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

for illegal possession of their seed if it is found to have accidentally blown over in the wind.
    Unsurprisingly, Monsanto has attracted plenty of criticism for its bully-boy tactics, but its lobby is a powerful one. Several board members have served on the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has taken a remarkably soft line on GM testing. Now, thanks to something called TRIPS (the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement), companies like Monsanto can claim patents on life all over the world. 74 As the Indian farming campaigner Vandana Shiva points out, that is not good news for millions of farmers in the developing world. Not only is the ancient practice of farmers saving their own seed under threat, but those who take out loans to buy expensive seed and fertiliser are finding themselves in a spiral of debt. Worse still, many of the crops they buy are failing. Designed in a laboratory somewhere in the USA, many of the crops turn out to be unsuited to the conditions in which they are actually grown. For the first time in history, Indian farmers – who are not exactly unused to hardship – are committing suicide in their tens of thousands. 75 As Shiva observes, when food production goes global, small farmers are the first to go.
Eating Oil
     
    Whatever your agricultural persuasion, it is hard to ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with the way we’re feeding ourselves now. One doesn’t have to look very far for the physical evidence: deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, poisoning and pollution – it all speaks for itself. Our food may
seem
cheap, but that is only because the price we pay for it doesn’t reflect its true cost. The damage is accounted for elsewhere. One recent study by Essex University found that the annual cost of cleaning up the chemical pollution caused by British agriculture was £2.3 billion a year – almost as much as farmers themselves got back in income. 76
    Leaving aside the questions of soil, seed and pests for a minute, there is one element of farming that is often overlooked: energy. Energy, in the end, is what food is, and in order to produce it, we need the help of our greatest energy source, the sun. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, depends on it, as does the ‘fixing’ of atmospheric nitrogen necessary for plant growth. Until about 1850, harnessing solar energy in edible form is basically what farmers did; and it is more or less what they have done ever since, except that from around that date, they have supplemented the process with the use of fossil fuels. From the earliest experiments with powered farm machinery and fertiliser to modern combine harvesters and food processing, fossil fuels have transformed farming from a thankless, back-breaking task (the punishment of the gods) into something really quite rewarding. Today, almost every aspect of industrial farming involves the use of oil in some way, from running machinery to making fertilisers and pesticides to the transport, processing and preservation of produce. Around four barrels of the stuff go into feeding each of us in Britain every year; nearly double that amount is used for every American. 77 We are effectively eating oil.
    The problem with that, as the German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher pointed out as early as 1973 in his book
Small is Beautiful
, is that fossil fuels are no more than the sun’s energy, captured millions of years ago and packaged in a readily available form. ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age,’ he wrote, ‘is the belief that “the problem of production” has been solved.’ The confusion arises, argued Schumacher, because we fail to distinguish between ‘income’ and ‘capital’ from the natural world: ‘Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction, and applies it conscientiously … except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital