Ill Fares the Land: Confronting Unsustainability in the U.K. Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth
Abstract
:1. Introduction
- Research should ask what role multiple agents of change might play in a degrowth transformation and how their political agendas might intersect or conflict—here, complementing prior work addressing political (class) positionalities and discourses [4,10,11,12,15,16], the present paper will delineate these positionalities and discourses and argue that dominant class interests in the U.K., in upholding capitalism in various forms, impose strong constraints on a degrowth agenda;
- More research is needed to identify, critique, and theorise the roles that state and non-state and systemic or anti-systemic actors may have in promoting or inhibiting degrowth transformation of agri-food systems—here, again, Guerrero Lara et al. appear to have overlooked work in precisely this area [4,10,15,16,17], and in the present paper, we build on this theorisation of the state in relation to systemic and anti-systemic class interests to explore the dynamics of the U.K. food system;
- Finally, in bringing in the more-than-human dimension, this paper will continue the theme developed elsewhere [4,9,10,15,20] that ecological sustainability should be a fundamental desideratum of an enduring and stable social metabolism. Moreover, the paper will address explicitly the relationship between the U.K. food system and biodiversity conservation.
2. The U.K. Food System and Causal Basis of Agrarian Growth and Unsustainability: From National Developmentalism, through ‘Embedded’ Neoliberalism, to ‘Radical’ Neoliberalism
2.1. National Developmentalism
2.2. Embedded Neoliberalism
2.3. Radical’ Neoliberalism
3. Current Climate Change Impacts and Overseas Land Footprint of the U.K. Food System
3.1. U.K. Food System Climate Change Impacts and Land Footprint
3.2. Impacts Increased by Meat- and Dairy-Heavy Diets
3.3. Ecological Imperialism
3.4. Surplus Extraction Mechanisms
4. Biodiversity Impacts of the U.K. Food System
4.1. Generic Issues and Structural Causality Underlying Biodiversity Decline
- Loss and fragmentation of semi-natural ‘infield’, traditionally grazed habitats through agricultural ‘improvement’ (application of synthetic fertilisers and herbicides) or conversion of these to arable land;
- Overgrazing of semi-natural habitats, primarily in the uplands;
- Loss or mismanagement of ‘interstitial’ habitats, for example, hedgerows, field margins, ditches, ponds, etc.;
- Drainage or drying out of wetland habitats due to water over-abstraction;
- Pollution and eutrophication of surface and groundwaters leading to loss or degradation of aquatic ecosystems;
- Loss of crop rotations and arable–pasture mosaics leading to severe reduction in characteristic farmland species;
- Shift from spring-sown to autumn-sown cereals leading to loss of nesting sites for characteristic farmland bird species;6
- Generalised application of pesticides leading to loss of arable weed species, invertebrates, and thereby food sources for other wildlife groups;
A wide range of changes in agricultural management in recent decades has led to greater food production but these changes have also had a dramatic impact on farmland biodiversity. For example, populations of farmland birds have more than halved on average since 1970, and similar declines have been seen in many other taxonomic groups. Targeted wildlife-friendly farming, supported by government funded agri-environment schemes, can help halt and reverse these declines, but to date the only successes have been for rare and localised species. The area of land receiving effective agri-environment measures may have helped slow the decline in nature, but it has been insufficient to halt and reverse this trend.[51]
…the UK’s nature and environment continues, overall, to decline and degrade…the size of response and investment remains far from what is needed given the scale and pace of the crisis.(p. 3)
The best available information suggests that nature-friendly farming needs to be implemented at a much wider scale to halt and reverse the decline of farmland nature.(p. 7)
If we are to halt and reverse biodiversity decline we need not only to increase our efforts towards conservation and restoration, but also to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss, especially in relation to our food system. That means making our food more sustainable and nature-friendly and adjusting our consumption to reduce demand for products that drive loss of nature.(p. 9)
4.2. Neoliberalism and the Land-Sparing Approach to Agri-Environmental Policy
5. Dietary and Food Security Impacts of the U.K. Food System
5.1. Dietary Impacts
5.2. Food Security Impacts
6. Contested Policy Discourses Surrounding Agrarian Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss Mitigation, and Food Security Strategies
6.1. Net Zero: ‘Societal Project’ or ‘Flanking Measure’?
Attributing the “post-political” [that is, uncontested hegemony] label to a field wherein even relatively aligned institutions are in tension is overly simplistic. The unfolding of these tensions in the coming decades must be attended to in a way that does not reify a monolithic state-capital nexus, but instead acknowledges the dynamism and lived nature of institutions and the class interests they represent, modulate, and materialise. These fissures are currently predominantly discursive in nature [due to provisional hegemony], but as the British countryside is reshaped in various forms by impending socio-ecological change, they will become socio-material gulfs.
6.2. Hegemonic and Quasi-Hegemonic Discourse
6.3. Alter-Hegemonic Discourse
6.4. Sub-Hegemonic Discourse
6.5. Counter-Hegemonic Discourse
7. Outlining a Policy Framework for Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, and Degrowth in the U.K.
7.1. Transforming the Agri-Food System through Political Agroecology, ’Radical’ Food Sovereignty, and Degrowth
7.2. Integrating ELMS and Agroecological Food Production
7.3. Detailing a Sustainable Social Metabolism through Agroecological Production
7.4. Politico-Economic and Ideological Constraints Imposed by the ‘Imperial Mode of Living’
8. Conclusions
Funding
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | By capitalist here we also mean market-dependent family farms, even though these may not employ off-farm labour. The peasantry (self-subsistent and semi-self-subsistent agrarian producers) had effectively disappeared from Britain by the mid-19th century (see [4] and [18] for more detail on the rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain). |
2 | Appropriationism and substitutionism refer to the undermining of discrete element of the agricultural production process, their transformation into industrial activities, and their re-incorporation into agriculture as inputs, for example, human labour by machinery, animal traction by the tractor, manure by synthetic fertilisers, etc. [23]. |
3 | The ‘imperial mode of living’ refers to the normalisation of affluence, growth, and high levels of resource consumption characteristic of the global North (the imperium), predicated significantly upon the ideologically ‘invisible’ exploitation of the global South. |
4 | The authors (WWF and RSPB) assigned a risk score to each U.K. sourcing country based on their deforestation/conversion rates, labour rights, and rule of law indices. Scores varied from 0–12, with 11 or above being ‘very high’ risk and 9–10 being ‘high’ risk. |
5 | The uncompensated appropriation of land and resources by capital for wealth accumulation, involving the wholesale removal of the original inhabitants without absorption as labour into the subsequent agro-industrial or mining developments. |
6 | Key farmland and ground-nesting bird species, such as skylark, lapwing, and stone curlew, require no or very low vegetation when incubating eggs in order to see and avoid predators—autumn sown cereals are already too high in early spring to enable these species to incubate safely. Autumn-sown cereals are bred to respond to synthetic fertilisers and put on growth very quickly; traditional or ‘landrace’ cereals, even when germinating in the autumn, do not produce significant growth until the next spring, especially when grown in organic and no-till management systems—they may produce less per area than modern cereals grown with agrochemicals, but they can produce indefinitely and sustainably with no artificial inputs and generate no negative ecological externalities. |
7 | Despite the fine words expressed in DEFRA’s Agricultural Transition Plan update of January 2024 and the improved payment offers and increased coverage/flexibility of the ELM schemes detailed therein, the essential principles of land sparing ‘public goods’ payments, embodying a dichotomy between productivist farming on the one hand and biodiversity conservation on the other, remain in place. |
8 | The characteristics of a diet consistent with public health, climate change stabilisation, and low environmental impact are already quite clear [94,95,96]. This is a diet that provides diversity, with a wide variety of foods consumed; achieves balance between energy intake and energy needs; is centred around minimally processed whole grains, tubers, and legumes, fruits, and vegetables; has moderate/small amounts of meat, dairy, unsalted seeds and nuts; has small quantities of fish from certified fisheries; has oils and fats with a beneficial omega 3:6 ratio such as rapeseed and olive oil; and is very limited consumption of foods high in fat, salt, and sugar and low in micronutrients. |
9 | A recent paper [100] appears at first sight to contradict this statement. Closer examination, however, shows this not to be the case. The study on which the paper is based only tests varying levels of agrochemical inputs on modern wheat varieties, with the ‘lowest input’ still at 110 kgNha−1. This, however, is not ‘low input’ from an agroecological perspective, where the expectation is that no agrochemicals (or, more specifically, synthetic fertilisers) are employed. The modern varieties tested in this study would certainly not thrive under a zero-agrochemical regime. Moreover, the application of N at the lowest rates in the study would still prove toxic to most non-target plant species in the field or field edge (the great majority or wild plant species find even very low levels of N application toxic [101]), and this applies also to the soil biome—agroecology seeks to maximise the vigour of this soil biome by refraining from agrochemical use to support sustainable, resilient soils and hence sustainable and resilient cultivar production. |
10 | Although the work of John Letts as an academic archaeobotanist has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals, his long-standing experimental work with ‘heritage’ grains and CGC has, so far as it is possible to ascertain, not yet been similarly published (although it has been published in non-peer reviewed publications as per the ‘Land’ citation in the present paper). However, the agroecological foundations for his fieldwork and conclusions from it are supported by peer-reviewed research (see above), and his work has been funded through the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 727848 and is summarised in the following link entitled ‘Low input and organic heritage cereal production in South East England’: http://cerere2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/17_EN.pdf (accessed on 15 December 2023). Similar experimental fieldwork and findings have been undertaken and generated in the USA by Rogosa (funded by the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program), where einkorn, emmer, and other landrace wheats outperform modern wheats under organic conditions (that is, where synthetic fertilisers and pesticides are not applied) [107] (p.4). |
11 | It may be asked how CGC and agroecology are connected to related (or putatively related) production techniques such as conservation agriculture (CA) and circular agronomy. Concerning CA, this, according to the FAO’s definition [109], is a farming system that can prevent losses of arable land while regenerating degraded lands. It promotes the maintenance of a permanent soil cover, minimum soil disturbance, and diversification of plant species. It enhances biodiversity and natural biological processes above and below the ground surface that contribute to increased water and nutrient-use efficiency and to improved and sustained crop production. CA principles are universally applicable to all agricultural landscapes and land uses with locally adapted practices. Soil interventions such as mechanical soil disturbance are reduced to an absolute minimum or avoided, and external inputs such as agrochemicals and plant nutrients of mineral or organic origin are applied optimally and in ways and quantities that do not interfere with or disrupt the biological processes. This definition is virtually identical to CGC and agroecology with the exception that these avoid agrochemicals altogether since they recognise the damage that agrochemicals cause to soil, soil biota, and non-target field and field edge plant species, thus compromising the underlying rationale of conservation agriculture itself. ‘Circular agronomy’, for its part, aims to close nutrient cycles in the agri-food chain, aiming to improve the current carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycling in agro-ecosystems and related up- and downstream processes within the value chain of food production [110]. This, however, seems to be part of an ‘ecological modernisation’ agenda tied to capitalist productivism. Agroecology is based centrally on such circularity, of course, but without recourse to synthetic fertilisers or mineral supplements that generate major problems for the environment, soil health, and the longer-term sustainability of food production itself. |
12 | It may appear that these figures are contradicted by the long-term wheat yield trials at Rothamsted Experimental Station in the U.K. These trials show a yield of about 1 tonne/ha under continuous wheat cropping and 2 tonnes/ha when wheat is grown in rotation [111]. The results of CGC and Rothamsted are not directly comparable, however. This is because (a) the CGC method is no till, while the Rothamsted plots are ploughed annually; (b) CGC does rely (in part) on chopped straw and clover to retain fertility levels, so this is not directly comparable to the continuous cropping without fertiliser undertaken at Rothamsted. In other words, the 1 tonne/ha yield at Rothamsted is based on continuous cropping of wheat without any fertiliser application, which is not the same as CGC. A more meaningful comparison with CGC would be the continuous cropping with farmyard manure (FYM) application trial at Rothamsted, which demonstrates yields between 2 and 3 tonnes/ha for most of the experimental period (rising up to 6tonnes/ha after 1970 with change in wheat variety). But, as pointed out above, FYM relies on livestock which means diverting considerable areas of land to livestock production to retain the fertility of cropped areas. |
13 | In fact, 15 million tonnes of wheat are produced annually in the U.K., but only c. 5 million tonnes are milled to produce flour for human consumption—two-thirds of wheat produced is fed to animals. Animal feed grains are not suitable for flour milling, however. As argued above, all cereal production should be directed to human, not to livestock, consumption. However, this cereal should be produced on an agroecological basis without recourse to agrochemicals, synthetic fertilisers, or to livestock to provide the FYM for organic rotations. As argued above, this shift to non-rotational agroecological production is both necessary and feasible. In addition to the multiple disbenefits of conventional wheat production identified above, it also needs to be pointed out that modern varieties of wheat and conventionally milled wheat flour (through the Chorleywood method), together with the standard addition of sugar and other additives to bread so manufactured, has important negative health and nutritional impacts [112,113]. |
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Tilzey, M. Ill Fares the Land: Confronting Unsustainability in the U.K. Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth. Land 2024, 13, 594. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13050594
Tilzey M. Ill Fares the Land: Confronting Unsustainability in the U.K. Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth. Land. 2024; 13(5):594. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13050594
Chicago/Turabian StyleTilzey, Mark. 2024. "Ill Fares the Land: Confronting Unsustainability in the U.K. Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth" Land 13, no. 5: 594. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13050594