So Shall We Reap
What's gone wrong with the world's food - and how to fix it.

Colin Tudge exposes the devastating fallout from today’s relentless drive for maximum food production at rock-bottom costs. In this explosive book he shows how we can take back control from the corporate barons, feed the world and, ultimately, ensure the survival of humanity.

Tudge writes:

"The prospects for humanity and for the world as a whole are somewhere between glorious and dire. It is hard to be much more precise.

By 'glorious' I mean that our descendants - all who are born on to this earth - could live very well indeed, each as comfortably and a great deal more securely than any ancient potentate, and could continue to do so for as long as the earth can support life, which should be for a very long time indeed. We should at least be thinking in terms of the next million years. Furthermore, our descendants could continue to enjoy the company of other species - establishing a much better relationship with them than we have now. Other animals need not live constantly on their beam-ends, and in perpetual fear of us. Many of those fellow species now seem bound to disappear but a significant proportion, enough to be well worth saving, could and should continue to live alongside us. Such a future may seem idyllic, and so it is. Yet I do not believe it is fanciful: no mere 'Utopia'. There is nothing in the physical fabric of the earth or in our own biology to suggest that this is not possible.

'Dire' means that we, human beings, could be in deep trouble within the next few centuries, living but also dying in large numbers in political terror and from starvation, while our fellow creatures, a huge and random swathe of them, would simply disappear, leaving only the ones that we find convenient, or that we can't shake off: our chickens, our cattle, and the flies and mice that come along for the ride. I'm taking it to be self-evident that glory is preferable.

We think of ourselves as British or French or American or whatever, or as doctors or bricklayers, as frustrated schoolchildren or harassed parents, each with our own particular problems and claiming our particular 'rights', hut we don't as a matter of habit think of ourselves in our raw biological form - as animals: collectively as the species Homo sapiens. We don't treat the world at large as our habitat and no longer think, as many other societies have often thought, of other species as our fellow creatures. Anthoropologists tell us that some other peoples through history and prehistory saw themselves as a part of a Creation, alongside other species: they might see themselves primarily as Cherokee or Algonquin but also as the brothers and sisters of bears and beavers. There are hints of such a tradition in the Western world, for example in St Francis of Assisi, but in the modern West this is not the common view. Rational and materialist on the one hand, and effetely 'spiritual' on the other, we like to think we are above mere flesh, and that with our rational minds and our technologies we can do whatever we want. There is no need to take other life forms seriously, or the fabric of the earth itself, because we can make of them what we will. The men and women who run the world's affairs and spend so many hours around the conference table seem to think exclusively in these political and bureaucratic terms. Until very recent years, when 'environment' became a slogan that could attract votes, and 'biodiversity' has become the subject both of diplomacy and of law, most politicians (I can attest from experience) found any mention of either to be slightly ludicrous. Even now, the world's leaders typically seem to suppose that 'environment' means 'golf course' and that 'biodiversity' is simply another resource, vaguely linked to tourism on the one hand and to biotechnology on the other, but in either case far less interesting than oil.

But whatever else we may be, whatever our aspirations and pretensions, in the end we are animals, and big and voracious animals at that; and the greatest mistake humanity has made this past few thousand years is to forget this most elementary fact. Earlier societies might be forgiven for messing up their environments (as the archaeological and historical records show they often did) because, at least in some cases, they did not know enough biology to keep out of trouble. We have much less excuse. Present science is far from perfect but we should do better than, say, the ancient Greeks or the Mayans. On the whole, though, we don't. Indeed, because we act on a much bigger scale and with much more vigour, we do a great deal worse. The trouble is, of course, that we don't use our science for general human comfort and long-term survival; and the basic reason for that, I suggest, is not that the people in charge are evil but that they, along with most of the rest of us, have misconstrued the nature of the problem. We don't think of ourselves as animals. We don't think of the world as our habitat, but as modelling clay to be shaped as we choose. Nature is remarkably flexible and astonishingly adaptable, and will lend itself to a huge variety of manipulations. But it is not infinitely forgiving. If for commercial or political or ideological reasons our manipulations drift too far from what is biologically permissible ('sustainable' is the fashionable term) then the biological systems collapse, spin off in quite new directions, and humanity and our fellow creatures must collapse with them. The archaeological and historical record is crammed with examples of policy outstripping biological possibility, or sometimes of plain apathy; and as the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed, 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes'.

"Dazzling ... humane ... important ... this book is a wake-up call" - Felicity Lawrence, Guardian

"Brilliant ... I strongly urge everyone to read So Shall We Reap" - Monty Don, Observer

Size: 115 x 197 mm
Pages: 451

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