In the league table of things that irritate people about me (talks too much, listens too little, too confident of own opinions, lousy cover drive, to name a few), one that lurks in the mid-table seems to be ‘still hasn’t learned to sit still and relax.’
If you were to design a human being to cope well with a lock-down, let alone the full isolation we unfortunately have in our house again at the moment, it’s a fair bet that you wouldn’t come up with me. Occasionally, however, the restlessness that is generally so annoying pays dividends.
I am lucky enough to have enough garden to fill some of the time by gratuitously cutting things down or back, and to have enough adventurous spirit to attempt ever more complex things in the kitchen (a tomato cassoulet last night). But the rest of the weekend I have filled with ‘attending’ the Oxford Real Farming Conference, an antidote to the establishment’s Oxford Farming Conference that took place last Thursday, a few miles up the virtual road.
Being a child of the sixties and seventies, who was raised by society to regard mere vegetarianism as political extremism, I still smile self-consciously at some of the sessions I nearly sat through (‘Peasant to peasant methodology to massify agroecology’, for example, or ‘the technofixes of colonialism and resistance’), but, as each day passes, I find myself increasingly buying into the central message that the earth will manage to feed us all if only we stopped messing it around. The principles are simple: plenty of plants, not much meat, plenty of variety, and grown locally. It is all about treating all farms as ecosystems, about food sovereignty and fairness, and about not being held prisoner, for example, by the four seed companies who currently control 65% of the world’s seed production.
Into this gentle world, yesterday morning, flopped an article in the Guardian alerting anyone who wished to be alerted that the government has temporarily gone back on its commitment to ban insecticides that contained neonicotinoids, in order to hold back a current virus in sugar beet. So far, so easy. Poor bees. Naughty government.
(Neonicotinoids were developed in the 1990s to kill insects that had developed immunity to other pesticides, and they kill by attacking the nerve cells. The three detailed arguments against them are that they persist in the soil for years, that they are taken up by flowering weeds and that they ‘affect the productivity of bee colonies and have a long term impact on their populations.’ The EU banned most, but not all of them, in 2018 (at the time against the UK government’s wishes),and then Michael Gove finally wrote that ‘unless the evidence changes, we will keep these restrictions in place once we leave the EU’.) The US government allows their more or less unrestricted use.)
Like everything else in public life, Covid, for example, Brexit, HS2, the interesting arguments are actually much better when waged in shades of grey, and not in black and white. The case against neonicotinoids is very powerful, but not quite conclusive; sugar beet farmers deserve a living like the rest of us do, even if their product is directly adding to the diabetes time bomb. I may well regret this decision bitterly, and I do, but I suppose it doesn’t mean that you will.
But you will have detected just as swiftly as I have, that this decision is part of a wider pattern of our post Brexit government rowing back from the environmental, hygiene and welfare standards that have been painstakingly built up over the last 20 years. Can you be certain, (or do you even give a damn) that the price of a trade deal with Uncle Sam will probably be hormone-infused beef and chlorinated chicken carcasses? Have you read up on (and again, do you care about) gene editing? Do you feel, as most of the 4500 delegates to my conference did, that the sound we hear out there isn’t a contented cow going for a walk, but the rumbling start of a race to the bottom? How sad does that make you?
It matters either way, which is what Jamie Oliver was trying to achieve with his online petition to enshrine food policy into legislation.
Rachel Carson warned in her book Silent Spring, over half a century ago, that the war we wage on nature with toxic pesticides is inevitably a war that we are waging against ourselves. Researching and writing my book on bees has convinced me that she was absolutely right. Shopping and eating have to be intensely political acts.
I simply ask if their previous form on other stuff allows you to trust this government with what goes into your stomach, out of your soil, and away from your skies.
Sadly, me neither.
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