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Italy - 24/10/2004
TERRA MADRE - Agriculture The Most
Important Of Humanity's Productive Activities
By HRH The Prince of Wales, who gave the closing speech on
Saturday October23
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.
Imposing industrial farming systems on traditional agricultural
economies is actively destroying both biological and social
capital and eliminating the cultural identity which has its
roots in working on the land. It is also fuelling the frightening
acceleration of urbanization throughout the world and removing
large parts of humanity from meaningful contact with Nature
and the food that they eat.
So this "flight from the land" is happening in both
developed and developing countries. Unfortunately, these trends
towards urbanization are almost inevitable while societies
throughout the world continue to put a low valuation on their
food, denigrate food to the status of fuel and abandon any
loyalty to their local and indigenous farmers.
But there is another consequence too. There is now a growing
body of evidence that suggests that in the so-called developed
world we are in the process of creating a nutritionally impoverished
underclass - a generation which has grown up on highly processed
fast food from intensive agriculture and for whom the future
looks particularly bleak, both from a social and a health
standpoint.
As Eric Schlosser has pointed out in his brilliant book "Fast
Food Nation", fast food is a recent phenomenon. The extraordinary
centralization and industrialization of our food system has
occurred over as little as twenty years. Fast food may appear
to be cheap food, and in the literal sense it often is. But
that is because huge social and environmental costs are being
excluded from the calculations. Any analysis of the real costs
would have to look at such things as the rise in food-borne
illnesses, the advent of new pathogens such as E. coli 0157,
antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal
feed, extensive water pollution from intensive agricultural
systems, and many other factors. These costs are not reflected
in the price of fast food, but that doesn't mean that our
society isn't paying them.
So perhaps, having said all this, you can begin to see why
I am such an admirer of the Slow Food Movement and of all
the hard-working, indomitably independent people like yourselves,
all over the world, who are part of it.
Only a few years ago it would have been impossible to imagine
that so many people across the world who are either directly
involved in small-scale artisan food production, or are interested
in consuming the fruits of such labours, should gather together
in this way. This, of course, is a great tribute to the unceasing
energy of Dr. Carlo Petrini.
Slow food is traditional food. It is also local - and local
cuisine is one of the most important ways we identify with
the place and region where we live. It is the same with the
buildings in our towns, cities and villages. Well-designed
places and buildings that relate to locality and landscape
and that put people before cars enhance a sense of community
and rootedness. All these things are connected. We no more
want to live in anonymous concrete blocks that are just like
anywhere else in the world than we want to eat anonymous junk
food which can be bought anywhere. At the end of the day,
values such as sustainability, community, health and taste
are more important than pure convenience. We need to have
distinctive and varied places and distinctive and varied food
in order to retain our sanity, if nothing else.
The Slow Food Movement is about celebrating the culture of
food, and about sharing the extraordinary knowledge - developed
over millennia - of the traditions involved with quality food
production. So it is important to ask how this gathering can
promote those ideals more widely, particularly when we are
faced with remorseless pressure to operate on a larger and
ever more impersonal scale.
I believe you are in a better position to answer that question
than me, but for what it's worth, I do believe that simply
coming together and sharing ideas, and above all joining the
international Slow Food Movement and to create, by the extraordinary
process of cross-fertilization and invigoration which takes
place at gatherings like these, an ever more influential and
powerful association that cannot be so easily ignored, the
the answers will emerge organically. As the old saying goes,
there is safety in numbers, and people tend to listen to organisations
with a very large membership. They do!
On this theme it does seem to me that the other great food
movement with which I am associated, the organic movement,
has so much in common with the Slow Food Movement and this
communality of purpose and direction ought to be a source
of co-operation and, also of course, celebration! So I do
hope that we may see ever-closer links between these two important
movements.
And the importance of your Movement cannot be overstated.
That is, after all, why I am here - to try and help draw attention
to the fact that in certain circumstances "small will
always be beautiful", and to remind people, as John Ruskin
in the 19th century did, back in England, that "industry
without art is brutality". After all, the food you produce
is far more than just food, for it represents an entire culture
- the culture of the family farm. It represents the ancient
tapestry of rural life; the dedicated animal husbandry, the
struggle with the natural elements, the love of landscape,
the childhood memories, the knowledge and wisdom learnt from
parents and grandparents, the intimate understanding of local
climate and conditions, the hopes and fears of succeeding
generations. Ladies and gentlemen, all of you represent genuinely
sustainable agriculture and I salute you.
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