Also known as the groundnut or potato bean this curious vegetable is a legume and shade- tolerant climber that produces strings of edible tubers up to about 2″ long:

I bought my original pea-sized tubers from the ART in Devon two years ago and grew them up a support made of reinforcing iron bar threaded through alcethene pipe and pushed into the ground; you can then easily tie wire mesh onto the hoops which stand about 2m high. The apios had been sorely neglected and were competing for both root space and space on the wire with a vigorous climbing berry. I didn’t harvest any last year, it is recommended to give them 2-3 years to get established- the tubers grow away and you can harvest at any time of the year, which is quite an advantage.

Oikos Tree Crops in the States supply larger varieties- but the cost of a plant passport to import them is expensive (which is why I havn’t done so yet.)

I saved most of the little tubers and ate about half a dozen of the larger ones- cooked for 15 minutes, tastes like potatoes with a nice nutty flavour. Quite exciting to finally get a small harvest of this promising crop- apparently with 15% protein content. Will definitely grow more next year and take more care of them! This might also be something that you could establish on the forest garden edge to climb into trees.

GMOrganic: A Botanical Love Story from News21 Berkeley 2011 on Vimeo.

by Marc Diacono

Hdbck 192pp Quadrille publishing 2011

Marc Diacono runs Otter Farm in Devon, “the UK’s only climate change farm where we’ve planting olives, peaches, pecans, persimmons, apricots, szechuan pepper, vines and much more.” He is also leads the Garden Team at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage. He has worked closely with forest garden guruMartin Crawford whose influence in some of the choice of plants described here is evident, and the two appeared together on a recent R4 Food programme.

The notion of a climate change farm is an interesting one: facing the prospect of a warming climate Marc has started growing crops like those listed above that would have been considered marginal for Britain until recently. “The idea is beautifully sustainable” explains Marc- “if we can take advantage of climate change to grow food usually sourced from overseas we will be producing low carbon food for a domestic market – helping arrest the acceleration of climate change. As a result Otter Farm has become known as the ‘Climate Change Farm’.”

In this video clip from Jan 2009 Marc can be heard saying how mild the winters have become and how the grass doesn’t stop growing- this is quite surprising since it was in the middle of the first of the past two really cold winters we have had in Ireland at any rate, and I am wondering if he still thinks the winters are likely to be that mild, and whether he has lost some more tender stuff recently. For example, I lost many of my small Myrtus Ugni during the past two winters- and in this book, Marc does advise “if you live in a colder region, I’d be tempted to keep your plants undercover, at least through the colder months.” I live in a milder part of Ireland, and this is a plant that should be hardy to -10degrees C, so this does perhaps give an indication of the difficulties of adapting in terms of the plants we might grow to a climate that is unlikely to change in a linear fashion.

That being said, this is a sumptuously illustrated book full of good ideas and lots of sensible practical advice on both growing, preparing and cooking some really interesting food crops not found in the average allotment.

Marc’s philosophy is very simple and makes a lot of sense: why grow the same old standard staple veg like potatoes and cabbage, which can easily be bought cheaply (good old intensive industrial agriculture) when you could fill your garden with exquisitely delicious food crops like mulberries, Szechuan pepper, apricots and yacon?

he also advises to choose “easy winners” and going for perennials and plants that don’t need too much attention.

There is a great chapter on nut trees, in which he recommends perhaps surprisingly, in addition to chestnuts and walnuts- if you have space for them- also pecans which apparently he is having success with.

Under soft fruit he includes blue honeysuckle, autumn olive -Eleagnis umbellata- and fuchsia (ever tasted a fuchsia berry?).

Many of the plants he includes I am familiar with and am growing myself; one that was quite new to me is the perennial vegetable Kai lan, apparently a cross between kale, asparagus and broccoli, which sounds fantastic and definitely one I will try for next year.

All in all a lovely book, the perfect present etc., an essential addition to the forest gardening bookshelf and a great companion to Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden.

I met Helena over 10 years ago in Dublin where I remember debating her on whether the people of Ladakh, where she has based her organisation the International Society for Ecology and Culture, really were happier than us in the west as she seemed to think, and whether their “consciousness” was really more advanced than our own, as she maintained.

Why I wondered, if that was the case, did they appear to have no premonition of the problems that might accrue once the Evil Modern World was let in. Apparently their culture was so fragile that not only could they do nothing to stop it but the whole fabric of their society fell apart as soon as it encountered consumerism, commercial advertising and globalisation.

In this new film, I was surprised to see some of the material from Norberg-Hodge’s earlier film Ancient Futures- Learning from Ladakh simply recycled as she recounts once again the story of an early visit to a Ladakh village where she asked a young man to show her the poor houses in the village. After thinking for a while he responds that there are not really any poor houses; but revisiting the same village 10 years later, after the arrival of tourism and their western values, she overhears the same man complain, “oh, we Ladakhis, we are so poor”.

It is a poignant story and the message is one of changing perceptions in a changing world. This must have made a particularly strong impression on Helena as she worked as a translator in Ladakh when visitors from the outside were rare, and had the unusual experience of seeing an ancient culture transformed almost before her eyes in just a few years as the modern world moved in for the first time.

ISEC has a twin approach to this issue of perception and the problem of dissatisfaction engendered by advertising: one is to take westerners to the villages where they can stay for a while and live with the locals on working on the farms. This brings in an income, but perhaps more importantly, helps with the Ladakhi’s self-esteem as they come to understand how valued their farming life-style, traditional community and local crafts are to disaffected post-modernists from the west.

More interestingly still, ISEC has arranged to take Ladakhis who had never previously left their villages to visit the west where they are wowed out by washing machines and other gadgets but also get the message that behind the bright lights and glitz the west has serious social problems unknown in back home. When they return their message is: “The west is not all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t go down that path.”

This is a very interesting take on East meets West and there is much to be learned from it but I’m not sure I take the same message that Helena presents in the new film. In fact, although there is a partial truth here, it is a blatant over-simplification with some glaring errors and misrepresentations.

Clive Hamilton is one of the interviewees and his message is: “Material wealth has never brought us happiness.” Excuse me? This is a central and prevalent myth of the environmental movement: poor people are happier. They have community, family, traditions- things we have lost and yearn for. There are certainly serious and real problems caused by affluence, which may include depression, but they are trivial in comparison to the problems of poverty. The Ladakhis do look very appealing to the neurotic romantic westerner who has so much mobility they are always feeling homesick, and a volunteer holiday working on a farm there for a few weeks could be a great thing to do, but we do not actually want to trade places with them. The lack of mobility in traditional communities would stifle us and we would I think find it more like a prison if we didnt know we had a plane ticket out of there.

(There are studies that suggest we dont get much happier beyond a certain level of wealth, but we still get a little happier; I think it may be the wealth of the wider society that would count here, the availability of expensive surgery perhaps when we need it, that would make a difference also.)

Nor would we be likely to admire the feudal political system, or the complete lack of any opportunities apart from those designated by circumstance at birth, the vagaries of the weather causing sporadic crop yields (shame about all that cheap subsidised food coming on the new road in smelly trucks, but it might save you from going hungry in a bad year) or the complete absence of that other Evil product of globalisation and modern technology, modern medicine and such things as hip replacements (my Mother just had her second at 85 years of age, now she’s like Riverdance).

(I havn’t been to Ladakh, but trekking in Nepal 20 years ago I was struck by how often I was stopped by locals who showed me wounds and sores or sick children and implored me for medicine. They wanted western medicine because they knew it worked.)

The film’s central message is: globalisation and the modern world are terrible; traditional communities are happier; we need an entirely new approach based on localisation. Not complete self-reliance, we are told, but local needs should come first, starting with local food, but also decentralised renewable energy in the form of wind and photovoltaic.

The latter point about energy is the most ridiculous part of the film. Who in their right minds in making general proposals of -not just renewables- but decentralised renewables? I myself do live off grid like that and I’m not advocating it!

Never mind that these technologies are absolutely the product of globalisation, they could scarcely be created locally, and mostly are manufactured in China using probably quite polluting processes that require rare Earth metals of which China has 95% of the world’s supply;

or that running decentralised energy systems to any extent is basically prohibited currently by limitations in storage- batteries- which is still very costly, and that such systems could only supply relatively very small amounts of power.

There is a big emphases on food of course. Vandana Shiva is there telling us that “our research” has proved that small farms consistently deliver 3-5x the yield of- what? large scale conventional farms? I think not, but one of the problems with films like this is that references are rather forgotten so it is hard to check. But anyway, all that “science” and “evidence” stuff is all part of the problem, innit? After all we are also talking a crisis of the Human Spirit, one really should try to avoid THINKING too much.

Conspicuously absent in the film was any mention of Genetic Engineering but in her brief talk afterwards Helena came out with the old canard about “for-profit seeds that have terminator genes in them.” Crikey, do these globe-trotting super-greenies not bother to read even basic information about the stuff they are promoting? Doesnt she listen to Skepteco??

Arch-doomer Richard Heinberg is also featured, claiming that globalisation is propelling us into a “universal famine”- forgetting perhaps that historically agrarian cultures have always been subject to intermittent famines, and the Green Revolution- which Shiva and Norberg-Hodge would be completely opposed to- has succeeded in more than keeping abreast of population and the incidence of famines has declined since the 1980s.

There are some contentious points about localisation made by Goldsmith in the film: “food miles” are not such a big component in food, especially if coming by sea (airfreight is another matter); but there are other difficulties with localisation of food: in a famine, you cannot just import food from somewhere else unless you have a global economy functioning; and some areas are better suited to some crops than others, so local food might lead to less choice.

Farmers markets are much promoted in the film of course and in the discussion afterwards, but it is questionable that lots of people driving to a farmers market as may be the case involves less “food miles” than them all walking to a central supermarket. And one other issue noticeably missing from any discussion: farmers markets, like organic food, tend to be more expensive, often supplying fancy artisan food rather than basics. Delicious, healthy, wonderful, I love farmers’ markets, but they are inevitably criticized as being middle-class and elitist, and cheap food is surely one of the great successes of globalisation.

Farming as a career is appealing to some, but I think of the essay written a few years ago by Heinberg himslef calling for 40 million more farmers in a post-peak oil world in America alone- this would completely reverse the trend of the last 50-60 years. Most people do not want to be subsistence farmers, it is too hard. I really wonder how many in the packed audience would really want to give up their electronic gadgets and all the other trappings of globalisation they benefit from and work on a farm for the rest of their lives, because for the localisation project to gain any real traction, must of them would have to do just that.

And would Helena really want to give up her jet-setting lifestyle of international travel as award-winning author and environmentalist and become grounded permanently and localised, perhaps in a remote village in Ladakh -or anywhere- herself rather than just romanticizing the lives of others?

There are important lessons to be learned from Ladakh, including issues around community, how we treat our old people and how to manage development; but this film has no depth and just regurgitates the same old over-simplified post-modern dirge we have been hearing for years.

Simon Fairlie

Chelsea Green 2010

pbck 322pp

My name is Graham, I’m 46 years old and I am a born-again carnivore.

Like many of my generation, my first act of rebellion was to become a vegetarian sometime around the age of 14, following in my sister’s footprints and unfairly taking out my concerns for other species on my mother’s cooking, which was mainly of the traditional variety of English food, including a wide range of meat dishes.

“Rich westerners’ eating meat is the equivalent of eating the children of Africa, South America and Asia” admonished a Marxist text that came into my hands around that time, making a profound impression on me: we in the developed rich world were taking more than our fair share of the global pie, and starvation in other countries was the end result.

Clearly we had blood on our hands, of both the animals themseleves and that of the poor. The reasons for this were that it takes several times more land and resources to feed omnivores than it does vegetarians; in a world where many were brought up to “eat what I was given because there are starving in Africa” meat became a symbol for extravagance and exploitation.

I dont think I ever really took an ideological postion regarding humans’ right or otherwise to take the life of animals for food. Social justice and environmental concerns were paramount- it seemed obvious to me then that land taken for animals was not available for the greater biodiversity afforded by woodlands, and thus an early interest in trees drew me naturally to permaculture with its vision of forest gardens and great diversity combined with habitat.

By this time, in the mid-1980s I was living in a small rural commune on the Welsh borders where I had gone to learn to grow vegetables. This happened to be a vegan commune, and although I was never ideologically a vegan, I was happy to partake of the vegan diet and learn the pleasures of home-made soya milk and tofu. One year we even grew a reasonable crop of soya beans.

There were however at least two broad categories of vegan in this commune. On the one hand, there were those from an urban Animal Rights background, who were not too fussy about other considerations such as food miles, or whether their food included meat-substitutes like TVP, and were happy to eat white bread and even to go skip-diving for free food. Anything went so long as it was vegan, and this extended to other animal products such as clothing and footwear. They had ties with hunt saboteurs and wanted to give over some of our land for ailing sheep as an animal sanctuary.

On the other hand there were other vegans there who just didnt like animals. They wouldnt tolerate pets of any kind, much less farmed animals, retired or otherwise; land was for growing vegetables or natural habitat, period. This group tended to be much more purist about food on many levels- had to be organic and wholefood, while they didnt object so much to leather clothes.

I abandoned the vegan diet towards the end of my stay in the commune in the midst of what I thought of as The Vegan Wars, but almost never ate meat until much more recently when I moved to West Cork and meat has become a once or twice weekly part of my diet- much to the relief of my mother for now when I visit she no longer has to make a special vegetarian dish.

Here I am surrounded by small-holders who often keep some animals and local meat, fish and poultry are readily available. While factory farming has always been distasteful to me and the problems of a diet of meat three times a day seem all too obvious, I have long been persuaded at the environmental benefits of eating some meat and the ecological functions of animals in a permaculture system.

It is to these, and many other, issues of meat, veganism and farming that land rights activist Simon Fairlie, editor of The Land Magazine has addressed his fascinating book “Meat- A Benign Extravagance”.

The book is information dense, packed with statistics and graphs,and Fairlie gives a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of meat, farming and sustainability.

Interestingly, he states in the opening section that it is specifically to counter the arguments put forward by vegans that he has written the book.

His initial chapters are aimed at addressing a common figure quoted by many in the environmental movement, that it takes around 10 times the land to feed a meat eater as it does a vegetarian. Fairlie’s analysis shows how difficult this is to actually quantify: not all meat is the same; pigs traditionally were able to eat food and crop wastes and so didnt necessarily take any land; sheep can run around happily gathering nutrients from marginal land not suited to crops; farm animals can also provide other yields and services, the most important of which is manure to add fertility, without which the vegan would require more land for green manures.

Two other important points he makes which are often missing from this debate: first, that animals can be herded and shepherded, thus making the default farming system of the landless poor; second, that keeping animals acts as a buffer against shortages, allowing feed to be diverted quickly for human consumption in times of hardship or failed crops- a function that works apparently both on the small farm scale, as well as the global scale.

Fairlie has done an important analysis of 8 different land use models and calculated the land requirements to feed Britain, comparing each of organic/chemical (conventional) versions of vegan, livestock and permaculture systems.

Because organic yields of wheat and potatoes are only 60% of conventional production, and the need for grain to feed high-yielding beef and dairy cows, he concludes orthodox organic livestock-farming would have the most difficulty feeding Britain on the available land, but that with the use of traditional and permacultural practices to enhance the nutrient cycling abilities of animals, together with more dispersed production and rural settlement, this could be improved significantly.

Fairlie concludes that the actual figure is much more favourable to meat production than conventionally believed, taking all factors into consideration “the effective ratio of human edible feed to meat and other animal products in US feedlot beef comes to about 3.2:1″

Having established this- and making a strong case that the ecological benefits could outweigh the extra land with good animal husbandry- Fairlie then takes on the vegans first hand: what would the British landscape look like if it were all vegan? He suggests that few vegans have really contemplated this, and that we break our long-standing relationship with animals at out peril: the immediate question for the stockless gardener becomes, how to deal with the pests- from slugs to deer- if we cannot kill them, and what indeed will our relationship to the natural world be at all if all the unused land is simply fenced off, as Failrlie envisages would be the case if some strands of vegan thought were carried to their logical conclusion. He pokes fun at the vegans:

Nothing causes sleepless nights for conscience-stricken vegans so much as the sound of rats scuttling in the cavities in their walls.

Worse than that, is the danger of vegan dystopias of concentrated high-tech urban settlements, with vegan food produced entirley without animals in labs, possibly including synthetic meat cultured from artificial animal tissue, genetic engineering, and even transhumanism. Such visions of the future are promoted for example by influential vegan philopsopher Peter Singer, who apparently sees such developments as the logical result of a Buddhist concern to reduce suffering.

Those of us who value the natural world, and more especially our relations with members of the animal kingdom, wild and domestic, would do well to keep an eye on the vegan agenda, for it may not turn out to be quite as meek, disinterested and innocuous as it might seem.

He even takes on Greenpeace and other activists who continue to oppose whaling even of species whos stocks have increased beyond danger levels, and defends the rights of the hunter:

To the extent that they campaign against whaling on humane grounds, WWF, Greenpeace, Sea Shepherdand the like are no longer protectors of the environment, but have set themselves up as the world’s ethical policemen.

Fairlie goes onto argue that this dysfunctional vegan ethic has had a disproportionate influence on the permaculture movement, and gives an analyisis of the core text for cool temperate permaculture, Whitefield’s “The Earth Care Manual”, which he says reflects the general permaculture bias towards nuts, woodlands and forest gardens and hardly any mention of grass:

What some seem to forget is that permanent grass is an entire ecosystem of perennial species (with its own stacking system) which doesn’t have any above-ground infrastructure to maintain” and goes on to sing the virtues of grass: “it is highly bio-diverse and resilient, it creates organic matter in the soil, it introduces nitrogen and improves fertility, its fertility can be moved easily from one place to another with the aid of animals, it can be cut up for mulch, it opens up ground for sunlight, it can be walked on or driven on when mown or grazed, it is the easiest surface for picking up windfalls or shaken fruit, and it is good for playing football on.

In similar vein, Fairlie takes issue with recent claims that ruminants contribute to significant amounts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions through their release of methane, which he argues are exaggerated and hide pressure for policy to favour a move towards intensive models over pastoral practices, at the expense of tackling the real causes of climate change,which is clearly burning fossil fuels.

Fairlie hardly tries to hide his own ideological bias: a small holder and stock-keeper himself, he clearly feels a strong cultural and “spiritual” need for our traditional relationships with animals in addition to the environmental benefits.

He lets his ideology run away with him however when he dismisses genetic engineering as part of a techno dystopia, in opposition to the pre-industrial rural lifestyle he clearly favours; and he criticizes initiatives like The Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with high Yielding Farming and Forestry signed by 800 scientists and pundits of the Center for Global Food Issues:

The gist of this declaration …is that to provide sufficient nitrogen to feed a future population of 8.5billion which industrialisation will spawn, we will have to resort not only to nitrogen and other fertilisers but also to genetic manipulation. Any attempt to secure nitrogen and other nutrients through organic means would require undue encroachment upon natural habitats- if not their total destruction. If we want to feed the world and preserve biodiversity then we’d better continue with industrial agriculture. Rather than share agricultural land with nature we should spare land elsewhere. To protect nature we have to farm unnaturally.

It is a shame Fairlie does not seem aware of the essential “Tomorrow’s table” by Ronald and Adamchuk which argues that GE and Organics make the perfect bedfellows- precisely because GE is a biological, rather than a chemical approach. One might ask, what is the meaning of the world “unnaturally” in the last sentence. Why should GE be any more “unnatural” than conventional plant breeding, or indeed than any other use of technology, agricultural or otherwise? GE is just another technology, which could be and I believe is being used to help organic farmers also, and to make organic farming more competitive and sustainable- surely something Fairlie would welcome as part of his hoped for “biological agricultural revolution”.

Fairlie then goes on on the next page to accept that it is nonetheless hard to believe these more integrated, small-scale and low-tech approaches could work for the burgeoning populations in countries such as China, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, thus tacitly accepting that Center for Global Food Issues are largely correct: it is the richer countries who now do indeed have the luxury to examine their food and farming systems critically, for there is clearly huge scope for improvement; but Fairlie is wrong rubbish the Green Revolution as benefiting only the rich at the expense of the poor, as it clearly did achieve its aims of feeding millions of people and staving off famines.

He misses the point that Paalberg makes (“Starved for Science”), that the majority of the remaining hungry people in the world are in Africa where they have not yet had the benefits of the Green Revolution, and where they are already practicing traditional organic small-scale agriculture- that is why they are hungry and poor because yields are so low.

Fairlie also gives a hard time to the Haber-Bosch method of manufacturing artificial fertliser from the air: both scientists were associated with the Nazis, Haber supported the war effort and developed the chlorine poison gas; he later became head of the chemical Warfare Service but was discovered to be a Jew and removed from his post. He died in 1934 befroe he could see the gas he had helped develop be used in the death camps.

So Fairlie asks the interesting question, since the fertilisers we use were a bye-product of the war, what would have happened had we not revolutionized farming with them,increasing yields but creating a dependence on fossil energy and interfering with traditional practices of nutrient cycling in the farm? Could humanity have not taken a different path?

This rather smacks of romaticism to me: certainly chemical farming did help displace people from the land, but this process was already underway for other reasons, for example developments in horse-drawn machinery, which was already reducing the labour force on the land and causing migrations to the city. It is an interesting question, but I think one of those “what ifs?” that could be asked equally of every other major technological development we have seen- perhaps even going back to the discovery of fire.

Fairlie fails to make a convincing critical appraisal of his own clearly stated bias against modernity and preference for what appears to be a mode of living somewhere around 2-300 years ago, where people were poor but happy, living in small family groups and villages with a cow and a couple of pigs and going to country fayres. No mention of how for example education would have to be rather severely curtailed if we all went back to the land to this degree, nor any discussion of the downside of the typically conservative, religious and even oppressive values held in many rural communities, or the historic vulnerability to famines, both of which may have contributed to people fleeing the countryside when they got a chance to. Perceived negatives in this Fairlie’s romantic vision are all dismissed as a result of the pressures of capitalism and the march of modernity forcing people off the land.

Fairlie’s book is an important contribution to permaculture, and discussions on animals in farming and diet, and more broadly, humans place in relationship to nature and the landscape in an increasingly urbanised world. He does a very good job of unpacking the ideologies behind some aspects of vegan movement and asks some very interesting questions about how this may be have created a strong vegan bias within the permaculture movement, and made a strong case that an element of meat in the diet- albeit a modest component- can still be sustainable and that farm animals play a crucial ecological function in the landscape.

I admire Fairlie’s work with The Land and of course as a rural permaculturalist I support moves to make it easier for people to create sustainable livelihoods for themseleves on the land.

I suspect however that far fewer people than he thinks really want to do this, and for good reasons: the city offers more opportunities in many ways, and life on the land is far harder for a society as a whole without various backups than he suggests. I dont accept Fairlie’s general view, the conventional one within the environmental movement, that times were necessarily better in the agrarian past at some undefined point, and people have always been forced off the land against their will;

nor do I assume as he does that people living even more post-industrial lives than they do now, would necessarily be any less happy than the self-sufficient small-holder, even if they were fed on synthesised meat tissue grown in a lab. I dont have such a horror of possible future technologies, nor do I have such a contempt for the life of the urbanite.

In fact I do wonder just where exactly Fairlie is actually coming from when I read this extraordinary statement in the final chapter:

The natural world is controlled by God, while the technological world is controlled by scientists. Both are tyrannical, but as tyrants go the former has a better record than the latter.

At this point I part company entirely with the author, who although he has done a good job of exposing some of the more extreme warped versions of what “nature” means in the end may be just trying to replace them with another, equally fanciful, of his own making

I am however glad to have such a well-researched and argued book to back me up as I go off to cook me sausages.

Actually they are not mine, but the logs were inoculated about 2 years (!) ago by permaculture students during a field trip to John Dolan’s site near Ballingeary, West Cork.

Dowels inoculated with mushroom spawn were purchased from Ann Miller’s Specialty Mushrooms. Holes are drilled into the logs- birch in this case- every few inches, and sealed with wax.

This should be done about 2 weeks after felling the logs, but no longer than 6 weeks after- seemingly when the logs are just cut they may have resistance to colonization by fungi, while if you leave them too long they will quickly be colonized by some other fungi that you might not want!

The logs should be kept in a moist dark place, care needs to be taken to ensure they do not dry out. They can be wrapped in black plastic sacks for the first few months. After 6months to a year- Oyster mushrooms can fruit from about 6 months onwards- the logs can be “shocked” to try to promote fruiting, by soaking in water for 24 hours and then banging them on the ground a few times which is supposed to simulate a branch falling.

Growing mushrooms on logs is a fantastic way to add yields to forest gardens and add value to firewood, and an ideal activity for wet cloudy climates such as Ireland.

John told us the very week they started to fruit he had a volunteer from Japan staying who was… an expert mushroom chef! She was able to show him how best to flame-cook them. Tasty!

Saturday’s conference was entitled “Can Ireland Feed Itself?” and included an interesting mix of speakers on a variety of (mainly) food related topics:

The conference was opened by Lord Puttnam, who quoted Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest and placed great emphasis on technology and education which would be needed to rejuvenate a world which had seen incomes reduced all over the world for the past two decades, and to reverse two centuries of self- destructive behaviour.

That seemed a bit extreme to me. For many, incomes have certainly been increasing up until a couple of years ago; I moved to Ireland around then soon after the start of the “Celtic Tiger”. It’s all over now of course but from an income point of view, much of Asia and elsewhere also seems to have done rather well.

As for the past two centuries, a section of humanity has been enriching itself partly through the exploitation of fossil fuels, and in many ways things have improved for humanity, with gains in medicine for example; I dont think you could call it all self-destructive- unless of course you are expecting imminent global collapse.

In this paper called Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade? the authors Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, et al show clearly that human well-being has been increasing in the past generation or more, the question being whether it is at the cost of long-term sustainability of the environment.

Next up was Swithin Goodbody of the Food and Agriculture of the United Nations. Swithin is an agricultural scientist originally from near Schull. He was the most interesting of the speaker for me, discussing a lot of issues I have been reading about lately, especially hunger in Africa.

He pointed out, in contrast to Puttnam, that until the 19th Century most people were poor; since then large numbers of the world’s population have experienced unprecedented wealth and levels of choice. Apart from parts of Africa, where crop yields can be as little as 10% that achieved in the US, in the case of maize for example, or only a quarter in the case of Africa’s best crop, sorghum.

Swithin emphasized the need to get improved technology to the poor, the barriers being corruption and in some areas conflict, but also often inappropriate technology and poor infrastructure. He also emphasized the need to increase the farm size- most peasant farms are less than 1 hectare in size, which he said were too small to cope with set-backs. This is echoed in this article in which the writer argues:

The root problem is this: The world’s poorest countries remain attached to the small, subsistence-level family farm. At a moment when African and Asian countries should be consolidating their land holdings into sustainable, high-yield agricultural businesses, there is a persistent hold on the least effective form of farming. Governments, such as India’s Congress Party, are devoted to keeping people on the land. A wide range of misguided aid organizations and ecological groups sustains the myth that small is good. It isn’t: In farming, small is deadly.

Apparently many NGOs work to keep farms small by adopting a policy of only helping the “poorest of the poor” which keeps small farmers on the land, but without improving their productivity or helping them out of poverty.

Goodbody also spoke about population pressure, which he saw as still a serious problem, with fertility rates of 2.6 in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which would lead to a doubling by 2035, and he argued that food aid and and increasing the food supply would only serve to increase the population further.

This view I found surprising. I put it to him after the event that more investment in science in agriculture was needed, as Paalberg argues, but he was not convinced that was the issue; Pearce claims fertility rates in Africa also are trending downwards and expects the working age population in Ethiopia for example to peak soon after 2040.

Kamal Mouzawak, chef and food visionary from Beirut was next, unfortunately I have no notes from his talk;

Ian Dempsey CEO of the West Cork Development Partnership spoke next, mainly about supporting local food producers and the West Cork Fuschia brand;

then came Carlow cattle and sheep farmer Derek Deane, who spoke of how Europe has behaved since WW2 as if famine will never come here again, but, referring to the sharp rise in the price of wheat following the drought in Ukraine, the danger now returns.

He was highly critical of GATT and the WTO, arguing they should take agriculture out of the WTO, and Ireland should grow food for itself. He also lambasted supermarkets, claiming they were “taking over the world” and that only the primary producer should be able to label their own food. Very little Irish food is consumed here he said because of confusion – food is being labeled “Irish” even if it has been produced somewhere else but processed here for example. Deane strongly argued for a more self-reliant Ireland, and felt multi-nationals also have a strangle hold on the developing world.

An alternative view is given by Matt Ridley who writes here that

“Today, by contrast, a poor harvest in Russia is going to lead to imports, not starvation, and you can already feel the impact of that demand for imports in world wheat prices. If speculators are guessing that there is more of this to come and are bidding up wheat prices further, then good for them. They are accelerating the planting of more wheat, the substitution of other grains and so on — they are thus lowering the eventual peak in prices.”

Most countries keep back enough grain for themselves and relatively little is actually traded internationally anyway; price spikes because of regional effects like droughts tend to be temporary. That is of course the downside of localising and self-sufficiency: Ridley would argue such a strategy would create far more food insecurity.

Local food artisan Giana Ferguson, Director of Gubbeen Farmhouse Products,and a Founder of Slow Food Ireland spoke next, about the struggle they had as small cheese makers to meet all the new regulations that were being imposed on dairy products soon after they started.

Gubbeen is a wonderful example of a small family business of artisan food producers, very much playing a role in keeping West Cork as a region of gourmet excellence and showing how to live well from a small farm, but I dont see them as really about localisation of local food self-sufficiency; rather, they run a serious business and would certainly not wish to see a decline in their overseas sales, especially to America where Irish speciality cheeses are extremely popular.

Next was the CEO of Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) Whooley who began by clearly stating his message that we should eat more fish. Well he would say that wouldnt he, but he made a strong case that there is huge scope for increasing the fishing industry in Ireland, although much of the growth would be in farmed fish. This caused some controversy, as he was asked about the sustainability of fish farming in general, and the wisdom of pursuing an industry in which wild stocks are crashing so badly, but he claimed that there are still many viable species which allow room for growth.

One thing he mentioned that will be if interest to permaculturalists was the potential he sees in small-scale perch farming which can be done easily in ponds dug out of poor boggy land.

The final speaker was Rob Heyland, actor turned script writer, who has of late taken it upon himself to give talks on the state of the economy and the failure of capitalism Heyland argues the only way out of the banking crisis is complete default and the reversion to self-sufficiency. I found his arguments leas than convincing however, especially as he seems to have lifted several of his quotes about how the money system works from Zeitgeist or similar conspiracy-type film. You can read the whole of Zeitgeist debunked line by line here if you are interested.

All in all an enjoyable and well-organised event which generated some interesting discussions. I’m not sure it really addressed its own topic however; no doubt Ireland could feed itself if we all reverted to subsistence farmers, but it will probably be much easier if we keep trading, which was clearly the agenda of half the speakers at least. Whatever changes may be needed to the financial system are another matter.

In any case, I hardly see us starving over here, we are just too wealthy. If you want to know what slow food is really like, probably best to ask an African peasant. There is nothing wrong with moving or living in West Cork and growing your own food, or some of it, and the artisan food industry- now worth $75billion according to Giana Ferguson (can that be true?!)- is great for small farmers with niche markets, and is a great way of promoting traditional skills, a sense of place and regional identity, and building community, but I dont think retreating into parochial self-sufficiency is the answer to anything, not is it really what anyone wants.

We wont run out of food here. You can always get chips and garlic mayo at Julie’s Diner in Bantry, and they are open late at weekends.

Robert Paalberg

Harvard University Press 2009 Pbck 235pp

Harvard Professor Robert Paalberg has written a book that makes essential reading for anyone interested in global food politics and why Africa still fails to feed many of its people.

Africa remains the only region on earth with increasing poverty and hunger. The number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day increased 50% since the early 90s; Between 1991 and 2002 the number of malnourished people in Africa increased from 169 to 206 million, with nearly a third of sub-Saharan Africa malnourished, compared with just 17% in the developing world as a whole.

Paalberg accounts for this as a result of policies that since the 1970s have resulted in a massive decline in investment in agricultural science in Africa. While in Asia and South America, farmers benefited from the new science of the green Revolution, and have been able to both feed their growing population- confounding the predictions of neo-Malthusians- and bring many out of poverty as well. India started planting new Green Revolution short-straw varieties in 1964; by 1970 production had doubled, averting fears of famine.

Why did Africa get left behind? Paalberg argues that while in Asia and South America had strong enough institutions and science to continue with their own scientific developments with little further outside assistance, Africa was became influenced by a change in the political and cultural climate in Europe from the 1980s onwards. In particular, this has seriously slowed the uptake of Genetic Engineering in Africa, which Paalberg argues is a result in part of the ideological position of many NGOs working in Africa.

In order to examine what lies behind this ideological position, Paalberg gives a detailed account of the rise of the Organic movement in the west, and a strong consumer movement demanding more natural food:

“This reification of what is “natural” is in part a cultural reaction to the hegemonic expansion of modern science. Advances in modern science tend to diminish both unspoiled nature and unquestioned faith, prompting those with a strong romantic or spiritual side to register their objections by seeking foods that incorporate less modern science. “

This view had already emerged in the US as early as 1892 when a clergyman called Sylvester Graham invented the “Graham Cracker” as a reaction against additives used to whiten bread. Paalberg points out Graham was a “patriarch and a prude; he thought women should go back to milling their own flour and believed in vegetarianism as a means to control sexual passions.”

In Europe, Rudolph Steiner founded the vitalist school of philosophy called Anthroposophy.

“‘Vitalism’” explains Paalberg “was the once-dominant view that living things had a chemical composition different from non-living things”- a view known to be untrue by science since 1780, yet one that still underpins much of the organic movement even today. Steiner’s “Biodynamic” techniques- a mixture of sympathetic magic, astrology and animal sacrifice- seem to have been growing in popularity in recent years.

Sir Albert Howard’s 1940 publication “An Agricultural Testament” was also influential in this reaction against science in farming: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Lady Eve Balfour was next in 1943 with her book “The Living Soil” which inspired the formation of the Soil Association in 1946, “still the institutional guardian of organic farming traditions in Great Britain.” The SA’s leading patron is HRH Prince Charles, “the most prominent exemplar of this blue-blood attachment in England to pre-industrial, chemical-free farming”.

In the US, J.I Rodale coined the term “Organic farming” and founded the “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine in 1942. Rodale was also a big fan of alternative health care and supplements.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” perhaps did more than any other book to warn of the dangers of chemical pollution from farming. The environmental movement had come of age and began to have a real influence over public policy.

The movement grew rapidly with the rise of an alternative youth culture in the 1960s and 70s, getting a major boost in the US in 1990 with the creation of a single national standard for organic produce.

However, even today in the US the organic sector makes up only 2% of total food purchases and using only 0.4% of cropland. The claims of the organic movement of safer, more nutritious food, and of being more beneficial to nature, are not in general supported by scientific evidence. Paalberg argues that the per capita amount of land need to feed people has declined by more than 50% in the US since 1920; a switch now to organics would require far more land, threatening much of the remaining forest and wild areas.

“Carsonain environmentalists cannot refute this logic, but they resist accepting it because it requires them to endorse a larger rather than a smaller role for modern science.”

More science had already reduced some of the harm from chemical farming highlighted by Carson; bringing in more science to farming now is still the best way to address the environmental impacts by making farming more efficient. The Organic movement has proved to be still wedded to its ideological roots.

The prevalence of the “nature knows best” ideology has been possible because the west has already seen so much improvement in agricultural productivity, as a result of science and technology, that it is well-fed and unwilling to take on yet more in this sector, switching its concerns to reducing the impact on the environment of farming.

Paalberg accepts that this stance makes sense in the west with its excesses of CAFOs, and a subsidy system that encourages over-application of Nitrogen fertiliser, and problems of obesity rather than starvation.

In addition, the modern world seemed to feel an acute sense of loss of community and connection with the natural world and began to harbor romantic notions of returning to an agrarian past.

What might be understandable if misguided at home has become disastrous in Africa, where essentially farmers are poor- and therefore sometimes hungry- because of too little science, rather than too much. African farmers mostly own their own land (unlike in South America) and so would be well placed to benefit from improvements in crop technology for example, but a combination of powerful western NGOs and corrupt African governments discouraged investment in this area.

{Correction 16-09: Paalberg does not say most African farmers own their own land but emphasises that there is far more access to in Africa than in, say Latin America, with only 15 landless landless people in the countryside to every 100 smallholders: “This greater prevalence of land-secure smallholder farmers among the poor in rural Africa increases the chance they will benefit from a farm-technology upgrade. Yet not just any upgrade will do. A new farming technology will be pro-poor as well as pro-growth only if it raises the the total factor productivity of small as well as large farms.”}

This opposition to science is most strongly expressed when it comes to genetically engineered crops. This technology was first being developed at a time when public science funding in agriculture was declining, leaving private corporations like Monsanto to step in and lead the way. The organic movement has banned the use of GE crops; Europe has kept GE food crops out altogether so far. Paalberg sees the ideology behind this as going beyond the simple environmental and health concerns, extending to issues of carrying capacity and population:

“Carsonian environmentalists were offended because gene transfer was so clearly an attempt to engineer and dominate nature rather than live within nature’s normal reproductive constraints.”

Perversely, the environmental concerns of the rich world became transplanted into Africa, where people struggle to feed themseleves still.

“Farming in Africa is a world apart from farming in Europe or North America” writes Paalberg, and goes onto say:

“In Africa…farmers today are not involved in specialized factory farming. They are planting heirloom varieties in polycultures rather than scientifically improved varieties in monoculture. They have a food system that is traditional, local, nonindustrial, and very slow. Using few purchased inputs, they are de facto organic. And as a consequence they remain poor and poorly fed”.

Yields of maize in Malawi for example are less than one tenth of yields in the US.

Many NGOs working in Africa seem motivated to keep them this way. Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace places a great emphasis on safeguarding the “traditional knowledge” of the Africans. The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) is the most prominent amongst NGOs promoting organics in developing countries; their mission in Africa is not to increase productivity but to enlist farmers there into the organic movement. Since so few farmers use synthetic chemicals it will be easy to get them certified. “Poor and nonproductive” Paalberg notes ruefully , “but certified organic.”

Paalberg is scathing about some of the approaches by NGOs. The German organisation Networking for Ecofarming in Africa has partners in 13 African countries to warn them of the dangers of “Western agricvulture” supplanting indigenous knowledge, yet promotes biodynamic farming in its workshops.

“German trainers at one NECOFA session in Kenya in 2005 took the time to introduce local participants the importance of light rhythms from the planets and to instruct them in developing manure preparations that included essential bits of stinging nettle, chamomile, and cow horn (NECOFA 2005). Such knowledge is neither farmer-derived nor indigenous to Africa. Nor is it even knowledge.”

Pedalling pseudo-science to hungry people is akin to quack therapists promoting homeopathy for AIDS or malaria.

Paalberg details the political process used by NGOs, aided and abetted by the UN and supported by a complacent governments in the west and corrupt urban-based officials in Africa, to block the use of science to improve the farmers lot there.

How much of this is to support lifestyle choices of the rich in western countries? Paalberg sees it as neo-colonial in its effects: nearly all certified organic produce in Africa is specialty crops destined for the west, not food for the locals. “Organic farming advocates from IFOAM nonetheless like to assert that organic agriculture in developing countries is not a luxury but somehow a precondition for attaining food security.”

What could GE crops do for African farmers? The most obvious is drought-tolerance (DT). Monsanto has played a big role in developing DT corn in the US, but African will have to wait before they can try it. Only South Africa is an exception to the red tape and stiffing restrictions that all other African governments have place don GE technology, following the European model.

In any case, the big companies are not developing DT varieties suitable for Africa because they see little commercial gain there; African farmers are simply too poor. If GE gets into Africa, it will be through philanthropic organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation called Alliance for a Green Revolution In Africa (AGRA). Monsanto is working with AGRA however to donate some of its technology to develop DT crops there. There remain many political obstacles, and Africa which needs this new technology more than anyone, seems destined to be the last to get it.

Friends of the Earth have been opposed to DT crops in Africa since 1999, citing the danger of them growing in areas currently unavailable to other crops as one of its main objections to GE.

“How strange that agricultural crops with new growth potential would be seen as a threat by the NGO community” notes Paalberg, “but such was the new political reality.”

A new generation of GE crops may help shift attitudes in the Europe. So far, the technology has been used to benefit farmers, with little apparent benefit to the consumer; new crops may have tangible benefits to those who eat them, and as with GE in medicine- which has not met with the same opposition- may then come to be more accepted.

Paalberg makes a tightly argued case for the unnecessary prolonging of hunger in Africa being at least partly fueled by ideological and even religiously motivated western NGOs. While there is an understandable attraction to the simple life of living from the land in the west- something that I have shared- those of us who choose this life are wealthy enough to afford everything from tools and polytunnels to the best seeds we can get, and we do not have to worry about going hungry if the rains dont come.

GE and other scientific advances would farmers here, and the environment also, but we are wealthy enough -because of the benefits technology has brought us so far- to have the choice. To actively campaign to keep these benefits from the poor is not just anti-science, but anti-humanity.

I attended an Earth Day conference organized by Sustainable Ireland (now Cultivate) about 10 or 12 years ago in Maynooth which brought together anti-GE activists Vandana Shiva and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho with a representative from Monsanto. There must have been over 100 people in the conference hall; I’d guess every single one was anti-GM, and certainly anti-Monsanto. Many had been involved in pulling up GE trial crops, or would have been ready to.

That includes me, and if you had asked me just a few months ago I might have felt the same- in particular the thought of “Terminator Genes” could only send a shiver down one’s back and there is an understandable suspicion of big apparently unaccountable companies making money from controlling our food supply.

But it turns out Terminator Genes were never marketed, and their original purpose was as a safeguard against the dangers of GE crops seeding into the wild with possibly unintended consequences.

Many GE crops have been developed by independent universities and Government agencies, and not even always for profit. Could it be that GE crops, which after all represent a biological technique (rather than a chemical one) may not be the feared next step of corporate industrial food, but may actually provide a way out of over-industrialised chemical-based farming practices?

A key reference for our podcast is the remarkable book Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchuk. You can find the Ronald’s website of the same name here. Their book suggests the potential for a surprising marriage between organics and GE- if only the Organics regulations would permit its use.

The bottom line is this: the peer-reviewed science suggests no special dangers in GE crops, and satisfactory regulatory measures. (Contrast this with clear dangers in some “conventional” “foods” eg some soda drinks.)

GE is essentially just a more precise means of plant breeding, no different in its basic outcomes than the aeons of plant breeding farmers have always engaged in, and unlike for example hybrid varieties- which are accepted even by organic standards- in most cases, the farmers can still save their seeds from these improved varieites.

Scaremongering and calling for a total ban is likely to only push the companies into more secrecy, making regulation more difficult. Instead, it beholds all of us to become informed about what could be a very useful technology for us all.

See the SkeptEco website for more references.

with Eoin O’Callaghan, Naomi Fein, Christina LaPerle, Graham Strouts and Michael Wellock

The SkeptEco podcast came out of a study group that has been meeting around Kinsale for the past few months. Our interest has been to examine critically claims of the environmental movement by reading the existing published scientific research. Links to all the papers referred to can be found on the SkeptEco website.