Each year as China commences ploughing, so dust particles appear a while later at the mountain-top observatory – even though the fields and the monitoring equipment that is detecting the dust are thousands of miles apart. It is a sign of trouble. The dust indicates the loss of soil on a grand scale as a process of degradation and desertification unfolds in a manner that threatens real challenges for future food security. Top soil that is in many places just a few inches deep is perhaps our most precious resource, and yet, because of how we farm, vast areas of soil are being degraded or lost. Dust storms are more and more common in China, with some dust travelling to Korea and Japan as well as over the Pacific. According to the United Nations some 400 million Chinese live in areas threatened with desertification. Farming, grazing, deforestation, and irrigation methods have all helped to create giant dunes up to 400 metres high. Each year these shift inexorably forward, swallowing everything in their path.
It is not only soil that is increasingly on the move: so is our food. As a result of ever more globalized trade, food travels further and further, often covering vast distances between continents, even food that could be produced locally. In fact it has got to the point now where some countries effectively import huge areas of land, in the sense that farms in distant countries produce only food that will be consumed elsewhere. This adds to the threat posed to some countries’ food security as land is moved from small-scale production for local markets to large-scale monoculture production to meet international demand. In the short term, countries might hope to earn revenue from these exports, but the costs of that policy can include serious social and economic problems, for example as water and land are driven into short supply and as food production for local consumption is reduced.
Giant sequoias at Kings Canyon National Park. The world’s largest tree species is confined to the western Sierra Nevada in California, USA. The tallest specimen alive today tops more than 270 feet. The oldest giant sequoias are in excess of 3,500 years old. They were well established at the time Tutankhamun was Pharaoh in Egypt.
OVERLEAF: Farmers work on the rice terraces in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, China. This traditional method of farming on slopes helps to conserve both water and soil, making it a more sustainable form of food production.
In the UK, our food in total travels an amazing eighteen billion miles each year. This includes imports by ships, trucks and planes. This produces an estimated nineteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Over two million tonnes of it is produced simply by cars travelling to and from shops. The majority of produce in the US travels between 1,300 – 2,000 miles from farm to consumer.
Perhaps the central message we should draw from this juxtaposition of circumstances is the need to promote sustainable farming everywhere, not just for local reasons, but for global ones too. Intensive monocultures destined for global commodity markets and dependent upon vast amounts of petrochemicals is a style of farming which, according to a recent UN survey, has been a major factor in causing up to a third of the world’s farmable soil to be classified, to different degrees, as degraded – and that is in the past half–century alone. This is not a sustainable form of agriculture, and just so that we are clear, the dictionary definition of that word ‘sustainable’ is ‘to endure without failure’.
In the UK, our food in total travels an
amazing eighteen billion miles each year. The
majority of produce in the US travels between
1,300 – 2,000 miles from farm to customer.
A truly durable farming system – one that has kept things going for 10,000 years – is the one that is commonly called ‘organic farming’. In a sense this is an unfortunate term because it has the ring of an alternative approach, or even a new one, when it is actually how farming was always conducted before industrial techniques came to dominate agriculture. It means farming in a way that preserves the long-term health of the soil, which comes down to giving back to Nature organic matter to replace what has been taken out. It means maintaining microbes and invertebrates in the soil and good moisture. It means using good water catchment management, planting trees that prevent the soil being eroded and maintaining the teeming biodiversity, including the beneficial and essential insects, such as bees.
It has become ever more apparent to me that the ‘food miles’, the degradation of soils, the chemical pollution and the massive consumption of oil and natural gas add up to a way of producing food that acts without any concern for the harmony found in Nature and the natural order. This approach abandons the fundamentals that should sustain food production. But it is the increasing demand for land that poses the biggest challenge.
I should be clear, though, that this is not in my view merely a competition between technological approaches and different methods of farming. Once again it comes down to that fundamental question we will address in the following chapters of how we have been persuaded to look at the world and regard our place within the great scheme of Nature. Looking at the way we treat the natural world and produce our food raises questions far deeper than those of how it will be possible to save charismatic birds like albatrosses or to grow food without destroying the land.
Forest
We are all personally involved. Take what is happening in the middle of remote rainforests. Thousands of species are being destroyed every year as large areas of natural habitat are cleared to make way for farmland. This may seem so far away that it does not touch us. And yet a quick glance along an average super-market shelf reveals that this is not so at all. From the supply of coffee and beef to the soya and palm oil that are ingredients in a huge range of processed foods, our modern world is presently fed in a highly destructive manner.
New roads are being driven into ever remoter areas of the rainforests to keep pace not only with the demand for food, but also to extract minerals and timber. A case in point is a new road that links Boa Vista in Northern Brazil with the Atlantic coast of South America at Georgetown in Guyana. It cuts through some of the most diverse and undisturbed rainforest in the world, and in doing so it threatens to unleash massive deforestation, which will in turn produce carbon-dioxide emissions and cause both the loss of vital biodiversity and huge disruption to the culture of the indigenous societies who still live there. The President of Guyana has told me how he sees little option but to allow the opening of the remote interior forests. His country needs income and the international community presently places a clear financial value on soya, beef, and timber, and so his country must clear the space to produce it. I have been very concerned about this but I am pleased to say that, in part, as a result of work undertaken by my Rainforests Project in bringing people together, a ground-breaking deal between Guyana and Norway has been concluded. The new agreement sets out to cut forest loss through providing Guyana with alternative economic strategies that will promote and enable low-carbon development, rather than the destructive changes in land use that have occurred in some other countries in that region.
It is not only in the tropics that the last wild forests are under threat. Even in the European Union some of the most extensive natural forests that remain are being cleared, especially in the East. In Romania, for example, where I have travelled extensively, agricultural expansion is leading to the clearance of wild forest. The forests are also being plundered for timber in ways that are quite unsustainable, in part because of the way in which the forests have been privatized, so that they lack