Food and Agriculture – it’s time for change!

 

There is widespread concern about the human global population explosion, but few people realise that the earth is having to support a second population explosion - that of the animals deliberately bred to satisfy outdated dietary habits. The earth cannot continue to support this double burden.

 

The world food situation

 

Much of the food now sold in the UK comes from parts of the world where the people who grow the crops once depended upon them to meet their own nutritional needs. Now these people are likely to be exploited as workers in cash crop industries - driven off the land they have traditionally worked, they are often paid a pittance whilst exposed to dangerous conditions: working with unsafe machinery and suffering unregulated exposure to deadly chemicals.

 

Cash crop industries are ripping the heart out of thousands of traditional rural agrarian communities, using agricultural methods which are not sustainable and lead to soil erosion and degradation. They are heavily dependent on chemical herbicides and pesticides and other undesirable biotechnologies, and are increasingly including GM crops. Multi-national food industry and biotech companies are increasingly the controlling force behind agriculture and the food supply in developing communities.

 

Two-thirds of the British cereal crop is fed to livestock annually, this could be used to feed 250 million people each year. Livestock consume half the grain produced on the planet. This is in a world where every 3 seconds a child dies of malnutrition and 24 million people starve to death every year.

 

The needless exploitation of animals

 

Factory farmed animals are deprived of all significance as living individuals, reduced to the status of 'food' machines, they suffer painful and humiliating treatment and traumatic journeys to death in horrific conditions. Livestock farming needs to be phased out and land and other resources used to produce plants for food. Farmed animals yield nothing that humans need that cannot be produced more efficiently and humanely directly from plant sources. If everyone in the world ate a plant based diet and food economies were organised more fairly there would be enough food produced for everyone.

 

MCL promotes the growing of food for a vegan plant-based diet without the use of chemicals or animal products or additives, such as animal manures and blood, fish and bonemeal that would be used by many organic growers. MCL encourages the production of food through sustainable methods of vegan-organic horticulture and agriculture, including permaculture, using plant-based compost and liquid feeds and green manuring techniques.

 

Food grown by local hands on local lands

 

MCL promotes a healthy vegan diet based on crops that can be grown in a person's home climate wherever possible, to reduce the environmental impact in terms of food miles and maximise the nutritional content of crops by ensuring they are eaten as quickly as possible after harvesting. MCL encourages people to question their dietary habits and avoid purchasing foods that have been transported half way around the world.

 

Wherever possible food should be grown in small fields and orchards. We should all aim at growing as much of our own food as possible, even if only on a window sill or in a pot or container, using our own energy to cultivate our food. Using gardens, where people have them, allotments or being part of community gardens or community supported agricultural ventures give scope for people to grow at least some of their own food and reduce dependence on the large scale industrial agriculture that is causing such human, animal and environmental degradation. Foods that we do not grow ourselves need to be chosen to minimise the distance from field to fork. We would encourage small human-scale patterns of production that mean food is grown for local communities, by local people. Food should be made available in ways that minimise the need for processing and packaging to avoid waste and pollution.

 

There needs to be more research into the range of food plants that can be grown in each climate zone. There are 20,000 known species of food plants grown in the world, yet more than 90% of all plant foods come from less than 20 plant species.

 

It has been estimated that it takes 8 times the amount of land and 10 times the amount of fossil fuel to feed a person a typical western omnivorous diet, compared to someone eating a vegan plant based diet. A vegan UK could be self-sufficient. If livestock farming were phased out, there would be adequate land for arable and horticultural crops, as well as the development of tree crops to meet a wide range of needs.

 

Trees as a food source

 

More needs to be done to harness the massive potential of trees as a source of food and many other raw materials that can be used by people for clothing, shelter and energy. If animal farming were phased out, vast areas of land would be freed up for tree planting programmes. Much of the land currently used for animal farming was once forested. Since 1969 25% of Central America's forests have been destroyed to create grazing for cattle.

 

Trees are an amazing source of food. If the yield per hectare of different types of crops are compared, trees are by far the most productive. Trees make a positive impact on the environment, they stabilise the soil and reduce erosion. As trees are permanent crops, their cultivation does not require regular ploughing which damages soil structure. Most importantly trees play a vital role in the battle to reduce global warming.

 

Sustainable food production

 

Food is transported long distances, sometimes thousands of miles by air, sea and road, just so people can have access to an endless supply of exotic food products at any season of the year. These 'food miles' give rise to massive amounts of environmental pollution, contributing significantly to global warming. UK trade in food transported by air grows by 7% each year as the demand for a wider range of fruit and vegetables increases. At the same time the area of land in the UK used for crop production has reduced by over 11% just since 1990. Trade related transport is one of the fastest growing sources of 'greenhouse' gases.

 

The heavy dependence on chemicals in 'modern' farming systems means that many pollutants enter the food chain and the wider environment. Residues from nitrate fertilisers, pesticides and weed killers - and waste water from abattoirs -contaminate water courses, as do animal wastes and the growth hormones and antibiotics they contain. The recent emergence of genetic modification gives great cause for concern, as public protests across the globe attest. Even countries dependent on food aid have rejected GM supplies offered by the US. Once again the power and interests of trans-national corporations is riding roughshod over public safety and choice. GM and non-GM farming could not co-exist because pollen travels across many kilometres on the wind and on insects. Non-GM and organic crops would become contaminated and the choice of farmers and consumers to avoid GM crops would be removed. Misleading claims have been made that GM foods will help with food shortages in developing countries, while what is actually happening is that international biotech companies are seizing control of much of the world's food supply. Using strategies such as patenting seeds that need branded chemicals to grow (marketed by those self-same companies) and developing crops that are grown from what are known as 'terminator seeds', that prevent farmers from saving their own seed each year, has shifted control of the local food supply out of the hands of ordinary people and into the hands of big business.

 

So what can you do?

 

 

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