Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
verges by the side of roads ('the long acre') - and in modern times railway tracks, vacant
lots, the detritus of markets, rubbish tips, supermarket skips and discarded reusable con-
tainers. It is easy to see how the meaning of the word developed.
It is because waste is by definition economically valueless that it is of great value to
those who live at the margins of the monetary economy. Waste provides a crucial security
net for the destitute. Its existence relies on the fact that there will inevitably be activities
that are worth someone doing for their own benefit, but not worth employing anyone else
to do. It is the existence of land of this quality that provides the basis for David Ricardo's
theory of rent: waste is land, or resources, for which you don't have to pay any rent.
A second salient feature of waste, is that it is predisposed to the provision of meat and
dairy produce. There are some forms of waste which provide food of uniquely vegetable
composition: the gleaning of previously harvested crops for example, or the detritus of ve-
getable markets. But the majority of crop wastes are by-products which are inedible to
humans - straw, leaf material, the fibre that is left over after processing, and substandard
crops. When the labour costs of feeding these materials to animals outweigh the potential
profits, they become waste products rather than byproducts, available to the landless to feed
to their own livestock for the cost of carrying them away. When the labour costs of grazing
an animal on a tiny wedge of land or an inaccessible low grade pasture outweigh the poten-
tial profits, that too becomes waste.
The use by the poor of balks, headlands and the long acre (the side of the road) to feed
livestock has long been abandoned in the UK, with one exception: travellers still tether
their horses and goats there. The disuse explains why nowadays the most fertile land in
Britain, the hedgerows, can be found just five metres away from land that has been stripped
of its nutrients by years of intensive silage cropping.
But in many poorer countries the practice of letting livestock glean food that would be
inconvenient to gather by hand is still widespread. In towns in Mauritania, for example,
poor incomers from rural areas bring their pastoral habits with them:
Goats are the main livestock. The main products are goat milk and fattened sheep.
This stock rearing is carried out by low-income families and is done by women. An-
imals wandering in the streets are characteristic of this system; they feed on urban
waste but always receive a high quality complementation of kitchen waste, wheat
flour, groundnut cake, lucerne etc. and are watered daily.
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But it is in India where scavenging by animals is not only a central pillar of the food eco-
nomy, but has also been elevated to the status of religion. No discussion of India's adoption
of the sacred cow can avoid borrowing from Marvin Harris' essays on the subject
Mother
