Free Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel Page A

opportunity. ‘Constable Country’ is set to become a global brand, with the proposed Horkesley Park Heritage and Conservation Centre, a £20 million leisure complex with shops, cafés and even an ‘art experience’ (a genuine Constable painting) at its heart. The centre, which lists as its main content an ‘interactive interpretation experience of the Life and Times of John Constable’, hopes to attract 750,000 visitors a year. The proposals have caused an uproar, with English Heritage, owners of nearby Flatford Mill (the original scene of
The Hay Wain
), worried that the tiny site, which already attracts 200,000 visitors a year without any publicity at all, will be completely swamped.
    Projects like Horkesley Park highlight how detached we have become from rural life in Britain. By turning our countryside into a heritage theme park and buying all our food from abroad, we might think we are getting the best of both worlds, whereas what we are actually getting is the worst. While we prettify and petrify our own back yard, our eating habits are despoiling those of others. Like the picture of Dorian Gray turning nasty in the attic, we are letting a hidden world bear the brunt of our urban lifestyles, while we pretend those consequences don’t exist. Never mind pastoralism – what we are practising is Nimbyism, and on a global scale.
No Business Like Agribusiness
     
    With its rural depopulation, land reforms and economies of scale, the English agricultural revolution paved the way for modern agribusiness. Today, rural communities all over the world are being transformed, with traditional mixed farming methods giving way to large-scale monocultural production. Peasants are a threatened species. Although there are still 700,000 small-scale farms in India, that figure is expected to drop by half in the next 20 years, and the story is the same all over Asia. As Western patterns of urbanisation are adopted worldwide, so are our far-from-perfect methods of feeding ourselves.
    Technical advances in farming are nothing new. Farmers have always sought ways to increase yields by improving the seeds they sow, and at first glance, the genetic modification of crops just seems like the latest step in an age-old tradition. The development of plants to make them more resistant to disease, for example, should theoretically be an entirely benign and important use of science. But recent developments in GM have taken it in a very different direction. Cell-invasion technology, in which new DNA is ‘smuggled’ into a host gene, now allows engineers to interfere with the very life-force of a plant. And if that seems a little sinister, how does this sound: ‘terminator technology’, in which plants are bred with ‘suicide genes’ so that they die after just one germination? For thousands of years, farmers have saved their seeds, selectively breeding them over time to create a better crop. But if modern seed companies get their way, grain, like cars, will soon have an inbuilt obsolescence. Farmers who want to sow next season’s crop will have to buy next year’s model – it will be a case of germinate, and terminate. If Justus von Liebig thought he was ‘sinning against the Creator’, one wonders what he’d call what we’re doing now.
    Modern agribusiness isn’t just about producing food, it is about maximising the profit to be made from it – and after a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1980 that the
patenting of life
was permissible, there has been plenty to be made from GM. 73 Ever since then, the US biotechnical company Monsanto has been doing just that, accumulating more than 11,000 patents on genetically modified seeds, giving them a 95 per cent share of the global market. As the film-makerDeborah Koons Garcia documented in her 2004 film
The Future of Food
, the company is ruthless in asserting its rights of ownership. Farmers unlucky enough to have land neighbouring Monsanto’s are frequently sued by the company