A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only.
www.brucenixon.com
products. Grain could be blown up as in the case of popcorn, rice crispies, cornflakes or puffed wheat. In
processed cereals the raw grain is refined and roughage is taken out. Further harm is done by adding a lot of
salt and sugar. Various additives make the product taste or look better, increase its shelf life or restore
vitamins. The same was done to bread, ultimately producing white sliced bread tasting more like paper.
Potato crisps are another example – processing a nutritious vegetable, adding lots of salt and putting it into a
packet.
It’s called adding value! Business schools teach this way of making more money. In the case of food, it is
taking out value and creating social costs. Another business opportunity is opened up – the growing vitamins
and other supplements industry, necessary to compensate for the poor nutritional quality of our food. Smart
business! Another cost is added to the household budget. We’d be far better off in every sense with the
original unprocessed food.
Cheap food is really expensive. Ultimately it is poorer people and small farmers who suffer most from cheap
food policies. The biggest cost is ill-health and that means higher taxes to pay for health care. This perverse
practice steadily destroys local supplies everywhere. When a global food crisis looms, it’s crazy to drive
farmers out of business for a few pence on the price of milk or a few extra pounds of profit and we buy our
milk from across the water, contributing even more CO2 emissions. We are increasingly driven into hands of
food multinationals. Is that wise? The same applies to importing potatoes from Egypt and apples from France
or Italy.UK has the best natural conditions for growing apples. In a sane world, products that damage our
future and produce social costs would be heavily taxed. A Social Cost Added Tax (SCAT) would be applied to
the producers and distributors to help pay the social costs of “cheap food” and thus healthy food would have
a lower price.
History of the Green Revolution
The Green Revolution began in 1945 and the term was first used in 1968. Essentially it was to produce an
abundance of cheap food to feed the world after the privations of WW2. It ushered in what became large
scale industrial agriculture, now referred to as agribusiness. It involved the use of oil based fertilizers and
pesticides and nitrates as well as ever larger, more complex, oil powered machines. The pioneers who
introduced the Ferguson and Massey tractors that replaced horses were idealistic and believed they were
helping to feed the world. At first the tractors were small and did less damage to the soil. But tractors and
combine harvesters grew bigger and bigger until we now have huge satellite directed machines that operate
in giant prairie fields. In countries like USA, industrialised agriculture involves transportation over great
distances – even of the bees required to fertilise Californian fruit trees. Globalisation now means that food is
shipped over vast distances, sometimes with sound justification, sometimes just the opposite.
It couldn’t have happened without abundant cheap oil. It took the drudgery out of agriculture.
The Green Revolution succeeded in its aims in rich countries. In general, it caught up with and surpassed the
needs of the global population for the first time. But it largely bypassed Africa. Whereas worldwide the
average person today has 25 per cent more food than in 1960, in Africa they have 10 per cent less. However,
as is so often the case with large scale technological, science based revolutions, there were enormous
unintended consequences. Amongst such unintended consequences were – wine lakes, grain-mountains and
loss of seed diversity. But we now know more; we’re in the 21 st century, a different situation, a different
world.
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