Blogs / Better Planet

As much as I love Prince Charles and his slow-food inclinations, I do have to admit the opposition has some pretty persuasive arguments. David King, a huge British scientist, just made a speech saying the West’s reluctance to bring genetically modified farming and other modes of “high-intensity” agriculture contributes to the continent’s 700,000 deaths from starvation every year.

It’s not clear, though, exactly how King squares his desire to help feed Africa through high-tech, ultra-efficient farming with his advocacy for carbon emissions cuts. (King is known for saying climate change is a greater threat than terrorism). The reason to like organic farming isn’t that it fits in better with a particular lifestyle; it’s that it’s comparatively low-emissions. If catastrophic temperature increases do take place, poor countries are going to be the ones who suffer the most from famine and disease.

So, yes, if the problem is that we’re not bringing genetically-modified crops to hungry Africa because they give us the heebie-jeebies, that is nigh-homicidally crazy. But if we’re trying not to industrialize their farming too rapidly in order to save them from pestilence and heat down the road, that’s more like a tough call.

Image: flickr/DavidDennis

My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).

He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:

[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.

If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.) 

Image: Slowfoodnation.org

Prince Charles ticked off the actual British government today by calling dependence on genetically-modified food grown by big corporations an environmental catastrophe. Some respected scientists were appalled, and cited the growing demand for food around the world as a good reason to keep trying to make agriculture as efficient and productive as possible.

But I’m sort of with the flighty aristocrat ignoramus on this one. Charles, who owns an organic farm, is trying to make the legitimate point (I think) that the more you industrialize farming and consolidate it, the less sustainable it tends to be. A multinational business generally tries to minimize the number of man-hours that go into tending its vast holdings. The fewer farmers required to create a truckload of crops, the better for management. This means lots of machines that burn fossil fuels, lots of pesticides with dubious Silent Spring side-effects, and the depletion of soil by growing one crop on it over and over again, rather than carefully rotating crops, preventing erosion, and taking the other measures you usually take to protect your land if your family farm is going to be your sole source of income your whole life. In the long term, that sort of thing can help create exactly the sort of food crisis we’re suffering right now.

Sure Charles’s affection for small, organic farms might be partly grounded in Brideshead Revisited nostalgia for the merrie olde days, and his rhetoric is overheated. But he’s basically right. Even if you think the monarchy is evil, this is like that scene in an action movie where the bad guy gets a speech and you realize he has a point.

Image: flickr/C’est moi!