked the article, if people want to buy food that is processed, and uses chemicals as long as they know about it let them, but let the small farmer, the natural producer go about his business too, and allow fossil fuels to transport the products. Choice should be free and not in the hands of a few elite .
Dr Bell seems to be skirting the depopulation agenda.
Great article, thank you
Great Article———-“Tens of millions of people receive external food aid to prevent them starving”———Yet the world can afford to use masses of food (corn, wheat, maize etc) to make ethanol for our vehicles and therefore forcing up world food prices causing misery and death for the poorest.
It is good to see the issue of food and farming being addressed. It is a topic I have been posting about for many months.
I feel ashamed when contemplating how we have become so domesticated that without lorries delivering food to supermarkets virtually all of us would be screwed. And it isn’t inconceivable that such an event could occur in our lifetime which meant that deliveries would stop. Shortly thereafter farm animals would disappear very quickly. Then the pets. And then you would be left to catch small mammals so lacking in meat that it takes almost as much energy to catch and skin one as would offset any calorific benefit. And then the fun and games really begin because a time comes when all you can think of is meat and you don’t care where it comes from. You can look at behaviour you see all around you now. It isn’t that far away from cannibalism.
The problem is not so much industrial agriculture but more industrial food production.
Besides which the global economy for agro products is such an absolute mess due to idiotic government policies (but I repeat myself), tarifs and other regulatory barriers and general misinformation that it takes a brave man to pronounce.
But he’s correct for each of us to produce our own requirements on a 3 acre plot is to return to the misery of the middle ages, especially since TPTB will still insist on us paying taxes (or tithes, or working his lordships land in lieu).
Farm local, seasonal food processed as little as possible and you’ll not go far wrong.
If those same PTB will let us, and if they don’t, well then, it’s Wat Tyler time.
There is no way to save the system and its demise is imminent. And this time around if the pyament systems themselves crash then how are you going to pay for a containership of food – carrier pigeon? And a few days ago there was an article on this page about British food security and how it has diminished in recent years. There will be no containing of such a situation. People assume that we could introduce a rationing system. This would be impossible with social cohesion as febrile as it is these days. It isn’t going to be order out of chaos it is going to be pure chaos for an indeterminate period of time. The will be no phoenix moment, more likely victors of fights between warring clans forming ugly debased systems that will not see the light of civilisation again for hundreds of years.
You live in some world as it should be that will always provide for you. That would be nice I can see the attraction but it isn’t going to be like that for long. Either you wise up to it now or you wise up to it in a couple of months time. I don’t say these things because it benefits me I am saying them because when things get bad at least there would’ve been some warning.
In the 1980s progressive liberals, especially among the clergy of the Church of England, used to wax lyrical about the ‘global village’. Se were all becoming neighbours. Joy, harmony, paradise, especially without nation-states.
They didn’t emphasise that the village always had the baron in his castle, the priest in his church, the stocks, and the market place where hucksters would sell charms to ward off the evil eye and keep women safe in childbirth to the gullible peasants. Nor did they mention that the village was a place of gossip and petty rivalry.
These progressives also didn’t mention that the land the village was sited on would be the demesne of that baron. They would work his land, owing him so many days service.
Finally an important article that clearly identifies the biggest risk to most of humanity. That risk is the interruption of the supply chain and the production of our food supply. Industrial farming and control of seed distribution by a few multinational companies is a huge risk and threat to humanity. The moves by globalists like WEF and the UN and oligarchs like Bill Gates, see food as a means to gain power and control, just like they use climate change or pandemics. People generally have no idea of this threat.