speech of charles (I have to cut it in 2 postings because it is a bit long)
Italy TERRA MADRE - Agriculture The Most Important Of Humanity's Productive Activities
By HRH The Prince of Wales, who gave the closing speech on Saturday October 23 2004
Ladies and Gentlemen, I can't tell you how pleased I am to be with you today and to share in this vitally important discussion about the future of small scale agriculture and of artisan food producers throughout the world.
The fact that no fewer than 5,000 food producers have gathered here today, under the "Slow Food" banner, is a small but significant challenge to the massed forces of globalization, the industrialization of agriculture and the homogenization of food - which seem somehow to have invaded almost all areas of our life today.
I have always believed that agriculture is not only the oldest, but also the most important of humanity's productive activities. It is the engine of rural employment and the foundation stone of culture, even of civilization itself. And this is not just some romantic vision of the past: today some 60 per cent of the four billion people living in developing countries are still working on the land.
So when I read "visions", such as that for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, which are based on transforming traditional, local agricultural economies into "powerhouses" of technological agriculture, based around monoculture, artificial fertilisers, pesticides and GM, my heart sinks. The missing ingredient in these great plans is always sustainable livelihoods and its absence increases the existing, awful drift towards degraded, dysfunctional and unmanageable cities.
The one resource the developing world has in abundance is people, so why are we promoting systems of agriculture that negate this advantage and seem bound to contribute directly to further human misery and indignity?
It is a sobering thought, ladies and gentlemen, that almost all of the next one billion of net global population growth (over the next twelve to fifteen years) will take place in urban slums. In one slum alone - which I'm not going to name because it is in a country for which I have great affection - more than 800,000 people, half of them under the age of fifteen, already live illegally in less than four square kilometres of the city. Even more sobering is the thought: what will these conditions breed for the future? Hopelessness, crime, extremism, terrorism? Who will deal with these chickens when they come home to roost on a globalized perch?
Despite the best intentions of many, we have to face up to the fact that often, the consequence of globalization is greater unsustainability. It is all very well talking meaningfully of the need for "globalization with a human face", but the reality is frequently somewhat different. Left to its own devices, I fear that globalization will - ironically - sow seeds of ever-greater poverty, disease and hunger in the cities and the loss of viable, self-sufficient rural populations. I don't think anyone would claim to have many answers, technological or otherwise, about what could possibly be done to reverse this process. The 800,000 people in the slum I mentioned earlier are not simply going to head back to the land overnight. But, surely, the first step to finding solutions is being willing to face up to both the causes and the scale of the problem -and this requires the globalization of responsibility.
I have a feeling that by now it may be quite well known that I am inclined to doubt whether GM food, for instance, will be - on balance - a contribution to the greater good of humanity. In doing so, I am not simply being dogmatic. I believe it is both legitimate and important to ask whether some people's faith in the potential of this and other new technologies is a product of wishful thinking, or of the hype generated by vested interests. In the long-term, are these methods really going to solve mankind's problems, or just create new ones? And how will we regulate them effectively? There are a great many examples of earlier, well-meaning attempts to control pests or improve the environment which have gone drastically wrong. And I'm simply not convinced that we have absorbed the lesson, which is that manipulating Nature is, at best, an uncertain business.
Even if we discount the potential for disaster, there is still the question of whether this is the right direction to take. If all the money invested in agricultural biotechnology over the last fifteen years had been invested in developing and disseminating genuinely sustainable techniques - those that work with, rather than against, the grain of Nature - I believe that we would have seen extraordinary, and genuinely sustainable, progress.
The problem, perhaps, is that techniques such as inter-cropping, agroforestry, green manuring, composting and biological pest control offer less prospect of commercial gain to those who have money to invest. The hundreds of millions of people who would gain are the much-derided practitioners of so-called "peasant agriculture", who have very little money, but who are the long-term guardians of biodiversity.
One of the arguments used by the "agricultural industrialists" is that it is only through intensification that we will be able to feed an expanded world population. But even without significant investment, and often in the face of official disapproval, improved organic practices have increased yields and outputs dramatically. A recent UN-FAO study revealed that in Bolivia potato yields went up from four to fifteen tonnes per hectare. In Cuba, the vegetable yields of organic urban gardens almost doubled. In Ethiopia, which twenty years ago suffered appalling famine, sweet potato yields went up from six to thirty tonnes per hectare. In Kenya, maize yields increased from two-and-a-quarter to nine tonnes per hectare. And in Pakistan, mango yields have gone up from seven-and-a-half to twenty-two tonnes per hectare.