Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
generally already better off urban areas. The shift towards such production has thus, a
largely negative effect on rural development.
In the above, the FAO are describing a process of industrialization that has, in its own
individual way, already taken place in the UK over the last 200 years and whose spread
throughout the developing world they predict, endorse and promote. Today many people in
Britain have misgivings about the industrialized agricultural system that we have inherited,
and are trying to de-industrialize it through support for organic farming, local foods, real
meat, community supported agriculture, animal welfare measures, and campaigns against
GM, pesticides and junk food. To the FAO these are an indication that we in Britain, have
reached the 'post-industrial' phase where, as they put it, 'environmental and public health
objectives take predominance'. The poorest in the developing world have no choice but to
progress through three prior stages of industrialization and urbanization before they arrive
at our state of grace, and even if they had the choice, that is what they would choose to do.
In the SOFA report, the FAO take a more guarded approach towards the process of in-
dustrialization, largely because it threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of poor
peasants. Nonetheless, they still consider that the inducement for smallholders to abandon
livestock farming:
is an integral part of the economic development process and should not be viewed
as a negative trend. Concerns arise when the pace of change in the livestock sector
exceeds the capacity of the rest of the economy to provide alternative employment op-
portunities.
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There is no shortage of reasons for challenging the trajectory laid down by the FAO.
Why, we may ask, should the rest of the world follow the path we have trodden, can they
not learn from our mistakes? What is to be gained by dispossessing peasants - the only
people on this earth whose environmental footprint does not extend into other people's
space - and herding them into megacities of jaw-dropping unsustainability? When the
world is already facing a resource crisis, how can it make sense to promote a centralized
food economy that pours good human food down animals' gullets and that relies so heavily
upon fossil fuels for its fertility, processing, transport, refrigeration, packaging and com-
mercialisation?
These are all crucial questions, but they cannot be posed with much integrity by those
who enjoy a diet that is unattainable for others on the lower rungs of the FAO's ladder of
urbanization. However commendable it may be in Britain to eat only free range chicken fed
on local organic grain, it is difficult to dispel an odour of hypocrisy when the only oppor-
tunity millions of people in developed countries are ever likely to have to obtain chicken
on a regular basis is through factory farms on the edge of sprawling conurbations. Those
