The present scene
Only 70 years ago agriculture in developed and developing countries consisted mainly of small family farms. Chickens and other domestic birds scratched a living around the homestead and commonly were cared for by the farmer's wife while poultry science was a low level topic in academia and found little application in practice. In the 1930s in the West, here defined as Western Europe, USA, Canada and the Antipodes, chicken and turkey were the most expensive meats, served only on festive occasions such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the UK during the Second World War (1939-45) food rationing provided each person with only two eggs a week, which included baking needs, and there was no ration of chicken meat. Occasionally old hens could be bought privately. Shortly after this time, some small, local poultry companies began to harness science in an innovative business model to put cheaper eggs and broilers on the table. By growth and amalgamation a few Western based companies today direct the global poultry business. How the world has changed! The price of food has fallen steadily for 60 years. But the intensive farming model, quickly adopted by the whole food chain, has taken a toll on the environment, on animal health and on human health. Further, the historic social structure of farming has been shattered by large-scale movement to cities, and in 2007 for the first time 50% of the people in the world lived in urban centres (United Nations Population Division, Reference UNITED NATIONS POPULATION DIVISION2008). This inevitably results in a downgrading of traditional human values that build community and quality of life.
What has gone wrong? The key to the major global crises today is unsustainability. The system is being pushed too far and cannot continue. We are breaking ancient boundaries that previously kept the system afloat. Man-made disasters have greater impact than natural tragedies. Climate change is seen as the greatest threat, but the issue of agriculture and food security is another looming man-made catastrophe that increasingly shows its teeth.
Most poor people are not hungry. But sudden large increases in food prices in 2008 pushed nearly a billion poor into hunger and survival mode. The historic Christian prayer does not ask for luxury but recognizes that a constant food supply is basic to life: “Give us today our bread or rice”. Because hunger cannot wait for market forces to provide food, emergency funds were quickly given in 2008 by the World Bank and national governments. The International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI, (2008) estimates that 30% of the increase in food costs early in 2008 was due to diverting farm land to biofuels, followed by speculation in food commodities and oil, an essential resource for intensive farming systems. Sudden huge government funding of biofuel production shows short-sighted political leadership which in 2008 diverted 20% of the land used for the US corn crop.
The market alone is unable to solve the emerging insecurity in the food chain partly because the root causes of the problem derive from the economic system. Even though market forces may bring some redress to the excesses that they create, the response is too slow when people are on the edge of life and death. The food chain presents an unusual scenario compared with manufactured and industrial goods. First, food security requires quick solutions to avoid famine; and second, the process of growing food is always slow, long-term and is traditionally integrated into a complete way of life. Over the last 50 years, science in agriculture has been highly successful in matching each emerging technical problem with an antidote or a remedy, thus enticing both scientists and society to think that the new challenge of unsustainability can also be tamed by new technologies. But the growing threat to global food security has far deeper roots. The economic-scientific model that has been so successful until recently is now obsolete. We cannot overcome this ominous calamity with a new vaccine, an innovative feed substitute, a novel synthetic hormone, a more prolific genome or a larger production unit with more capital investment and lower labour costs. This new problem is systemic not technical.
The unique nature of agriculture and food has been well recognized by prominent world leaders of stature and experience. Nelson Mandela addressing the United Nations said: “Feeding the world is a moral not an economic problem”. Dr M. S. Swaminathan, a world class Indian agricultural scientist, said: “Globalisation of food needs globalisation of ethics”. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank from 1995-2005, asked: “Where are the religious and moral leaders to speak about the real values of development?” Mahatma Gandhi commented: “You can judge a nation's values by the way it treats its livestock”. Other contemporary thinkers such as John Gray (UK), Giuliano Amato (Italy) and Leszek Kolakowski (Poland) have called for changed behaviour in providing a sustainable world food supply based upon justice, equity and compassion.
In this review we first analyse the systemic problem and then offer options for change. As step one, we need a deeper understanding of the current Western culture and values that provide the context within which the threat of famine is emerging. To critique ones own culture is not easy. Objectivity is especially hard for the West today, with cheap and surplus food and an average family budget able to absorb price increases without pain. The temptation is to ask: “What is the problem?” And to answer: “Do nothing and it will go away”.
Three decades ago in June 1978, an unexpected assessment of Western culture was offered by an internationally known figure. At the Harvard University Commencement Ceremony, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, foresaw the end of Western civilization - an incredible and prophetic moment. Here was the man who had defied the evil Soviet system, had suffered in the Gulag, was expelled from the USSR in 1974, and for four years had lived in exile in Vermont, USA. In Western eyes he was a champion. He had renounced communism and joined us. We felt reinforced by his presence in the West. We knew we were right and thought that he agreed. In this invited address at Harvard he said “No”. He told us that our blind culture of materialistic consumerism is destined to fall into the abyss of human decadence because we abuse and despise our freedom. He predicted that, since we in the West had embraced humanism and rejected our Christian heritage, we would be powerless to resist materialism that would soon possess us. Solzhenitsyn was an accurate prophet. Thirty years later we know that our civilization is unsustainable in its present form. Those with eyes to see acknowledge the end is in sight and change is vital. We may stagger on a little; but shall we be wise enough to change before we collapse? Probably we shall wait for a major world-scale, man-made disaster before acting. In the West we live in a cultural bubble obsessed with materialism and conspicuous over-consumption. Each year we inflate our cultural bubble further. We are now close to bursting point.
Community and ethics – despised topics today
Community is a fundamental fact of life. Each living organism is a community. Organisms cannot live in isolation. Ecosystems are universal. Every form of life needs input from others. Human community is not a socio-economic product of the Enlightenment like the market economy. Humans living together pre-date Western culture. Community was the foundation on which sustainable human civilization was started at the beginning of recorded time when humanity began to practise settled farming in the Neolithic period 12,000 years ago. Reflecting on this foundation from the heart of a current simpler civilization in Africa, the First Lady of Uganda, Madame Musevani, said: “It takes a village to raise a child”. Community means living, working and sharing together in all the essential activities of life.
But in our present world of 6.6 billion people the rich West is a minority, and sadly we isolate ourselves comfortably from our fellow humans: the West versus the Rest is not community. Outside are five billion of whom three billion are poor, living in rural areas on two dollars a day or less. Tragically the West is also out of touch with the physical and biological world on which all life depends. This isolation explains why we have no qualms about over-using and depleting the natural resources, living unsustainably and denying the impending collapse. Farmers have always known better. But there is another even greater tragedy – our isolation from each other within the cultural bubble. We no longer see each other as neighbours in shared community. Because our world view is strictly economic, we see neighbours as competitors; or customers; or disposable workers; or investors; or even obstacles to our ambitions that must be side-lined, ignored or removed. Those who lived through the Second World War in Europe clearly see the dislocation of community today, as then everyone worked together. Luxury encourages self-interest and is not conducive to community. Jesus remarked that the rich usually have difficulty with moral issues.
We are extraordinarily blind. While depleting our own Western community of its foundational strengths we speak of building a new global society. Our own society is uniquely focussed upon economic self-interest to the neglect of the deep qualities of civilized society: values, beliefs, ethics and morality. Yet today, the West strongly advocates globalisation based upon unrestricted capitalist economics and free trade. This model has a track record of successfully creating new wealth while simultaneously failing to share it equitably among the economic partners. Inevitably the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. In civilized countries legislation is used to prevent the excesses of greed and to distribute new wealth more equitably – even if only by discriminate taxation. The globalisation of agriculture and food has no such protective international laws. On the contrary, the laws of the World Trade Organization (WTO) require member countries to dismantle national legislation that protects poor farmers.
Achieving a new world order in a civilised manner will require the deep foundational qualities of community in addition to shared economic activity. Agriculture and food are crucially sensitive components of life, and globally they need the special treatment outside market forces that developed country governments have given them for decades and even centuries. A major negative effect of globalising the food chain is the destruction of formerly stable rural communities in the developing world – a consequence already evident in the developed West where farmers are now an endangered species.
All communities have rules of behaviour without which selfishness is destructive. Even primitive human communities have expectations of ethical behaviour and sanctions against individuals that violate their moral standards. As societies become more highly structured the expected standards are codified into law. The development of Europe into the Modern Era took place under the influence of Judeo-Christian standards and morality. Some historians and philosophers conclude the Biblical worldview was a major reason for the remarkable progress in science, economics, quality of life, and order in Western culture over the last 400 years since the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment.
The Christian foundational law for community was given early on by Moses, and was later concisely stated by Jesus. It says that you treat other people the way you would like them to treat you; and you do not do things to others that you would not like them to do to you. This practice is sometimes called the Golden Rule and, though not always practised, was the accepted standard in Christian Europe from the end of the Dark Ages until recently. Those who ignored the Golden Rule were sanctioned publicly or privately. ‘Doing the decent thing’ no longer drives behaviour. Today the acknowledged standard is self-interest. There are individual people who think of others but increasingly in the urban West we live anonymously and leave those in trouble on the other side of the street. The conflict between human selfishness and the need to protect community was recognized by some politicians and governments in the West in the 18th and 19th centuries. They enacted many national laws to prevent economic abuse by the strong. For example, in the 19th century the British parliament, often led by members with a Christian worldview, legislated socio-economic reforms against some extreme evils of capitalism: prison reform to prevent exploitation of prisoners especially women, the Plimsol line on ships to prevent deliberate overloading with loss of life and false insurance claims, limited work hours per week, safety laws in factories, laws against children working in mines, shelter for the unemployed, hospices for the weak and elderly etc. Good laws build community for the whole of society, rich and poor, educated and non-educated, and the disadvantaged.
Solzhenitsyn was right. Today in the West, selfishness and greed are dominant and we are willing to trade community for profit. Tragically many dismiss community as a fantasy unrelated to the real world of economics. Actually, community is not a pleasant abstraction or concept used by philosophers or theologians – community lies at the root of biology and is the heart of life thus forming an essential pillar of sustainability.
Here is a succinct characterisation of Western culture today:
• Materialistic consumerism dominates society;
• Public decisions are made only on economic criteria;
• Service to the consumer is driven by pursuit of market share;
• Maximum profit is awarded the ultimate accolade;
• Nobody is responsible for the public good;
• The aim is that next year must be better financially than this year.
This worldview is non-negotiable. There is no Plan B.
Good news turning to bad news
Considering our present calamity, first the good news. Over the last 60 years, the Western world has experienced an economic miracle transforming the standard of living. In 1957 Harold Macmillan, the UK Prime Minister, said: “Most of our people have never had it so good – but I am worried it will not last”. The agriculture and food sector has excelled with increased productivity per input of labour, land and capital. The percentage of disposable income spent on food has fallen every year for decades. Poultry producers are the stars of this economic revolution. An innovative business model using science has moved birds away from the farmyard into large-scale, intensively managed units; a few breeder companies supply poultry genetic resources worldwide. All the economic and biological performance prizes in the food chain go to poultry. This remarkable story was well presented recently by Havenstein (Reference HAVENSTEIN2006).
But the glowing success of the world poultry industry is increasingly marred by some serious emerging problems deriving from the very features that have hitherto driven success. Breaching critical boundaries replaces benefits with problems that spill into the whole society.
Briefly, without detail, here are some reminders: SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) with 8,000 human cases and 774 deaths, bird flu of different types including H5N1, dangers of new human diseases developing where large populations of humans and birds/animals live in close proximity (Jones et al., Reference JONES, PATEL, LEVY, STOREYGARD, BALK, GITTLEMAN and DASZAK2008), toxic contaminants and disease organisms in poultry meat and eggs, welfare of birds, pollution of land and environment by waste from large units, mono-genetic lines with reduced adaptability, lost poultry biodiversity and patenting of agro-bioresources. In addition, a major socio-economic negative impact is the loss of livelihood and markets by millions of small farmers. The poultry wunderkind is viewed with growing suspicion by the world at large.
With this long track record of success that has contributed so much to food security why are we now in trouble? It scarcely seems fair. The leaders are nice, even good people. Individually they are ethical. They do not break the law. They use good science, intelligent and rational business methods; and by reductionism minimize the use of resources and produce cheap food. What has gone wrong? Like the rest of society, we are pushing the market economy system that has yielded huge financial success and cheap food well beyond its limits. It is a Faustian bargain. Now we pay because we have stretched a good system too far and have broken boundaries of sustainability and morality through distorted and excessive use.
The poultry sector was a pioneer in designing the system and now contributes to the threats to our lifestyle and civilisation. These calamities are not natural but man-made: environmental collapse, pollution, excessive use of natural resources including energy and water, human, animal and crop pandemics, declining food security, huge contrast of rich and poor, and accelerating migration of billions from poor rural areas into the deplorable sub-human life in mega-cities. These man-made tragedies all support the current icon of impending disaster: Climate Change.
Scepticism
Two sceptical thoughts may come to mind at this point. First, things are not so bad. Second, we have always overcome individual problems as they arise and will so continue. Consider these two points before moving to the heart of the matter.
First, are things so bad? Is this an imaginary scenario of coming tragedy? No! New reports on impending tragedy are issued almost monthly by groups of thinking people including scientists, business leaders, economists, sociologists, philosophers, religious leaders and the UN. They give dire warnings that our lifestyle is unsustainable and our civilization is terminally ill. Political leaders seem impotent, have no alternative and usually offer short term palliative solutions. Ordinary people in the West are fearful and ask: “When will the big man-made disaster come?” Those working in the system just get on with work. Most scientists do not see themselves as the cause of the problem. Most business men behave with integrity. The crisis does not originate with individuals - the predicament arises from the system everyone supports. Tragedy will not be averted by individuals changing their lifestyle, though that is important. The system has to change.
Second, won't science solve the problem? Until recently science and other forms of human ingenuity have kept ahead of collapse by finding a solution to each emerging problem. Currently, for example, human vaccines for bird flu H5N1 are being engineered in readiness for a pandemic. That type of solution is fire-fighting and is becoming harder, more costly and carries its own new risks. We now need radical solutions that deal with the cause. Cleaning away the cobwebs is futile: we have to kill the spider.
Fire-fighting failed with Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - BSE): a new type of lethal genetic abnormality interactive between cattle and humans that emerged in 1986, though present but unnoticed in cattle for years before. Consider the BSE epidemic: at first scientists thought it was a new pathogen; whereas actually it was a genetic variant exacerbated by an innovative bovine feeding regime system designed to be more environmentally friendly and able to increase profit. In retrospect it is clear that nobody challenged the innovation that turned cows into cannibals by feeding them abattoir waste. The ancient instinctive boundary that makes cannibalism abhorrent to animals and to civilized humanity was ignored. Details of the genetic origin are still unknown. The serious nature of BSE for humans was denied and the system through which it was spread was permitted to continue for ten years because scientific and government authorities were in denial and bowed to economic interests. They swore to the public that beef was safe to eat. Then in 1996 some human deaths were diagnosed resulting from the human form of BSE. This condition is known as variant Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (vCJD) and results from eating affected beef. It is fatal and has no cure. Immense and costly suffering was caused to cattle, to farmers and to the 170 consumers who, to date, suffered greatly from vCJD before dying prematurely. Failure to face the crisis early in order to protect business resulted in enormous economic loss later. The cost of BSE at discounted present value is 93 billion Euros (European Association for Animal Production, EAAP, 2003). There is little evidence that science, business and governments have learned the lesson – to use greater caution and to respect critical boundaries in the food chain.
Destroying community of the market
In the West we think that conspicuous over-consumption can continue indefinitely. But there are vital boundaries. Breaching them will lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it. Thinking people know we are pushing the natural resource community beyond its ability to recover. But many leaders in business, politics and science believe we have found the winning socio-economic formula that has no limits. Their proven formula is the market economy that has yielded immense prosperity over several centuries especially in the last 60 years. Western leaders are now desperately keen to sweep the whole world into free trade and market economics by globalisation. But here is a tragic paradox. Even as the free market economy is being widely advocated it shows warning signs of unsustainability. Promoting it globally both spreads and compounds the crisis.
The market economy began to crack about 20 years ago. We can identify a significant hinge point when Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and the market”. This prejudiced and ill-advised statement led to the view that ‘Greed is OK’ and made corruption legitimate. Major business scandals have increased since then hurting many people. The balanced market economy should be the servant of society but has been distorted and is used by an elite minority for selfish ends.
All previous socio-economic systems had their deficiencies and some failed completely: barter, slavery, kings and their courts, the church, dictators, socialism, fascism, central planning, communism. These earlier socio-economic systems were often taken over by an elite minority for self-interest. Today, some ideologues believe the market economy is the perfect, infallible system and speak as though it is a basic law of the universe, like gravity. An African friend, an emeritus professor, told me how he was invited to a conference of concerned leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America to address poverty. A team of American business men tried to persuade them that capitalism is God's ordained way of life and will therefore automatically solve the poverty issue. The Third World leaders laughed because they knew that community is God's way. In similar vein, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US writer Francis Fukuyama (Reference FUKUYAMA1992) felt able to announce ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, meaning the West has found the final solution for socio-economic and political problems.
Solzhenitsyn warned against such social ideologies. The Soviets were convinced that communism was built upon the inevitable forces of history. It fell. Hitler started to build his thousand years Reich on a perverse ideology. It fell. Shaping the whole of life on an ideology is very dangerous and always leads to collapse. The market economy is undoubtedly the best economic system so far devised by man but grossly overstated as an ideology for life. Some argue that the self-interest motivation in capitalism that derives from picturing it as Social Darwinism inevitably means that the weakest must go to the wall while the strong prosper. It is increasingly clear that such an ideology without the foundational values of community will lead to the collapse of human civilization.
Faced with this problem, the penetrating analysis of the French intellectual, Blaisé Pascal (1623-62), is helpful. He presented a realistic description of the trap into which Western society has now fallen by ignoring the non-material side of human experience. His succinct statement paraphrases the two-part picture of humanity held by the Judeo-Christian worldview; namely, humanity exists simultaneously in the image of God and in the image of the animals:
“It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much he resembles the beast
without at the same time showing him his greatness.
It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness.
It is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both.
But it is very profitable to show him both.”
At its best, market economy is supported by the values of a healthy community and is also structured within itself as an economic system with recognized separation of powers. The balanced market economy is a community of land, labour, capital, consumers and citizens plus risk-taking entrepreneurs - all interacting together ethically under the rule of law. Each checks the excesses of the others. No single component is dominant. This balance accounts for its strength and success compared with previous socio-economic systems that, apart from barter, were abused by a privileged elite. In a balanced market economy each component receives rewards: interest on capital, wages for labour, rent for land, goods and services for consumers, profit for risk-taking entrepreneurs and better quality of life for all. In the last two decades that stable community has been violated by elevating financial capital as the supreme value. Return on investment is now the only result that counts. Financial capital holds authority over all other resources. Power is held by a small elite group who decided where capital investments will be made. We have broken the boundaries of the good market economy by ignoring separation of powers and the independent roles in economic community, by allowing collusion between government and large business interests. We permit capital to replace the market in the allocation of resources, and patent legislation to facilitate ownership of agro-biodiversity that favours the rich minority while conflicting with good law.
I call this system ‘Elite Capitalism’. With financial capital as the only arbiter, economics is distorted leading to an unbalanced society able to live in a cultural bubble for a while on accumulated momentum, apparently unperturbed by the obscene gap between itself and the poor and evidently willing to preside over its own demise. Our society is sick. When one component in a body runs out of control it is called cancer. The whole organism fails to function normally and eventually that community of life dies. Let us examine the cancer - Elite Capitalism - more closely.
Elite Capitalism
In a balanced healthy society, where quality of life for all is the ultimate goal, economics is one, but only one, of many components that guide decisions. The interests of all stake-holders are represented in economic decisions. But today in Western society Elite Capitalism is the measure of everything. Decisions are in the hands of a small elite group of executives with power to make huge investments anywhere in the world on behalf of large and small owners of capital whose only interest is profit and who have no connection with the people, places and products where their money is invested. The interests of local workers, customers, citizens and the environment are rarely taken into consideration except as they affect return on investment. This type of Elite Capitalism minimises the call of conscience in laying-off local labour and out-sourcing to cheaper labour resources, even using child labour that is banned in the home country. In the poultry industry, small farmers are unilaterally forced out of business as their markets are colonised by large capital intensive poultry units. Land use and value are subject to the financial return on capital investment resulting in dispossession of historic owners. Profits are repatriated instead of building up the local community.
In this electronic age, financial capital is highly mobile and scans the globe for the highest returns on investments. Decisions on new enterprises are made by the Elite Capital executives together with local politicians, sometimes corruptly and often without consulting other stakeholders such as workers, citizens and consumers. This pattern appears in the agriculture and food sector where many small farmers in the developing world are weak politically and economically. Today, under Elite Capitalism, these weaker segments are side-lined, even victimized, without redress. Another broken component of Elite Capitalism is found in the excessive rewards that flow, not just from newly created wealth but also from mergers, take-overs, asset-stripping, stock-options and include excessive compensation to the elite group of executives.
Globalization reveals the overwhelming power of the capital-rich nations. The West and oil rich countries control huge financial resources including not only designated investments in stocks, commodities and futures, but also venture capital and wealth funds. These massive capital resources are in the hands of a very small elite group of investment managers who are physically remote from the activities they initiate and manage financially. Specialists in business management, they rarely understand the operational nature and consequences of agriculture and are concerned with ensuring profit with calibrated risk for the capital. The food chain is a great attraction because food is a guaranteed market – even more so in the long-term than oil.
Elite Capital in agriculture and food
The food chain extends from producers to consumers and also includes the upstream supplies to farms and the downstream activities en route to consumers. This vast enterprise attracts Elite Capital that, by scale and integration, can claim ownership of resources, reduce costs, maximize market share and inflate return on capital. Hence upstream farm supplies of chemicals and seeds are now in the hands of a few multi-national companies. Similarly, the harvests of stable food crops that represent the big markets, are dominated by a small number of multi-national buyers. Further along the chain, a few supermarkets control food sales to millions of consumers and ruthlessly negotiate penal prices and conditions with producers, forcing many small farmers into sale, bankruptcy or suicide. This is the model now being advocated for the globalisation of the food chain. It will have the same effects upon the half of the world population still living on the land in rural communities where farming is the only economic option.
The multi-national chains of up-stream and down-stream companies already sell to some farmers and consumers in the developing world, as shown by several large European and American supermarkets in the urban markets of India, Brazil and Thailand. Clearly these international businesses have a long-term agenda of global control of the agriculture and food markets – an aim that will be facilitated by international mergers.
Unless international legislative boundaries are created, this capital-rich juggernaut will continue to grow and we shall see further global integration in the food chain by upstream and downstream multi-nationals joining together – chemical companies buying wholesalers and supermarkets or vice versa. Farmers will then be squeezed further and consumers manipulated by the marketing and advertising power of Elite Capitalism. Nothing will stop this process except government intervention – against monopolies or to promote sustainable farming and to protect consumer interests from greed.
A key strategy of Elite Capitalism is to break up the community to gain control of its separate parts, to regulate resource inputs and to reduce competition to ensure maximum returns on capital invested. There are many victims in this process. This Elite Capital system is unsustainable, which is why its current strategy to colonise the food chain is so specifically dangerous for the world. Collapse in other sectors of the economy can be extremely dangerous but despite suffering, recovery is possible. Such recovery would be long-delayed with many deaths from famine if the same failed scenario occurs for the food chain.
powerful examples of Elite Capitalism: the prime mortgage collapse
Lest it be thought that this prognosis is a fantasy, consider another economic sector where the Elite Capital strategy broke up healthy economic communities and led to collapse and calamity. Pause and briefly examine the anatomy of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Traditional finance houses offering mortgages to home buyers historically operated within an economic community of buyers and sellers; investors and mortgages were matched at publicly recognized and independently regulated interest rates; monthly interest payments and repayment of principal were defined over specific time; risk was covered by adequate collateral; the down-payment and income-earning ability of the buyer were key components to ensure sustainability. All parties benefited by improved quality of life including builders and their employees, mortgage lenders and their staff, investors and especially those seeking the security of their own home through work and savings. What happened?
Those whose worldview is to make money from capital investment realised that housing is another very attractive guaranteed market since people need houses. Some major financial institutions, formerly not experienced in the house mortgage business, entered the market. Seeking market share they took higher risks by offering mortgages at lower (‘sub-prime’) rates without requiring any down payment from the buyer. This minimized the buyer's risk. Then the financial institution or bank sold off blocks of sub-prime mortgage loans to intermediary bankers remote from the home-owner which were then passed on as investment packages to further investment houses often in other countries. Sellers and buyers did not know who else was in the chain. The home owners had no contact with the investors. The original bank advancing the mortgages to homeowners took high risks without collateral because the risk was passed to an unknown foreign bank. The wholesome community of the healthy market economy that provides checks, balances, collateral and security was absent. When credit and income tightened, many home owners could no longer make monthly payments and lost their houses while distant banks holding anonymous investment portfolios lost billions. Consequently ordinary people lost their savings and taxpayers had to pay to prop-up banks to maintain national and global financial stability. Risk and cost were shifted from entrepreneurs to society. Elite Capitalism deliberately broke the community of the market economy. Houses were no longer viewed as homes and savings for the owner but as investments – primarily for faceless Elite Capital to the loss of the home-owner.
Over the last 20 years similar cases of banks over-reaching their role through greed have resulted from Elite Capitalism that lacks an ethical basis for relationships between the trading components. Separation of powers in the economy has been replaced by collusion. Corruption flourishes not simply in individual cases but as a recognized part of the system.
By an extraordinary paradox, Elite Capitalism takes society back to the Pre-Modern Era when a privileged elite ruled society. Europe suffered several agonizing centuries to overthrow the rule of kings, nobility, aristocracy, landowners and the church. The Post-Enlightenment period celebrates the liberation of democracy and the rise of the market economy where everyone can participate equally. The American Declaration of Independence refers to “the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….”. Conceptually anyone can become Prime Minister or President and the road to personal economic success is open to all. Elite Capitalism shatters this balance by allowing a favoured group to hold power globally in capital funds, investment banks, mortgage houses, insurance companies and multi-nationals, and also to buy political influence. Their unelected executives are appointed in-house and are accountable only to faceless, benign shareholders. Often they are more powerful than elected politicians, control budgets larger than some national economies, and shape the development of society. Elite Capitalism destroys community by valuing people only by what they contribute to return on investment and not for themselves. It is not community, but is unjust, unethical, undemocratic, unsustainable and exploitive economic colonialism. In agriculture and food it will be disastrous.
Elite Science
Elite Capital has formed an alliance with Elite Science in agriculture and food by employing molecular biologists to move genes, known as transgenes, across species boundaries in crop seeds that are then sold to farmers to produce genetically modified (GM) food. Similar genetic manipulations of mammalian eggs and embryos are carried out with livestock. Remarkable advances in molecular genetics at the end of the 20th century have facilitated these technologies although they are still at a primitive level scientifically. Insertion of the transgenes is not precise and many attempts are needed before a modified transgenic cell survives and the new mature organism accurately expresses the trait influenced by the inserted transgene. This technique is being used prudently in health and medicine to produce diagnostic, preventive and treatment products for human and animal health and disease. In such cases, extensive tests and field trials are made before releasing the products for public use which, in most cases, are available only through a medical practitioner who advises on the likely success and side-effects. The final decision normally rests with the patient who carries the risk.
The story is entirely different for the food chain. Several large multi-national companies started research and development programmes to genetically modify the staple crop species used for food and for animal feed since they offer the largest market in the food chain. Many top molecular scientists in this exciting new field work for private companies that offer substantial funds and resources for research together with higher pay than in publicly funded research bodies. But normal research protocols are restricted and include limited and delayed publication of results and no independent replication – even by governments who, in the USA, often approve the food product for the market using the data and conclusions provided by the company. New GM organisms are patented enabling the company to charge a royalty for use of the seed and later legally pursue any farmers using saved seed from last year. GM foods have many negative angles including their sale in the US without labelling – a move that was resisted by consumers in Europe. The release of organisms produced by this controversial technology raises many uncertainties affecting human health, the environment and longer-term unknown effects in the biosphere. Thinking citizens experience a deep unease about the technology and indignation over the lack of public consultation, independent testing or long-term experimentation under controlled conditions. To date, GM foods have offered no benefit to consumers. Further, in 2008, a major independent UN study by 400 independent scientists and signed by 60 governments (the largest ever on this topic) concluded that GM crops have not increased production on farm (The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, IAASTD, 2008). Nevertheless multi-national businesses are now actively applying for and being granted patents on domestic livestock with similar aims for control of milk, meat and eggs. The promise of GM crops to feed the world better by producing GM crops for adverse environments in the developing world such, as arid or salt conditions, has been neglected as farmers in these countries offer poor market returns.
A key consequence of this new GM food scenario is the rise of Elite Science in close business partnership with Elite Capitalism. A small group of scientists can now make decisions to change the genome of major agro-bioresources without a mandate from society and, in many cases as in Europe, in spite of recorded opposition from society expressed through the market and consistently recorded by the EuroBarometer (Reference EUROBAROMETER2008).
Meanwhile, in research laboratories of public universities and institutions, some researchers, following normal scientific protocols, are discovering, publishing and warning of the extremely complex nature of the genetic structure and operation in higher species. This was earlier predicted by objective scientific thinkers whose views have been largely dismissed by Elite Capitalism and Elite Science. Undoubtedly, it is desirable for humanity to explore this unknown molecular universe with the aim of contributing to a better quality of life for all. But the genomic complexity now being discovered indicates unidentified dangers and risks to the whole of life by seeking quick profits where angels fear to tread.
Broken boundaries
In the agricultural and food chain, the concentrated power of Elite Capitalism and Elite Science breaches several boundaries long respected by civilized society including the rule of law, species boundaries and ethical standards. Each of these is an important and large topic in itself and a brief summary only is given in this review.
rule of law: the World Trade Organization (WTO)
Two of the basic premises under-pinning law in civilized society are being violated in agriculture and food. First, all individuals are equal before the law and, second, public activities are conducted under the rule of law. The two Elites reversed those premises by using law to protect the interests of the strong against the weak and by failing to bring major decisions into the public domain for rational debate, evaluation and even referenda when there are extensive consequences for global society and for life on earth. Privately owned businesses are using community resources for private gain and, in the process, are changing the structure of society.
The use of law to advance self-interest of the strong in the WTO requires member countries to open their agriculture and food to a world market increasingly directed by large, multi-national, Western capital-rich companies. The WTO is an elite body whose existence is not grounded in the choice of ordinary people. It was created in 1995 with powerful sponsorship from Western governments with the agenda of promoting free trade and liberal economics for the globe. That socio-economic model is used in the West and, as already discussed, gives huge advantages to those owning capital while poor countries whose principal economic resources are labour and farming are at a disadvantage.
In the area of agriculture and food, global free trade would open the growing urban food markets in the mega-cities of the developing world to the so-called cheap food shipped or flown in from the intensive large-scale production units in the West, which benefit from government subsidies. In the developing countries, Western capital is used to create large-scale tropical and semi-tropical crop plantations, mega livestock and poultry units using imported intensive technology, seeds, chemicals etc., and local labour on unregulated pittance wages. Return on Western capital invested is the prime goal with profits repatriated to the West and not used to improve the local quality of life.
Fortunately in 2008 the WTO Doha Round that aimed to bring agriculture and food into free trade finally collapsed because developing country governments refused to hand over their largely farming economies to this Western-centred model while Europe and the USA refused to drop their farming subsidies.
Without doubt, globalised free trade in manufactured goods, commodities from mines, and services yields benefits for all parties, as described by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. But WTO law will accelerate the break up of the huge rural populations of about three billion people in poor countries. These poor farmers need empowerment and protected domestic food markets in the way Western farmers have been supported for centuries enabling them to become so efficient. With their domestic food markets gone, the rural poor can only become poorer at home in rural areas, or migrate and swell the ranks of the unemployed in the shanty towns of the developing world.
Western political and business leaders often say that free trade will overcome poverty. There is no historic precedent to show that unregulated free trade helps small, poor farmers. Unregulated economics without community values always makes the rich richer and the poor poorer especially when driven by mobile capital seeking only profitable returns. Wonderful though the market economy is for creating wealth, history is witness that abuse in the market economy has only been prevented by legislation. You cannot separate economics from social development without losing quality of life and community. Tragically, the WTO is writing laws only for economic development and thinks that alone will lift society. This must change. The WTO must include legal and financial provisions for empowering the poor and fostering social progress. Applying the current economic WTO laws to agriculture and food is abuse of the Rule of Law. The playing field is not level. Privileges are given to the minority rich against the majority poor on the land. These laws are divisive and act negatively against the creation of a sustainable global human community.
rule of law: patenting of agro-bioresources
Patenting agro-bioresources has been identified earlier in this review as a powerful means of colonising high value crops in the food chain. Since GM crops do not increase farm production and offer no benefit to the consumer, why do farmers buy them? The answer is that these crops have been modified for a single trait – to increase biological resistance to chemical sprays used on the farm to kill weeds and insect pests. The increased resistance allows more highly concentrated chemicals to be used in smaller doses which initially offers the farmer a small reduction in his costs. However, since the chemicals are also sold by the same multi-national that sells GM seed there is lack of clarity in the price mechanisms of sprays and seeds. Without doubt patents facilitate a larger share of the market plus royalties. There is growing evidence that transgenic resistance to chemicals in GM crops may be declining and/or that weeds and insects are, in the normal evolutionary way, developing higher levels of resistance to these chemicals – requiring farmers to use higher dosages and thus negate the early benefits of these GM crops. The theoretical evolutionary reasons why the desired effect of transgenes is likely to be short-lived have been ignored in the rush to market.
Some multi-nationals are claiming patents on tropical and semi-tropical food and feed crops indigenous to developing countries that they do not intend to market in the foreseeable future – a practice commonly known as bio-piracy.
The proper use of Patent Law protects the inventor of a novel invention against unfair use by others for business and profit. However, the use of patent law to claim ownership of agro-bioresources is an affront to civilized society. If any group can claim ownership of agro-bioresources it is the farmers whose ancestors invested intellectual labour for millennia and produced improved domesticated varieties from wild species and made them available to all without charge. In fact, given the fact that civilization has arisen from settled agriculture, there is clearly a case for the cultivated and wild species used in food and health to be viewed legally as part of the Commons owned by all humanity. You can own a sack of seed wheat, a field of growing wheat, or a load of wheat for flour. But the concept of private ownership of the wheat species is so novel that it is difficult for the average person to believe. The present new situation is a reversal of the rule of law by giving an elite group minority rights over everyone else.
breaking open the boundaries of biological life
The discovery of DNA as the common biological language of all life affirms that the biosphere is a community. Knowledge of molecular genetics first flowed from publicly funded research initiated by Watson and Crick's discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA. Life is structured as a diverse community of molecules and genomes within species boundaries that, having been honed for millions of years, have proven to be stable and highly adaptable to slow change over time. Homo sapiens is part of this community of life.
The technology of dissecting and restructuring the molecular community creates an artificial mutant that is widely and rapidly dispersed without having to prove its stability. The technology for making a transgenic organism is crude, as demonstrated by the large number of attempts needed for one viable success. Dolly was the 276th attempt to clone a sheep. The ground for these fears has become more apparent recently with the discovery that the assumed genetic maps and models of species genomes are grossly inadequate and incomplete. Transgenic methods are based on a reductionist, linear, genetic model in which information flowed one-way from each DNA gene via messenger RNA (mRNA) to shape one protein; and many scientists viewed most DNA as inert junk. We recently learned that model is inadequate. Genes function in many alternative ways and combinations; all DNA appears to be functional; and multiple forms of RNA exist as operators that control expression of genes. Of great importance is the new realisation that the genome is an intricate, interactive, molecular community within which information flows along many pathways as well as back to DNA from endogenous and exogenous sources.
Elite Capitalism and Elite Science are rushing into the genomes of food species and making rapid changes with unknown long-term consequences. Not surprisingly, a grass roots feeling exists among ordinary people that Elite Science is now ‘playing God’, acting unethically and taking great risks with the future of the humanity and the biosphere. The urgent question is: what will society do now to avert the tragedies that will inevitably result from allowing Elite Capitalism and Elite Science, in the pursuit of immediate profit without adequate research, to breach the long-standing boundaries of DNA defined by millions of years of stable speciation?
boundaries of ethics and morality
The 18th and 19th century economic thinkers who formalized understanding of the market economy felt that the competitive instinct of self-interest operating within stable community was a positive feature leading to overall benefits. Some, however, recognized that self-interest by a powerful minority always surfaces, distorting and destroying progress and community. Adam Smith struggled with this issue. He proposed the concept of the ‘invisible hand’ arguing that in the ‘perfect’ market economy system with the free flow of information to all parties, decisions made by the market would always be subject to competition, that would prevent abuse by a minority. It is doubtful that this restraint on exploitation was ever effective and legislation against excesses of human behaviour has been needed. For sure today, the invisible hand is not operating in the international food market where massive multi-national companies exercise near-monopoly power.
The issue of ethical behaviour and morality is highly relevant to agriculture and the food chain. When challenged on their ethical behaviour in the areas discussed in this review, leaders in Elite Capitalism and Elite Science sometimes defend their actions by claiming that their responsibility is to their shareholders. They say that for them ‘behaving ethically’ means always serving the interests of the shareholders. I call this ‘Reductionist Ethics’. Devoid of ethical commitment to Community and the greatest good for the whole, it is a self-seeking world view that is not sustainable, rational, scientific or human.
What can and should be done by leaders in the poultry industry?
The thesis of this review is that our world is now moving towards a major man-made disaster and that tinkering to find individual answers to a cascade of emerging problems will not work. Major changes in values, legislation and foundational adjustments in the economic operating system are essential. Influential leaders in prominent sections of the global economic system need to take a courageous intellectual and moral stand to speak in world councils and act for sustainable change within their own sector.
The agriculture and food sector is hugely important as a major player in the economic field to ensure global food security and to ensure positive social consequences among the billions of poor in the world.
We see the beginnings of change among leaders in several sectors of the global economy. For example, the automobile industry is moving to reduce the damaging effect of cars on the environment. Leaders in parts of the energy sector are searching for alternative energy sources. I call upon leadership within the poultry industry to set in motion positive changes.
poultry leadership think tank
The first step would be to establish a Poultry Leadership Think Tank representing leaders from all sectors of the poultry industry to examine the existing poultry chain and to make proposals for change to fit the changed paradigm. The new system must ensure food security, empower the rural poor, sustain the environment, reduce the carbon footprint, serve consumers with quality food, meet the expectations of citizens and be ethical in its socio-economic effects upon the billions of poor rural farmers. Such a creative new model would not only serve the poultry sector but would also provide leadership for the whole food chain whose current trajectory is unsustainable and destructive. Poultry could again take the lead in the agriculture and food business.
Because the mammoth global poultry business is in the hands of only a handful of companies and institutions, leaders are in a strong position to make significant worldwide changes. The Poultry Leadership Think Tank needs courageous leaders from all segments of the industry to give time to listen to other parties including customers and citizens in all parts of the world whose voices do not normally get into the top scientific and business meetings.
Tragedy overtakes those who think only within their own paradigm and listen only to those who affirm their past. The challenge is to venture beyond the ideas of a technological solution or improvements in efficiency that lead to larger and more intensive production units. New measures of success are needed beyond ever cheaper food and profit. Appeals to ethics will not work; legislation will be needed. The Poultry Industry Leadership Think Tank must make proposals to Governments, the WTO and other Inter Governmental Organizations.
First, an agenda must be drawn up. Here is a suggested starting list that is by no means complete:
• Recognize that the agro-resources including farmers in Western countries are a national heritage that must not be left to market forces alone.
• Legislate and create an economic environment that will encourage sustainable food products for local consumption.
• Ask Western governments and the EU to continue their long-standing practice of providing support, financial and otherwise, and especially direct it to small farmers so they may compete against the food production funded by Elite Capitalism.
• Remove agriculture and food from the free trade laws of the WTO and create new international laws for the food chain.
• Create, through the WTO, a tax or levy on resources used in the international food trade that is used to empower poor farmers in the developing world by building infrastructures such as marketing, quality, hygiene improvements, and to develop new employment in rural areas such as up-stream and down-stream services to the agricultural community. This levy could be similar to the Tobin Tax proposal for a tax on international movements of finance.
• Provide national legislation for long-term farming development.
• Fund and sponsor research into non-intensive, sustainable food production methods making use of low resource inputs and carbon footprint data.
• Encourage direct links and more economic connectedness between farmers and consumers.
• Ask governments to use graded taxation on large companies in the food chain related to their increasing scale of production, processing units and market share.
• Remove all life forms from the patenting process. This means allowing patents only for new methods and for the non-living products obtained from living organisms.
• Forbid patenting of any wild or domesticated species used or likely to be used for food.
• Make laws that regulate the activities of near-monopoly companies in the food chain to prevent unjust exploitation of farmers and customers.
• Place limits upon the profit levels that can be made on capital invested in the agriculture and food chain by upstream and downstream multi-national companies and supermarkets.
• Introduce required courses on sustainability and community values along with the existing courses on ethics in business schools.
Citizens must be informed of the unsustainability of the present system, its unethical operations and unknown but likely risks to the biosphere that include the future of civilization as we know it. Many people will support such changes.
Of course, there will be opposition to any change, particularly to changes that challenge the privileges of Elite Capital and Elite Science. But, farmers, agro-bioresources and food are central to life and community. They are at risk – and so are we all. Without food, death is the only alternative. If change seems unrealistic and too radical then we must remember that we have put ourselves on a collision course with reality.
post-script: precedent for radical change – it can happen
In the 18th and 19th centuries as the market economy developed, greed and self interest led to some abuses of the weak by the strong. The slave trade is an example pertinent to the situation today. Everyone benefited except the African slaves whose communities and lives were brutalized – 12 million being transported mainly in British ships to the New World. Manufactured goods were taken on British ships to Africa and used to pay the slave traders who had destroyed rural communities and brought the black prisoners to the coast. Ship owners took the slaves across the Atlantic in appalling conditions and sold them at auction. The ships returned to Britain loaded with sugar, cotton, tobacco and other commodities from the New World. It was excellent globalised business. Everyone profited: British manufacturers, African slave drivers, plantation owners, ship owners and consumers in Britain. Everyone profited – except the slaves, whose rural communities were ruthlessly destroyed. William Wilberforce, a committed Christian member of the British parliament, was finally successful in 1807, only 200 years ago, in convincing parliament to abolish slave trading – and the British navy then monitored the High Seas to prevent other countries from continuing the practice. Law was used effectively to stop the abuse of economic power. Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, but he might ask today whether our post-Christian self-centred society has the intellectual and moral courage to place limits upon self-centred abuses that are destroying the fabric of global society.
