Colin Tudge
Small Is Beautiful
Feeding Frenzy: The New Politics of Food
By Paul McMahon
Profile Books 314pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Agriculture is surely the most important of all human endeavours – by far the main source of our food, by far the world’s biggest employer, with by far the greatest impact on our fellow creatures and the fabric of the Earth itself. It is the foundation of everything that we might aspire to achieve, from good health to world peace to wildlife conservation. It is the thing we absolutely have to get right. To succeed we must treat farming as an exercise in applied ecology – agro-ecology. Agro-ecological farming, with a clear social and, indeed, metaphysical purpose, has been called, by me among others, ‘enlightened agriculture’ and ‘real farming’. Following nature, enlightened farms are highly diverse in what they produce and low input (as organic as possible). They are complex and so must be skills-intensive, needing plenty of farmers, which means there is no real advantage in scale-up – they are usually small to medium-sized. Control is bottom-up: a network of small farmers answerable to their communities. Such farms tick all the vital boxes: they are productive, sustainable, resilient and regenerative; they help to restore land that seems degraded beyond redemption.
But the people with most power in this world see agriculture simply as a ‘business like any other’ – and, in line with the dogma of neoliberalism, they conceive business not as a natural, economic pillar of democracy but simply as a way of maximising wealth. Their method is ‘industrial
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match