wfn.org | Food fight: Church of Scotland defends the small farmer, a threatened species

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Note #7366 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

02-August-2002
02280

Food fight

Church of Scotland defends the small farmer, a threatened species

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - Martin Green, a Scots farmer, can rattle off statistics about how globe-straddling agribusinesses are putting small farmers out of work - even in Scotland, a picturesque little country with pastures full of sheep, cattle, barley and oats.

Of course, the fields are not so full, these days. Sheep and cattle were slain by the thousands last year to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in the British Isles - a strategy many farmers still consider ruthlessly extreme.

At the same time, the prices of oats, in this porridge-eating culture, have declined by more than 60 percent in the past five years. 

Even malting barley, a once-reliable cash crop - a key ingredient of Scotch whiskey - isn't bankable any more. Distilleries save money by importing barley from Russia and Poland.

"Whiskey is sold at a luxury price," says Green, who, like many other young farmers in Scotland, is trying to develop what he hopes will be a trendy niche market in venison, which he now raises instead of beef. He says his home in the Scottish highlands, outside of Inverness, is "surrounded by distilleries - there are 10 within five miles of my house. 

"But the only thing in the whiskey that's Scotch anymore is the water."

Green's lament is coming to sound familiar in Britain, where the pound has come to be worth more than the new Euro, which means that it's penny-wise to import agricultural goods from East Germany and elsewhere in Europe than to use domestic products. "Morale is very, very low," says Green, describing the five-year recession that has Britain's rural communities stymied.

Farmers say nobody listens to them, but that doesn't keep them from complaining that they cannot be competitive without the help of government subsidies.

Now, the Church of Scotland is lending an ear. 

In a report on its pastoral response to the foot-and-mouth crisis - and the slaughter of about 89,000 cattle and 655,000 sheep in Scotland alone - the church said recently that it must address the theological implications of the global nightmare in which relentless competitive pressures in the food industry crush the small and poor and favor the big and rich.

The complexities of the global market, it says, defies the Biblical mandate for "compassionate stewardship" of the earth, its resources and the people who share them. 

So the report ends simply: It urges consumers to buy local goods whenever possible, rather than patronizing grocery conglomerates and supermarket chains.

"Cheapness is not always the best thing to look for," it says. "Frequently, the producer, in the UK or across the world, is being played off against the other in order to drive down the price. This is not good, for the farmer, the environment, or the stability of the food chain." 

"There's growing recognition that we have a duty as consumers to act in a responsible way," says the Rev. Richard Frazer, the Aberdeen pastor who headed up the team that drafted the report.

"Most people don't know where their food comes from," he says. "We've lost the connection to the local farmer."

Frazer points out that shoppers will choose supermarket strawberries shipped in from Spain without giving a thought to local farmers offering a comparable product.

While farmers like Green are skeptical about whether the tiny Church of Scotland can have any impact on the global economy, Christopher Jones says small groups can make a big difference by changing their buying habits.

Jones, the director of the Farm Crisis Network in North Hampton, England, recommends starting with the supermarket manager. "Just ask him, 'Where did this come from? Why there? Why are you stocking only one variety of apple? Where do the strawberries come from?' There are examples where doing that kind of thing starts something."

The next step, he says, is to patronize the growers of local produce.

Jones admits that it's hard to get at the big conglomerates, but he says it's not impossible.

He's quick to say that many people who run corporations sit in church pews on Sunday mornings - so the church is uniquely poised to bring together corporate leaders and farmers from across the world church who are struggling to survive in a predatory market.

"It isn't a free market," he says, citing big U.S. corporations like Cargill and Wal-Mart, who - by widening distribution and lowering prices - control sectors of the market by under-cutting the prices of goods offered by smaller vendors, often, putting them out of business. Companies like Nestle, he said, "on this side of the water" are a similar problem.

Jones says there has to be a way of reaching "misguided Christians" inside powerful corporate structures.

He says the global church can help unite small farmers here and abroad, helping them to understand that small competitors need not be enemies, since they are both "getting screwed" by soft trade standards that ignore animal welfare, food-safety protections, and the importance of sustaining rural communities.

"We've got a very big struggle ahead of us in that area," he says.  "... It's going to take a major upheaval to handle this problem, something on the level of a Jubilee campaign." That's a reference to a church-led global effort to reduce the debt of Third World nations.

The Rev. Gordon Gatward, the director of the Arthur Rank Centre, a rural mission of English churches, says Christians should stand against a system that gives big producers an unfair advantage. "We've actually got to be prophetic," he says. "We've got to challenge the problems in the system."

In the Scottish countryside, that's an easier message to sell church-goers because even non-farmers can appreciate the burdens of small farmers. Urbanites tend to forget the problem as soon as journalists move onto another story.

The Farm Crisis Network, a organization that is beginning to assist bankrupt farm families financially so that they can stay in their communities, got more than 20 appeals for help during the new program's first three weeks, according to Gatward.

Green doesn't mince words about any of this.

"When you buy the cheapest products, you're undermining the society you live in," he says, adding: "It's hard to get that across to people" who don't think of buying food as a moral issue.

Green says it has been hard for himself and his wife, Moira, to witness the demise of Britain's rural culture. 

When a supermarket opened in Elgin, a town of 20,000 near his farm, several local butcher shops went belly-up, he says, adding that one former butcher now works as a parking attendant at Safeway.

"They created 80 jobs," he says, adding that plenty of other people were hurt. "That's not a net gain."

He says he has watched as Europe has gradually become a homogenized society, increasingly adopting the shopping-mall culture of the United States. 

"When you lose markets to multi-nationals, you lose communities to multi-nationals," he argues. "You can't have a village without shops. Without shops, you often don't have a pub. Without a pub, you lose the post office. So you can't pick up your pension check, either. And then people don't stay.

"And when they don't stay, you don't have a church."

Frazer says the new report is just a beginning.

"The idea is beginning to take root," he says. "The membership of the church constitutes a fairly substantial consumer base. We've got to get people to be much more thoughtful. ... It might be a slightly ambitious thing, but we've got to start somewhere."
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