Genetically modified fetishism

Jonathon Porritt, March 1st 2010, Forum founders, Farming

The assembled great and the good of the NFU must have been absolutely delighted to hear Chris Smith, Chairman of the Environment Agency, extol the benefits of GM technologies earlier in the week.

He stressed that he was speaking in a ‘personal capacity’, despite the fact that he was invited as Chair of the Environment Agency, and presumably had plenty to talk about in that capacity which might have been of more immediate interest to farmers.

Reflecting on this, it seems to have become a mandatory test of credibility for people like Chris to declare their enthusiasm for GM.  The pro-GM lobby has done a fantastic job in persuading the media and politicians that even the most modest GM-scepticism is tantamount to extreme science-hating emotionalism. 

To express any reservations about the notional sustainability benefits of current GM crops, let alone about the massively hyped potential benefits of future GM products, is to open oneself up to the charge of debilitating technophobia.  Shades here of George Bush beating up his NATO allies over the Iraq war: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

Sorry, Chris, but that’s really not the deal. Interviewed on Radio 4’s Farming Today, he suggested that anti-GM campaigners would really have to ‘move on’ in terms of their opposition on both environmental and health grounds – given that the balance of the available evidence would appear to indicate a relatively clean bill of health for GM on both counts.

If only it were that easy.  One’s judgement about ‘the balance of the evidence’ depends largely on where that evidence comes from, and even pro-GM advocates are very uneasy about the stranglehold that the big biotech companies have over access to data and transparency of the data used by regulators.  I wonder how content Chris is, as Chair of the Environment Agency, about the quality of that evidence, and the credence that should be attached to it? 

Furthermore, I wonder what Chris means by ‘environmental concerns’ in this context? I’d be astonished if he is not worried about the biggest environmental concern of all: the fact that even the next generation of GM ‘solutions’ promise little if anything in terms of reducing the dependence of modern intensive agriculture on fossil fuels and hydro-carbon-based inputs. 

On broad sustainability and governance grounds, GM-scepticism still seems to me to be the most appropriate response to the latest surge of evangelism for all things GM. 

But balance in this debate seems to be entirely lacking.  As the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, Technology for Development) Report in 2008 so eloquently pointed out, there are so many things that can and should be done right now to address issues of food security and increased yields without casting all our eggs in the GM basket.   (Don’t ask, incidentally, what happened to the IAASTD Report, which has, to all extents and purposes, been ‘disappeared’.  Some would say precisely because it was so sceptical about GM.) 

But for reasons I still can’t fathom, people like Chris get hugely over-excited about GM whilst remaining resolutely underwhelmed by all those other aspects of sustainable food production and distribution that would make a far bigger difference to an infinitely greater number of people in a far shorter period of time.

This is clearly not a rational process, whatever GM advocates may say.  Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that Chris is just the latest ‘big name’ to have given into the phenomenon of what I can only describe as ‘GM fetishism’.

President Sarkozy recently accused his fellow world leaders of having given in to ‘GDP fetishism’.   By which he meant (I assume!)  that their obsessive preoccupation with GDP at the expense of every other measure of prosperity, wellbeing and quality of life, was seriously impairing their judgement. 

By the same token, it is clear to me that the elite of today’s farming establishment (plus a few misguided Greenies) have clearly given in to a form of GM fetishism, which overshadows every other measure of innovation, sustainable yield improvement and resource efficiency in farming today.

I am sure Chris doesn’t see himself as a GM fetishist. But then he has also converted to the pro-nuclear cause over the last few years, and I have noticed that this is rich ‘two for one’ territory: go nuclear and throw in GM evangelism for good measure.  Or vice-versa. That, it would seem, is the only way to demonstrate one’s serious scientific credentials these days.

Or so some sad people say.

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Farming Futures secures £150,000 lifeline

Claire Wyatt, April 2nd 2009, Farming

Farming Futures will continue helping farmers and land managers understand how to respond to climate change thanks to a £150,000 grant from Defra.

We're delighted that our funding has been extended. Farming Futures is an invaluable resource for farmers, land managers and growers; it translates climate change science into messages that mean something and helps farmers recognise the business opportunities the changing climate holds. By providing information online and at events, farmers can get the information they need to deal with climate change.

Since it was launched two years ago the project has enjoyed a high degree of success and attracted high-profile support. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn congratulated us on our “impressive contribution” to awareness raising at the Oxford Farming Conference this year.

• The profile of the project has risen through regular coverage in the farming press and a year ago 47% of farmers knew about Farming Futures.
• It was voted the top website for farmers for information on climate change in the Farmers Weekly climate change special last year.
• We’ve created 26 fact sheets, 19 case studies and 3 video case studies addressing the impacts, challenges, opportunities and suggested adaptations and mitigations for each farming sector. 
• Our on-farm workshops have reached approximately 364 delegates, and we make Farming Futures resources available at various industry events throughout the last year.

Farming Futures is a communications project coordinated by Forum for the Future, on behalf of the National Farmers Union (NFU), Country Land and Business Association (CLA), Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC), Defra and the Agricultural and Horticultural Research Forum (AHRF) which represents the agricultural and horticultural levy boards.   
The project had been due to end in March 2009. The new funding will allow it to continue until March 2010, and within that time a long-term home and funding strategy should be decided.

Peter Kendall, NFU President welcomed the extension:

Henry Aubrey Fletcher, CLA president, said:

“The CLA are proud to be associated with another phase of Farming Futures.  The project is a great example of an industry collaborating to achieve a great aim and I know the workshops and resources are incredibly useful for our members.”

The new funding will enable Farming Futures to:

• continue our programme of on-farm workshops showcasing practice case studies for mitigating and adapting to climate change;
• translate climate change research into practical messages that farmers can use to take action;
• develop closer relations with the Rural Climate Change Forum and other industry bodies;
• continue creating, identifying and supporting climate champions within the industry who will help inspire and encourage other farmers to take up pro-environmental behaviour change;
• further develop the project's fact sheets and case studies for farmers and land managers;
• continue raising awareness of climate change, and encouraging behaviour change across the sector; and
• expand the reach of the project and raise its profile among farm advisors, young farmers and agricultural students.

For more information, please visit www.farmingfutures.org.uk

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Agricultural employment

Jonathon Porritt, January 27th 2009, Forum founders, Farming

Nearly two million unemployed. Another 240,000 redundancies already announced over the last couple of months. Heading inexorably towards three million – perhaps even by the middle of the year.

That changes everything. For those at risk, anxiety turns to fear. For those already affected, shock turns to anger. For policy makers, the rules of the game change dramatically. “What contribution will this policy make to protecting existing jobs or creating new jobs?” – that’s the question that now dominates. And that of course is why the prime minister organised his Jobs Summit earlier in the month.

Many commentators have already pointed out that there are not many sectors in the UK economy capable of generating many new jobs – and you can guarantee that the one place the government will not be looking at is agriculture. Having spent the last few decades fixing the system to reduce the people involved in farming and food production (there has been an 80% drop in farm workers over the last 50 years, and a 40% decline in the number of farms), I don’t suppose there’s a single person in either Defra or the Treasury with any real concern for employment in this critical sector.

So I suspect the Soil Association’s admirable contribution to the Job Summit will have got very short shrift. That’s a shame, as it makes some telling points, based on extensive research carried out by the University of Essex:

• UK organic farms provide, on average, nearly 2.5 times as many full time equivalent jobs as non-organic farms in the UK.
• Jobs per 100 hectares were 14% higher on organic farms (at 2.49 jobs compared to 2.19 jobs on non-organic farms). Small organic farms with an average size of 36 hectares supported the greatest number of jobs (5.23 jobs per farm).
• Organic farms are three times more likely to be involved in direct or local marketing (39%), compared to non-organic farms (13%).
• Organic farming is attracting younger people into farming compared to the farm industry as a whole. On average, organic farmers in the UK are seven years younger than non-organic farmers (whose average age is 56).
• If all farming in the UK became organic, over 93,000 new jobs directly employed on farms would be created.

Somewhat forlornly, the report concludes: “Government policy for UK food and farming should explicitly encourage farming systems that provide greater employment in agriculture and in farm-based or local food processing and retailing.”

Fat chance. I suspect that the total pool of talent inside government, looking at this or any other sector of the economy, that is capable of advising on “job generation”, must be very shallow indeed. It’s a very long time since the spectre of very large numbers of people unemployed over very long periods of time was causing ministers sleepless nights.

Indeed, for the best part of 20 years, its been ideological heresy to argue that it’s legitimate to use taxpayers’ money either to protect existing jobs or create new jobs – except in exceptional circumstances. The ruthless pursuit of increased productivity (in terms of per capita Gross Value Added) at almost any social cost ensured that all the brownie points went to those who helped shed jobs rather than create them.

Now that the government has been forced into some kind of rolling, cumulative stimulus package, there is at last a new reality dawning. 

Organic Works (Soil Association ISBN 1 904665 12 8)

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Gardening for food security

Claire Wyatt, December 4th 2008, Farming

Last week, I attended a really interesting event hosted by Garden Organic. The purpose was to explore what steps need to be taken to encourage more home grown food production as part of our food security options for the future.

During World War II, approximately half of the nation’s fruit and vegetable production needs were grown in gardens and allotments.  Nowadays, we import 60% of our fruit and vegetables with most of the rest being farmed in the UK.  Our eating habits have become heavily reliant on intensive agriculture, imports and goods grown outside UK seasonal production. It’s a sobering thought to know that we are famously ‘Nine meals from anarchy’ in the UK (no oil= no petrol= no trucks= no supermarket deliveries= about three days until we run out of grub).

These days, 82% of all UK households have a garden. Interestingly there is a fairly even spread of garden ownership across age groups and social grades.  However, 60% of these owners are not currently using their gardens for food production.

So, what effect would engaging this 60% have on our food security issues? 

To begin with, it’s important to investigate whether it’s possible to create a sustainable food supply sourced from the UK alone. There are 60.6 million UK inhabitants, each estimated to eat 0.5 kg or 150 kcal of fruit and vegetables every day. To supply this population would require 450,000 ha of land.

The equivalent of 150,000 ha could come from gardens and allotments (calculated by the average household size being 2.4 people and 82% of households having a garden with an average area of 186m2).  The remainder could come from 200,000 ha of commercial vegetable production on arable land and 100,000 ha of orchard land including agroforestry.  So, it is possible for us to feed ourselves, but do we have the will and the expertise?

There is a keen desire from the gardening and growing industry to encourage more domestic production. There are also claims of considerable benefits, ranging from mental and physical wellbeing and cost savings, to improved biodiversity and the environmental benefits of growing locally and seasonally. In addition, those who garden and compost are more likely to display other environmentally conscious behaviours. 

At the event, ideas started to bounce around about what research needed to be done to prove these claims. But it really started to get fascinating for me when we considered what would need to be done to convince the 60% of garden owners who don’t grow food to get out their spades and welly boots and start digging for food security.

There are already some great schemes out there such as the Land Share, Capital Growth 2012 and Food Up Front, but they all seem a long way off transforming your average BBQ and patio lover into a self-sufficient, seasonal-eating gardener.

On a practical level, potential gardeners may need training, advice and money to set-up their allotments, and garden centres need to stock the correct equipment for domestic production. Furthermore, there is a need to reach out and inspire people to think about and get involved in where their food comes from.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Is domestic production an effective way of encouraging us to reclaim control over the food that we eat? Do you think an increase in home growing is possible?  What else needs to be considered?  Would you do it?  Do you know how?

Other interesting facts:

• 80% of the world’s beef supply is managed by only four providers.
• According to Garden Organic studies, growing your own food only reduces your ecological footprint by 6% and only saves you around £336 a year.  However, it does have a knock-on effect on other behaviours – gardeners tend to have an eco footprint a third lower than average.
• The current depletion of honey bees – needed for pollination – has the agricultural world in a spin. But this isn’t a problem for home growers, as domestic gardens can be pollinated by lots of other insects that are still plentiful.

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Farming for carbon in the UK uplands

Claire Skinner, November 7th 2008, Farming

This Guardian article sets out a dire future for UK hill farming: recent research shows hill cattle and sheep farm incomes falling by up to 30% in the next five years in the South West, and even more in remoter areas. It's a combination of changes to the farm payments scheme for the uplands, making it a more complicated scheme, and rising input prices for sheep and cattle farmers.

Upland areas, including Exmoor, Dartmoor, the Peaks and Lake District, provide valuable landscapes for the UK, generate tourism, and provide much of our clean water. Peatlands are also the single largest carbon reserve in the UK, storing over three billion tonnes of carbon. That's the equivalent of 20 years of the UK's CO2 emissions. As the article states, "the effect of sheep and cattle grazing on the ability of Britain's moorlands to act as 'carbon sinks' is one of the most crucial functions of upland farming."

What the article doesn't mention are the likely direct impacts of climate change on these vulnerable areas, and the additional pressure on farmers to adapt. We know for example that higher summer temperatures could increase grass production and stock carrying capacity, but that more storms could make soil management very difficult. Warmer, drier summers also mean drying out of peat, making it more likely to be eroded, and then there's the increased risk of fire.

These are all difficult impacts for farmers to deal with - especially with sometimes very localised impacts. There is a strong argument for rewarding good management by paying farmers for carbon management of these vulnerable soils, particularly through restoring areas which are already affected by erosion and peat loss. The Moors for the Future partnership website states that "peatland restoration activities in England and Wales could absorb around 400,000 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from... 84,000 family-sized cars per year. If these savings were marketed as Certified Emission Reductions on the carbon offset market, they could pay for large-scale restoration."

It looks like farmers in these vulnerable areas are going to need all the help they can get.

www.farmingfutures.org.uk

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Farming Futures update: anaerobic digestors are go

Claire Skinner, October 24th 2008, Farming

Yesterday we held a great Farming Futures event in Dorset. Over 40 people came to Owen Yeatman's farm, near Blandford to hear about his venture into anaerobic digestion. (If you've ever wondered what the inside of an anaerobic digestor looks like, you can see it on the BBC Spotlight piece that went out yesterday evening.

The Lowbrook Farm digestor converts the slurry from the 400 head dairy herd and maize into biogas, producing electricity for over 400 houses. The digestion process also results in the nitrogen in the slurry being turned into a form which can be used more easily by growing crops, so the digestate is a more valuable fertiliser than the original slurry. A case study is available from the Farming Futures website.

Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU's Chief Policy Adviser on renewable energy and climate change, was one of the speakers at the event and discussed the role of anaerobic digestion in a low carbon future. He highlighted the different scales of digestor that need to be taken into account in policy making - to encourage a mixture: from small farm-scale digesters, perhaps providing biogas just to farm buildings and housing, right through to large scale commercial plants operated by waste management companie. We should be aware of the whole range of opportunities, and for example farms may be able to use the technology collaboratively where one farm may be better sited to take in waste from other farms and manage a grid connection.

Yesterday's event was organised with the NFU, one of the partners in the Farming Futres project. The project's approach of convening a number of partners - Forum for the Future, the NFU, CLA, AIC, and the AHRF (representing all of the levy boards) - with funding from Defra - is proving an effective way to produce clear and practical information for farmers and land managers on the wide-ranging issues related to climate change.

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Windfall

James Taplin, September 10th 2008, Farming, Retail

Most policy decisions are made with reference to their economic consequences – but what happens to the validity of the decision if the underlying economics are incomplete?

Across the UK our orchards are being grubbed-up at a steady rate to make way for other, seemingly more profitable, land uses. The most recent ordnance survey figures suggest that we’ve lost two-thirds of the orchard area we had in 1950, with some parts of the country experiencing losses of over 90%.

Orchards, as with other environmental resources, have values beyond their marketed price or profitability. These might include supporting wildlife and biodiversity, giving cultural identity to a community, or encouraging regional tourism. Our work with the Bulmer Foundation set out to explore some of the wider attributes of orchards and what they might be worth to society.

We found that the local stakeholder groups we worked with placed huge importance upon their local orchards, even where they had no general public access, and that their role in defining local identity and the ‘feel’ of the landscape were common themes.

When we tried to estimate the total economic value of orchards by valuing their key social, environmental and economic factors, we also found that basic economic profitability never accounted for more than 40% of the total economic value. In a number of cases, basic profitability was negligible – under conventional economic decision making these orchards would be at great risk, despite the huge values that they were giving to society.
 
We’re very pleased that Bulmers has used this research, along with other studies, to reconsider the basis of their decision-making around orchards’ profitability, and to engage government and key stakeholders on their wider value. Our hope now is that other land-use decision makers will also begin to question the validity of basic economic decisions, and look beyond the simplistic to embrace a wider appreciation of value.

Click here to download the full version of Windfall – putting a value on the social and environmental importance of orchards.

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Steering a sustainable path through GM issues

Claire Skinner, July 9th 2008, Farming

Are genetically modified (GM) crops vital to solve the current global food and land crisis? The current situation has, if not shifted the European view, at least rocked it substantially. From a solid resistance to any trace of GM in the food chain, people are now beginning to question whether this resistance is valid in the face of a food crisis, rising prices, increasing demands on available land, and water scarcity issues.

In the UK we have seen plenty of articles in the press in the last few weeks around GM technology and its role in tackling the food crisis. Some different positions have been made clear – government ministers calling for wider use of the technology, yet the chairman of a major biotechnology firm has explained that GM crops will not solve the current food crisis. In April the international multidisciplinary IAASTD report highlighted the uncertainty of possible benefits and damage of biotechnology.

We’ve looked into what it would take for GM to form a part of a sustainable agricultural system and regardless of which sustainability framework or lens we use to look at the issues – whether it’s the Five Capitals approach, The Natural Step, or triple bottom line accounting – we come down to the same couple of principles:

• Current GM technology is designed to be used in agricultural systems and within overall business models which are inherently unsustainable and which rely on depleting stocks of resources, rather than maintaining or building them.
• The potential for GM crops to increase yields, without using up finite resources, and in ways which do not threaten people’s livelihoods, has not yet been realised.

Click here to download 5 Capitals summary of GM issues

The variety of issues that have led to food riots across the world show us that we need to use long-term solutions to tackle them. Many of the trends, for example land pressure to grow biofuel crops, have come around themselves from taking a short-term view in the past and not fully understanding knock-on effects when we have tried to find a more sustainable path.

Globally, the area under cultivation by GMOs increased by 12% last year, to 114m hectares. America topped the list, but there is rapid growth in Argentina, Brazil, India and China (The next Green Revolution – The Economist 21 Feb 2008). The main crops are Roundup Ready maize and soyabeans. It’s promised that the second generation will have further traits, such as drought resistance, 'stacked' on top, and that further ‘upgrades’ on plant traits will happen more and more rapidly. Deep concerns stem from the fact that current GM crops are owned and controlled by a handful of large companies, represented by the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, together holding major sway over lobbying and the public face of the technology, as well as proprietary control over crop genomes.

Qualities such as nitrogen-fixing by cereals, and drought and salt-resistance would no doubt increase yields, and allow crops to be grown on marginal land. So far these traits aren’t available. As Jonathon Porritt’s article for Prospect magazine last December explained, these traits need to be tested and proven before we can claim that GM crops will help tackle world hunger. The report by the IAASTD , 'the IPCC of global agriculture', gives a comprehensive list of priorities for tackling global agriculture issues, and stresses the need for delivery of agricultural technologies to involve “thorough, open and transparent engagement of all stakeholders”.

In summary, GM might have a role to play in securing a more sustainable food production system in the future…

…but, it’s definitely not a ‘silver-bullet’ solution to world hunger, climate change and poverty.

Right now, our priorities should be reducing waste in the food chain, eating a less meat-intensive diet, and ensuring our production systems are energy and resource efficient and non-polluting, as well as overall poverty reduction measures to increase access to food.

Claire Skinner
Lena Staafgard

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Duel of the Presidents...

Katie Zabel, May 19th 2008, Farming

No... not in the US, but right here on English soil.

Partner organisations to our Farming Futures project, the CLA (Country Land and Business Association) and NFU (National Farmers Union) Presidents' took up our call to action and for the first time share their stories in video case studies about how they are adapting to and mitigating climate change on their own farms.

These new video case studies are just the start of the new resources that Farming Futures has to inspire and encourage other farmers to take action on their farms... check out the new website for fact sheets, case studies, free workshops, interactive maps of the impacts of climate change and our latest survey results...

Do you think climate change is a risk or an opportunity? Find out what English farmers think...

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Farming Futures gets a £250K boost

Katie Zabel, November 22nd 2007, Farming

Farming is responsible for 7% of the UK’s green house gas emissions. Which is why we’ve spent the last year raising awareness of climate change with farmers and land managers through our Farming Futures project – and why we’ll be continuing this work with the help of a further £250K from Defra to fund it for another 18 months.

Farming Futures is a collaboration between the big beasts of the farming world - the NFU, CLA, Agricultural Industries Confederation, Defra and the levy boards - helping farmers and land managers tackle the challenges of climate change and look towards the opportunities it could offer in the years ahead.

Farming experts provide advice on adaptation and mitigation and pioneering farmers who have already started growing crops like olives, almonds and apricots are sharing the lessons they've learned with the wider farming community.

We co-ordinate the project, and our Green Futures team have produced a great special report on the subject - Feeding the Future.

You can also read about Farming Futures in The Independent.

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