Prejudice Against Country People?

Some may say people defending the smaller producer are simply under the influence of a false nostalgia for an idyllic life that simply doesn’t exist any more, if it ever existed. That any efforts to save the independent family farmer are too little too late, and campaigning against production of GM foods is simply misguided when this is clearly the way to feed the world in the future.

However there are growing numbers of campaigners for farming that is biologically sound and economically just; notably some celebrity chefs in recent documentaries. They don’t consider themselves a bunch of romantics motivated by sentimentality for a countryside ideal; they believe it crucial for the planet to save the small producer, even if industrialists believe their destruction has been predetermined by economics and technology, regardless of our destruction of the environment.

The truth is that industrial agriculture is destructive and ultimately doomed to failure.

Every day we see global reports of environmental damage – pollution by toxic animal factory wastes and the spread of pests and diseases by the long-distance transportation of food, indifferent cruelty to animals, exploitation of cheap labour, the abuse of migrant workers, not to mention the threat of biological warfare by terrorists facilitated by global industrial practices.

What are our politicians doing about any of this? There is of course far too much money involved in industrial agriculture for any of our leaders to consider taking on board campaigners’ views.

Modern society also has widespread prejudice against country people.

In fact we should be supporting the world’s small farmers, and their ecologically sound farming techniques, in any way possible. Patronising comments about small producers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as provincial and rural (and therefore considered small minded) can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, magazines, and so on.

Small farmers and the people of small towns are rarely given the same respect or coverage in the media as things metropolitan or cosmopolitan, and you only have to look at the state of country roads and out of town public transport networks to see how much our own government really wants to invest in rural life.

Of course, it’s clear that not all small producers are living some kind of wonderful idyllic life, not all of them are ‘’salt of the earth” and not all of them are open minded and generous people. Stereotypes don’t work in any area of life. But we should never forget that farming is an ancient, useful, honourable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind.

Big business agriculture has replaced people with machines and chemicals and most people do not notice, or if they notice they do not care. The dispossession of farmers and their replacement by machines, chemicals, and oppressed migrants on slave labour wages is thought of by many as inevitable, and it is too late for correction.

The question is this: what is the best way to farm – not anywhere or everywhere, but in every one of the Earth’s fragile localities? Who will protect the world’s ecosystem when the small farmers have all gone?