The Prince and the Paupers

Prince Charles made a dire warning on the state of modern agriculture. He said, "For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes 2,000 gallons of water." Presently, Americans eat four times the average beef consumed worldwide and noted: "In the United States, soil is being washed away 10 times faster than the Earth can replenish it." He also added that the average American diet equals nearly a gallon of diesel oil a day

Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation", in an article written for The Washington Post days before Charles' visit, condemned America's current food system as "overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical fertilizers ... factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels." Schlosser blames the same food industry for the fat- and sugar-heavy food products that have triggered alarming obesity rates. "As upper-middle-class consumers increasingly seek out healthier foods," asserts Schlosser, "fast-food chains are targeting low-income minority communities -- much like tobacco companies did when wealthy and well-educated people began to quit smoking."

Big business agriculture promoted by Western corporations is to blame for up to a quarter of a million farmers committing suicide over the last 10 years, according to community leaders in India. Poor farmers are forced to take out big loans to buy expensive pesticides and fertilisers, and to dig wells for the increasing amounts of water they need. But when their crops fail, or their wells dry up, they fall into debt – and many thousands kill themselves out of desperation. Farmers are “misled” into believing the promise that the high-input, chemical-intensive, single-crop agriculture of the so-called “green revolution” is their salvation. So when it fails, they end up trapped in a debt spiral that too often leads to despair and suicide.

There is a way out of these dilemmas reformers claim. It is "sustainable agriculture" -- favoring the global ecosystem through such steps as maintaining a rich diversity in soil, water supply and wildlife, in planting trees, protecting water catchment systems. And on farms, recycling animal waste, composting organic waste and feeding animals on grass-based regimes instead of packed factory farms.

"We are told ceaselessly" -- but falsely, the Prince insists -- "that sustainable or organic agriculture cannot feed the world. ... An industrialized system deeply dependent on fossil fuels and chemical treatments is promoted as viable, while a much less damaging one is rubbished and condemned as unfit for any purpose."

PV Satheesh, director of the Deccan Development Society, which supports community farming declares “Organic, traditional farming can feed India. It can feed everyone. The trouble is that much of the traditional knowledge of agriculture has been destroyed by factory farming.”

But lets not forget that it was Marx over a hundred years ago who argued that "Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer."

And elsewhere in Capital commented

"...all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer."

Engels wrote in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man that human beings can master nature, but then qualifies this conclusion by adding

"[but] let us not flatter ourselves overmuch for our human victories over nature. For every such victory it takes its revenge on us. Indeed, each in the first place brings about the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third place it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first ones... At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -– but that we with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws."

SOYMB concludes, as Engels did, "As long as individual capitalists produce and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be considered in the first place.... Why should one be surprised, then, that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different character, and mainly even of quite an opposite one..."

The unplanned nature of capitalism and the drive for profits make ecologically-oriented production an impossibility.