A-Infos (en) Country Life - Colin Ward

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Colin Ward in his Anarchist Notebook here picks upon a theme close to 
his heart. Colin is the editor of _Fields, Factories and Workshops 
Tomorrow_ the modern version of Kropotkin's classic. The first 
chapter is available at our site and the book is published by us. Go 
look at: <http://ww.tao.ca/~freedom/books>

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COUNTRY LIFE
- ANARCHIST NOTE BOOK

Britain, with its heavily-subsidised  agriculture, has fewer land
workers per  head of population than any other European country. It
has fewer even than Hong Kong.  

Plenty of us have sought for explanations of the absence of a British
peasantry and of a tradition of food production linked to other
sources of family income than the standard historical explanations
provide. Into this gap steps a celebrated agricultural historian, Joan
Thirsk, who was an economic historian at Oxford for many years and was
editor of several volumes in the massive Cambridge Agrarian History of
England and Wales. Her new book Alternative Agriculture: a history
from the black death to the present day (Oxford University Press,
#25), explains a great deal.  

She finds that for centuries farmers, landowners, tithe-gatherers and
even statisticians have been concemed almost exclusively with the
production of basic foodstuffs in the forms of grain and meat. But
there have been periods when, for a variety of reasons, markets have
collapsed and a greater diversity of products has crept in. After each
of these periods, she argues, though farmers return to the pursuit of
mainstream foodstuffs, some new procedures or specialities in each
phase "carried positive benefits onto the next".  

Her argument is that three phases of altemative agriculture can be
documented in English history: "The first occurred after the Black
Death in the mid-fourteenth century, and lasted from 1350 until about
1500. The second occurred in the early modern period, and lasted
between about 1650 and 1750, though the way was being paved for it
from at least 1590 if not earlier. The third occurred in the later
nineteenth century, from 1879, and lasted until 1939. We are now in
the 1990s involved in the fourth phase, for which a path was being
opened from the 1970s."  

There were different causes for each of the historical phases of
searching for alternative crops, and for our current situation which
results, as we all realise, from heavily subsidised chemical grain
production which has done devastating damage to the environment. And
one of the fascinations of Joan Thirsk's book is the way many of the
same crops which we regard as alien to British farming today, were
produced in the earlier alternative periods.  

Amusingly she cites a manual by Walter Blith of 1652 recommending the
cultivation of "clover, sainfoin, lucerne, woad, weld, madder, hops,
saffron, liquorice, rape and coleseed, hemp, flax, and orchard and
garden fruits". Rapeseed, far from being an intruder, first appeared
here as a serious crop in the 1560s and remained until the nineteenth
century as a source of industrial oils. European subsidies for its use
as a vegetable oil made it by 1986 "the third most widely grown arable
crop in England after wheat and barley". Subsidy changes have caused a
decline, but the modified oil "is already being used experimentally to
drive public transport vehicles, including a ferry to Italy is in
Berlin, two buses in Reading two pleasure boats on the Norfolk Broads,
and post office vans ... Through genetic engineering, scientists also
see another use for rapeseed in cheap plastics".  

Dr Thirsk pays particular attention to those turn-of-the-century land
reformers like Howard or Kropotkin, who sought the repopulation of the
empty countryside through the combination of intensive agriculture and
industrial work. In her conclusion she reminds us that: 

"In the late nineteenth century phase of alternative agriculture,
Peter Kropotkin argued most eloquently in favour of labour-intensive
work on the land. Demanding more horticulture, he stressed first and
foremost the I common sense of growing  fruit and vegetables at home
to replace rising imports, but he also pleaded the good sense of
providing work for all. A policy of 'low labour and high technology'
had met the situation until 1870, he argued, but after that it was no
longer appropriate. The same may be said today. A notable character 
istic of many horticultural ventures is again their
labour-intensivity, and in a climate of opinion which also
acknowledges labour as a therapy, it is striking how often the
horticulturists themselves stress the value of their work, despite the
hard manual labour.  Since far-sighted individuals have forecast the
impossibility of restoring full employment now that modern technology
is daily reducing the work required, we plainly await another Peter
Kropotkin to pronounce the same lesson all over again. The continuing
obsessive drive to foster technology and shed labour at all costs
belongs appropriately to the phase of mainstream agriculture, and not
to the alternative phase ..." 

Naturally I find this an absorbing conclusion, especially since Dr
Thirsk adds that: 

"... judging by the experience of the three previous phases of
alternative agriculture, the strong assumption of our age that
omniscient govemments will lead the way out of economic problems will
not, in practice, serve. The solutions are more likely to come from
below, from the initiatives of individuals, singly or in groups,
groping their way, after many trials and errors, towards fresh
undertakings. They will follow their own hunches, ideals, inspirations
and obsessions, and along the way some will even be dismissed as
harmless lunatics." 

Her findings have great importance for the shapers of rural policy,
and especially rural planning policy. Especially, since she is a
veteran recorder of the economic history of agriculture, it is
absorbing to see how far she is from current discussion on the need
for new homes with its assumption that 'brown-field' sites (in
existing towns and cities) are virtuous, and 'green-field' sites (in
the country) are the rape of the countryside. For she automatically
sees the "diversion of the rural economy, permitting agriculture and
industry to co-exist in the same communities, and even in the same
households", as a way of avoiding "the painful social disruption which
followed later when industrial growth demanded that workers live in
towns".  

She hopes that maintaining and increasing village populations could
"relieve the heavy pressure on towns". It is marvellous to see current
assumptions turned upside down simply through paying attention to
rural history instead of to un-historical nimbyism. This is the most
significant book on the rural economy and on the assumptions of rural
planning for many years.            

Colin Ward

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