Why Prince Charles is Right about Agribusiness

*It's easy to scoff at the Prince's latest 'green' intervention, but if you really look at what he's saying, it's completely cogent*

[John Vidal is the Guardian's environment correspondent]

Prince Charles' warnings that genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture will lead to ecological disaster appear only to be adding a dose of passion to the cooler analysis of the world's leading agronomists, climate scientists and grassroots groups in developing countries, who have been saying much the same about farming and ecology for some time.

When asked whether "industrial scale food conglomerates are the way ahead", he said: "What, all run by gigantic corporations? Is that really the answer? I think not. That would be the absolute destruction of everything."

Anaylsis: Charles echoes Third World Network and Via Campesina, the world's two most authoritative farm analysis groups, and is aiming at global agribusinesses which dominate the food chain, and controls seed supplies, chemicals, and food processing as well as transport and retail sales. He also echoes Food Matters, a report from the No 10 Strategy Unit, which recognises that the agribusiness model of food production based on global competition has failed to deliver.

[Charles] "Corporations [are] conducting a gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong. Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?"

Analysis: Charles links climate change and world hunger with the growth of agribusiness and its reliance on oil, large amounts of scarce water, and chemicals. The UN, the UK government and the EU recognise that industrial agriculture, including biofuel, soy and palm oil industries, have been responsible for large-scale deforestation, as well as hunger and a growth in carbon emissions, soil erosion and social problems.

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation said in 2006: "The [global] livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth's increasingly scarce water resources."

[Charles] "A nightmare vision ... in which millions of small farmers are driven off their land and into unsustainable unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."

Analysis: According to UN Habitat, cities are growing by 180,000 people a day and the world's urban infrastructure is unable to cope. Roughly one billion people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa live in slums. The UK government's Commission for Africa said in 2005: "These slums are filled with the unemployed and disaffected. Africa's cities are becoming a powder keg of ... instability and discontent." According to a major UN report in 2003, the greatest underlying reason for the growth in slums has been globalisation.

[Charles] "We are missing the point. We should be discussing food security, not food production. that is what matters and that is what people will not understand."

Analysis: Charles echoes the G8 world leaders who stated in Japan in July: "We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security." The UN declared in May: "Securing world food security may be one of the biggest challenges we face in this century."

[Charles] "And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Analysis: The UN International Assessment of Agriculture (IAASTD), carried out by 400 leading agronomists and scientists with the help of the World Bank found no conclusive evidence that GM crops increase crop yields or that they were the single answer to global hunger. The report,
endorsed by 60 countries including the UK this year, stated that science and technology must be combined with traditional knowledge, working with communities on localised farming solutions.

[Charles] "Small farmers ... would be the victims of gigantic corporations taking over the mass production of food."

Analysis: The FAO, the World Bank and nearly all international development groups argue strongly that peasant farmers must be helped to produce more food. The World Bank, the UK's National Farmers' Union and the EU all recognise that the growth of agribusiness is linked to a worldwide decrease in the number of small farms.

[Charles] "I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place ..."

Analysis: The Punjab in India was the centre of the Green Revolution which introduced hybrid seeds, intensive irrigation and chemical fertlisers and pesticides in the 1960s and 70s. According to Reith lecturer and Indian ecologist Vandana Shiva: "Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have become water-logged desert."

[Charles] "Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture."

Analysis: The government of western Australia says on its website: "Salinity is one of the greatest environmental threats facing Western Australia's agricultural land, water, biodiversity and infrastructure. It is caused by too much water containing dissolved salts in the wrong places in the landscape."

[Charles] "I think it's heading for real disaster."

Analysis: Prince Charles is referring to global ecological problems. Here he echoes many climate change scientists, UN figures and politicians. His language - "unmentionable awfulness", etc - may be quaint, but is he the crank some would have us believe him to be? Absolutely not.