What is Land For? The Food, Fuel and Climate Change Debate

What is Land For? The Food, Fuel and Climate Change Debate, edited by MichaelWinter and Matt Lobley, London and Washington, Earthscan, 2009, xxþ340 pp.,US$79.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-84407-720-5Somewhere on this page there’s a serious case of false advertising. Perhaps it’s in thetitle of the book, which suggests that it is about the global questions surroundingfood production, biofuels and the impacts of climate change. Or perhaps it’s in mytemerity in reviewing the book for this journal, since that might seem to imply thatthe book has something to do with peasants.Well, it doesn’t. It’s about contemporary Great Britain. And although there areallusions to the world’s food supply throughout – mostly of the classic neo-Malthusian ‘How on earth shall we meet the challenge of feeding the world’s rapidlygrowing population?’ sort – there is a distinct lack of consideration of theagricultural context in which Britons, as well as the world’s peasants, live in thetwenty-first century.This is perhaps inevitable in a book like this, which shares some of the typicalproblems of multi-authored edited volumes. One can learn a lot of interesting thingsfrom it, including: what is AD (anaerobic digestion), how do butterflies respond toshort-rotation coppicing of willows for bioenergy, what is the global potential forcarbon sequestration, how will plant distributions (in Britain) change under globalwarming, how does one do risk analysis of government policies, and how doesconsequentialism differ from deontological contractarianism and other land-relevantethical concepts? One can even hear the story of the two American artists wholooked at a map of central England, thought they saw the shape of a dragon, anddeveloped this idea into years of gainful employment for themselves as ersatz landuse planners. What is harder to find, however, is a comprehensive view of what landis or might be for.Nonetheless, there are some interesting concepts in some of the chapters. ClivePerry contrasts neoliberalism with neomercantilism, showing that the latter is insome respects just as powerful an ideology in the twenty-first century as the former.The political leaders of industrialized lands seem to be steadfastly againstprotectionism when talking about other countries, particularly developing ones.When they are talking about their own countries and particularly their farmers,however, their free-trade ideology seems rather flexible.This raises the question of just what ‘food security’ means when applied tocountries of the global North. Is it a good thing for every land and nation, and dothe same arguments for it apply universally? Usually progressive thinkers tend toargue that it means food self-sufficiency, though with implicit exceptions for thenecessities of everyday intellectual life, such as coffee, tea and chocolate. But shouldthis apply to a country like Great Britain too? Ironically, it is being applied there –but the proponents of ‘neo-productivism’, as an argument for GMOs and high-input