Agriculture, Environment and Society — Contemporary issues for Australia
Edited by Geoffrey Lawrence, Frank Vanclay and Brian Furze
Macmillan Australia. 337 pp. $32.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
When Dorothea MacKellar put her patriotic juices to work in poetic praise of a giving landscape, she had no notion of how misplaced her enthusiasms were: "Core of my heart, my country, land of the rainbow gold. For sun and fire and famine she pays us back threefold."
Even among the littlies forced to memorise MacKellar in primary school, the land no longer seems as bountiful as it once was. Since the mid-1980s, at least one third of primary producers in Australia have experienced relatively sustained negative incomes. If the exodus from rural Australia continues at its current rate, the last person leaving the countryside should do so very early next century.
This economic and social crisis is shadowed and worsened by the continuing degradation of rural lands. Rather than being a marginal issue on the environmental agenda, it is our most serious ecological problem. Unlike the sudden and obvious impact of flood or fire, the signs of land degradation are slow to manifest themselves. After the soil has been blown or washed away, it is easy to forget that it used to be there.
Already one quarter of Victoria is salt affected as a direct result of tree removal. In the Murray Darling basin alone, at least 12 billion trees are needed as replacement cover to restore the region to a minimum level of sustainability. Such a program would cost $1.2 billion just for the seedlings.
In contrast — so Geoffrey Lawrence and Frank Vanclay point out — "while the Commonwealth wants to 'plant a billion trees' by the year 2000, over one billion trees have been removed from just two local government areas in Queensland since 1985 in keeping with that state government's land development policy".
While such statistics are sure to breed cynicism in any smug urbanite flushed with a green hue, the genesis of the rural crisis is extremely complex and doesn't lend itself to a quick or piecemeal fix, regardless of how many inner city dwellers move up country intent on teaching the cockies a thing or two about sustainability. Land degradation, as many of the writers in this anthology point out, is primarily a social, rather than a technical, problem. Instead of being an accidental outcome of current practices, it is inherent in the modus operandi of modern agriculture.
Recent changes in the countryside have quickened this process. Like all other industries, the production of food and fibre is being restructured along lines geared to international competitiveness. Farmers are being told by a succession of ALP-sponsored plans to "get big or get out". Proffered as a solution to the country's balance of payments problems, such schemes aim for greater volumes of output produced by fewer, more technologically sophisticated, farms.
The sentimentalised image of the small family farm is thought to be archaic. Megabucks agriculture is nowhere more in evidence than in the growth of contract farming, in which individual agriculturalists hire out both their land and their labour to the major food processors, who may specify all aspects of production from nursery to harvest. Such a system encourages growers to push their land beyond its reasonable limits because they have few options other than accepting the terms laid down by companies such as Birds Eye or McCain.
As part of this process of incorporating the countryside into a huge outdoor factory, agricultural bio-technologies are primed to engineer a technocentric version of sustainable agriculture. Herbicide-tolerant, pest-resistant and nitrogen-fixing crops are being developed in corporate and university laboratories worldwide. The major transmission vehicle for this bio-tech revolution is the seed manipulated by recombinant DNA technology with each new organism variously owned by fortunate transnational corporations which have invested in this area of research since the mid-'70s.
However, as Richard Hindmarsh points out, the new and very expensive package offered by bio-technology fails to address the central issue of sustainable agriculture — that of developing a long-term ecological view.
By the time the reader of this volume negotiates Hindmarsh's article the penny has already dropped — at least one would hope so. Most experiments at evolving a sustainable agriculture have been ad hoc, on a paddock by paddock basis, and are doomed unless they are integrated into a social, economic and ecological plan that is both regional and national in scale. For those of us hanging out for the promise of organic farming, the disturbing reality is that its market share is very low indeed — the average Australian consumes a mere 5 cents worth of organic produce each week.
In fact, the ecological reality of food production is extremely forbidding. As Neil Barr and John Cary remind us in their discussion on the use of chemicals: "Natural selection usually adapts to subvert controls aimed at a pest's life cycle or behaviour. It is hard to see any pest management system being permanently sustainable. Flexibility and adaptation are the key to biological survival. Inflexible commitment to any idea or ideology is the first step to unsustainability."
Other contributors to this anthology would disagree. Proponents of the alternative agriculture movement insist on an optional vision that can remake the countryside. Whereas their ecological critique of current practices is sharp, their strident advocacy of bioregionalism, self-reliance and the reduction in international trade verges on utopianism. The full reality of the social and economic crisis being experienced by farmers now fails to enter within the parameters of their schematic approach.
While many readers of Green Left Weekly may want to take me to task for such a sentiment, I ask you to read this book first. With 17 contributions, Agriculture, Environment and Society is a stimulating symposium on the problems and options confronting the countryside, with quite a range of outlooks represented. Such a book can undermine the left and green movement's shared ignorance of the complexity of rural issues and suggests how essential a red-green alliance is in overcoming the crisis currently facing the countryside.