The Crystals of Catastrophe

by Peter Lanyon 

Sugar beet is such a feature of Norfolk farming that one may take it for granted. One expects to get stuck behind those lorries and to see the plume of steam above the Cantley factory. We are always hearing of new pests and diseases and of the wrong sort of weather for the crop, and we don’t notice that these headlines are interspersed with record-breaking sugar beet harvests.

We pass so many people every day who are obese that we don’t notice that either, however much harm we know it does to folk and however much of the NHS’s struggling budget is devoted to treating it.

Put these two commonplaces together and one wants to deny it, to say it must be more complex than that. It’s not. East Anglia is a centre for growing a drug that damages far more people than tobacco and narcotics, is not only legal but is blatantly flaunted, contains no useful fibre, minerals, or vitamins, is pure, white and deadly, and was castigated as causing “The Saccharine Disease” as long ago as 1974 By Dr T L Cleave.

There’s more. Because it’s a bulky crop torn out of the fields during the winter when they are wet, it requires machinery that destroys the structure of the soil, compacting the deeper layers and churning the shallower ones to lifeless mud. This became so bad a few years back that the mud being trundled out of fields onto the roads became an East Anglian scandal, only shelved by the development of more expensive machinery, but much of the soil ends as mud in the water courses as before. Bigger machinery still cajoles the denatured soil back into what passes for health in time for the next crop.

What is disguised during this rape of the land is that East Anglia’s topsoil is being removed from its fields and run into its ditches, streams, rivers, drains and sewage systems. Since the Romans navigated their way far inland along the regions’ many rivers, these waterways have become progressively silted up, a mere vestige of their former size and depth. When we boast of the Broads as a boating paradise, we conceal the fact that they are a trivial (and artificial) remnant of a one-time efficient and low-energy method of transport.

The silting up has increased enormously since fossil fuel replaced horses, and since mechanisation required our fields to be run together, with ditches and field-draining often modified in piecemeal fashion instead of through sensible overall planning. This is one of the main reasons for the increase in flooding, only you won’t often hear the Government or water utilities admit this – the farming lobby is too powerful for that. Indeed our farmers will tell you, correctly, that since 2006, reduced subsidies paid to them by the EU have forced them considerably to reduce the amount of sugar beet they grow.

The EU had to do this to conform to the World Trade Organisation’s requirements to reduce such subsidies to prevent sugar beet being sold at below world market prices. Thanks to the subsidies our farmers had been getting, they could afford to sell their sugar so cheaply that exporters could dump it on less developed countries still cheaply enough to put those countries’ own farmers out of business. Oxfam played a memorable role in attacking this shabby system, and our Government and our farmers have never forgiven them for it. But for Oxfam and other NGOs, we would be wrecking our fields even more with sugar beet than we are now.

I wish the tale might end there. It can’t. There are two big UK sugar firms, Associated British Foods (AFB) that produces Silver Spoon, and Tate and Lyle. While the two firms’ granulated white sugars are exactly the same substance – pure, white and deadly crystallised sucrose – Tate and Lyle has always been proud that its product is pure cane sugar, whereas AFB’s Silver Spoon is proudly home-grown beet sugar. Norfolk is near the northern limit for growing beet, and the tropical sugar cane has a higher sugar yield and is sometimes considered to be a more efficient use of land. The appalling conditions of sugar cane workers, however, mean that is nothing but hypocrisy. One can’t compare the sugar cane workers’ casualties from pesticides, cutlass injuries, heat, overwork and callous employers on the one hand with damage to our own soil from growing sugar beet on the other. Each ought to be avoided – even if it didn’t result in our addiction to sugar!

Associated with the restructuring of the sugar industry in the wake of the EU changes, several refineries in the UK closed down, and AFB began to shift their focus towards cane sugar, buying sugar importers Billingtons and then South African cane plantation owners Illovo. I shall let Simon Fairlie, joint editor of The Land (Issue 13, Winter 2012-13) continue:

 “In theory the increase in demand for sugar cane should have improved prospects for third world farmers. But most of the imports are not coming from smallholder producers in poor developing countries; instead the beneficiaries are more likely to be land-hungry agro-industrialists who want to cash in on the sugar-cane boom.”

The massive land-grabbing perpetrated by rich corporations across the world deserves a column of its own, but because of the war in Mali it’s appropriate to mention one such land grab there, up-river on the Niger from its broad inland delta on the fringe of the Sahara. The delta area depends on the river for its remarkably rich and complex ecosystem providing sustenance for three different ethnic groups.

Further up the river a barrage was completed by the French well before independence to realise a dream of irrigating a million hectares of farmland, but so far less than a tenth of it has been developed. To change this, Mali began looking for foreign investors, and one of those was Illovu, mentioned above as a part of ABF, owners of Silver Spoon, who planned to cultivate some 14,000 hectares of sugar cane there.

“Its contract stipulated that the regional government should first remove the 1,600 people occupying the land, and the project’s water needs should be fully met before anyone else on the distribution canal can receive anything. If there is any water left that is. The project will take 20 cubic metres a second from the River Niger during the first phase alone ……. According to the Office du Niger data, since 2006 the barrage has failed to discharge the official minimum of water downstream to the delta between January and May. There simply isn’t enough water now.”*

Illovu pulled out when the war started, but one can imagine the chaos it left behind.

As a young man I was deeply upset by Vicki Baum’s “The Weeping Wood”, about the sadness behind the history of rubber, and still feel unease about that material. If we renamed sugar as “the crystals of catastrophe” might it help us to wean ourselves off our dreadful addiction?

* - extracted from Fred Pearce’s book The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth, Eden Project Books, 2012, featured in The Land (ibid), for which I am grateful.

Do you see the cat?

by Pete Smith
 
“Seeing the cat” has served as a metaphor for achieving an understanding the teachings of Henry George since he set them out in his bestselling economic treatise “Progress and Poverty” in 1879. George sought to understand why there are recessions and poverty amid plenty and his investigation led him to identify the central role of land in the economy. The original story goes something like this:

"I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of a shop window... I took a glance myself, but I saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the picture: 'Do you see the cat?' ...I spoke to the crowd. "Gentlemen, I do not see a cat in the picture; is there a cat there?" Someone in the crowd replied, "Naw, there ain't no cat there. Here's a crank who says he sees a cat in it, but none of the rest of us can." Then the crank spoke up. "I tell you," he said, "there is a cat there. The picture is all cat. What you fellows take for a landscape is nothing more than a cat's outlines. And you needn't call a man a crank either because he can see more with his eyes than you can with yours."

The metaphor works because the cat – like role of land in the economy - is utterly unmistakeable, once it becomes clear. I first “saw the cat” about three years and now I can’t help but see it everywhere. I see it when I walk up the High Street and pass street traders, empty shops and unaffordable house prices in estate agents’ windows. I see it when I walk past the Job Centre and derelict brownfield sites in other parts of town. I see it when the discussion turns to the barriers facing business start-ups. Any media coverage of economics, welfare dependency and poverty and again I “see the cat”.
 
The ramifications of these findings are far reaching and extremely relevant to the Transition Movement today as it develops initiatives to build resilience, re-localize the economy and create prosperity that is shared across the community. To be successful Transition requires social cohesion which in turn rests on equal access to economic opportunities and relative parity of wealth. However the Law of Rent is immutable – it is an economic reality that cannot be wished out of existence as we shift to a new economic paradigm. Landlords still need to be paid and new enterprises still need to secure locations at the going rate. The squeeze of rent will continue to be felt.
 

A possible future scenario is that land values will fall as the old economy unravels and landowners, finally recognising that there will be no “return to normal”, capitulate. This may then create the conditions for economic rebirth – a transition economy of new work opportunities, full employment and decent reward for an honest day’s work.  Examples of communities pulling themselves up by their bootstraps can be found in the past, particularly in the aftermath of wars and natural disasters. This “pioneer phase” is typically characterised by a high degree of cooperation and community spirit. Nevertheless as the economy blossoms it is inevitable that rents will rise once more and a wedge will again be driven horizontally through society, elevating those above it and pushing down those beneath.


What then is the solution to this problem? Henry George proposed that the economic rent of land be shared equally by the community rather than be allowed to flow into private pockets. He held that this remedy is in keeping with the highest principles of justice because people own what they create through their labour while the things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all. Whether or not one accepts George’s remedy the crux of the matter is that as human beings we cannot survive without access to the natural environment. The big issue at the heart of economics therefore is the terms upon which people have access to land. Understanding this and developing an effective response is the challenge facing all of us who are engaging in the task of creating an economy that works for people and planet.

“Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action, and when there is correct thought, right action will follow”. Henry George, Social Problems, 1886.

Pete Smith is co-founder of the Henry George Society of Devon, amateur economist, and entrepreneur.

Post originally published on Transition Network's Social Reporting Project during their recent week on Economics


Images: the cat in question; estate agent window, Totnes; derelict buildings - photos Pete Smith

Robin Hood and our Tax System

By Mark Crutchley

Robin Hood, as we all know, stole from the rich to give to the poor, so it comes as no surprise to find that the modern day tax for which his name has been appropriated, doesn’t find favour with our current government. Nonetheless earlier this week you may have seen that a group of 11 European nations, including both France and Germany, agreed plans to introduce a Financial Transactions Tax – the so-called Robin Hood Tax. The tax would be a very small charge on all financial transactions such as foreign exchange, bond, share and derivative deals. Because the value of these transactions is so great – foreign exchange turnover is well over $4,000 billion a day (source BIS), around half of it traded in London – even a small percentage tax will raise billions of pounds for the governments which implement the tax. 

Here in the UK though the government refuses to implement the idea, despite the fact that London being the largest financial centre in Europe would mean that they stand to raise more than any other government; perhaps up to £20 billion a year. The tax would – according to our government – damage the competitive position of London in the global financial markets. It says it would only participate if the tax were to be levied globally, something which it well knows is not going to happen. But is London’s competitive status really so weak that a tax of 0.01% (£100 on a million pound deal), the likely rate on currency and derivative transactions, going to undermine it.

Meanwhile the Confederation of British Industry threatens that the tax would adverse impact on people saving through pensions and other investments, ignoring the fact that most pension funds do not engage in currency speculation or intensive use of derivatives. It would be “damaging for jobs and growth”, well perhaps for a few in the investment banks, but what ridiculous exaggeration.

This is just part of a pattern which sees companies – with their high level access to government allowing them to influence policy (see Guardian article) – setting an agenda which favours ever lower corporate taxes, not just here in the UK but across the world. Accountants PwC reported lastweek that tax payments by a group of 100 largest UK listed and headquartered companies fell by 18% last year despite their profits having gone up. This continues a trend in payments going back to 2005 which has seen the corporate tax take reducing. And this isn’t through tax dodging, which sees the likes of Starbucks and Amazon moving their profits around to low tax countries; it’s a result of government cuts in corporate tax rates; cuts which are set to see the corporation tax rate fall significantly further in the next couple of years. Competitive tax reductions may move a small number of jobs from one country to another, but have far more influence on raising profits than on economic growth. All this is supposed to boost our economy, but I don’t see much sign of that happening, do you?

The financial crisis was triggered by the reckless lending and speculation of our banks and the British and European economies are still struggling to come to terms with it. A transaction tax on the speculative activities of those same banks could both alleviate the burden of cuts which are being imposed on the poorest sections of society and potentially reduce the risk of a recurrence in the future. The only losers are the investment banks and their massively well rewarded employees. How sad that our government has chosen to side with them, rather than with the overwhelming majority of the people of Great Britain.

Bees, Honey Cell Bases and Belligerence

by Peter Lanyon

Most people know that honeycombs are formed of hexagonal wax cells, and that this economic arrangement stores a maximum amount of honey in a given space, since the cells are tessellated – they fit together side by side, wasting no space between them. Some people are able to restrain themselves long enough from the delectable taste of honey to notice that the intact comb consists of two layers of cells, one above the other, with a wax wall closing one layer off from the other. If they wonder how the bees were able to fill the lower layer with honey, they may deduce that in the beehive the layers are built vertically, not horizontally as in the way the comb reaches the table. Indeed the hive is full of these two-sided vertical combs with the mouths of the cells facing sideways, with just enough room between each comb for the bees to tend every cell.

Thanks to television, we are familiar enough with this sort of thing to nod at it as just another example of nature’s ingenuity. And you may just nod again if I tell you that the cells do not face exactly sideways, but are tilted upwards a little so that the fresh, runny nectar is less likely to drip out. If I now ask you to suggest what the wax wall is like that forms the base of each cell and separates its contents from the cells in the other side of the comb, please bear with me.

The simplest arrangement would be a flat vertical wax sheet on which all the cells abut, but that is not at all what it is like in fact. Instead, the base of each cell is a shallow cone or dimple, formed of three congruent rhomboidal faces, that protrudes into the other layer, those faces being shared with three cells in the other layer. Unlike some modern expensive toys that do it all for you, this blog will leave you the fun of imagining that, but the diagrams below may help. The clue is that the separating wall zigzags shallowly as it passes the conical cell bases protruding alternately from each layer. It is by no means flat.

One might assume that it evolved that way because it is stronger, but the double layer of tessellated cells is pretty strong anyway. The answer - worked out by the famous Swiss mathematician Samuel Koenig at the request of the French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur in the early 1700s – is that such a structure holds the maximum amount of honey for the least quantity of wax, wax being an energy-intensive substance for bees to make. A flat wall would use more wax to hold the same honey.

You may say, not much more! Not enough more to matter, surely? But if I tell you that it is a species characteristic of honey bees, differentiating them from other related bees, then I think you’ll have to agree that it must be the product of evolution. You may still say - so what? To me it illustrates the extraordinary length of time that has been available for bees to subject to natural selection various types of wax comb design through the aeons, so that the genes for the more adapted cell bases could end up in today’s honey bees, and not those for flat bases instead. It’s not as though bees think, for their accumulated “brain” is about the size of a pin head, so it hasn’t happened with the speed that cultural evolution happens in us. It has taken … just as long as it takes. And it has cost all those less successful plans in the genes – maybe brilliant in other aspects – that have gone to the wall on the way, through being borne by just a few fewer bee colonies each generation until the genes and the plans were lost.

To modify Blaise Pascal: “Le silence eternel de ces temps infinis m’effraie!”  It may have taken some 10 million years.

Compare it with our own cultural evolution. Less than one thousandth of that time ago, we were still hunter-gatherers, for whom the response to any degree of overcrowding was to move away towards less threatened resources. Halve that time again, and we were just getting really good at slaughtering each other in the competition for land, having had the brilliant idea of agriculture. And now, that system has been such a successful cultural evolution in terms of population that we are running out of resources, out of land, and yet are still inventing better ways to slaughter each other ( – including recently such bogus excuses as the “responsibility to protect” to get over the sanctity of national boundaries).

What makes this even more potent is that any suggestion that we have taken a wrong direction is immediately quashed by another, parallel evolutionary quirk we have evolved – the overwhelming gender imbalance in humans that predisposes us inexorably to warfare and militarism. And there may be a third element in the fateful pattern - that capitalism seems on a par with masculinity in driving us into incessant conflict.

The bees may have had a thousand such blips – or evolutionary wrong directions – during their progress, when seemingly brilliant types of comb and shapes of cell have had to run their courses in order for the flaws in them to manifest themselves. And they have arrived at this present successful type, with a tri-rhomboidal base, and this is even now being tested by nature to see whether it is equal to the challenge - of mites, or of humans or of some of our spin-offs, such as pesticides and climate change, or simply of human interference in general with bees. 

In comparison, our combination of agriculture, warfare and aggressive gender imbalance may be just one little blip of thousands to come before we can say we are as soundly based as the honey bee – if we survive all the blips. And we won’t ever have been blown back into the stone age, for there is no backwards for evolution, only forwards – only it may not be our current idea of forwards at all. 

This is uncomfortable territory for us all. On Saturday, 16^th February at 11 am. academic Cynthia Cockburn will be talking in the Curve at the Norwich Forum on “Towards a Different Common Sense”. Among the different senses she may tackle are those that concern militarism, gender and capitalism.  (The bits about hunter-gatherers and agriculture are at least partly my own; about bees very much the bees’ own.)