Category: Articles

Luigi’s nibble of the keyhole gardens of Lesotho resonated with me for a couple of reasons. First, it showed that at least some people are not sitting about waiting for the rest of the world to solve the food crisis for them. More than that, though, it set me to thinking about this type of garden.

The BBC, with its customary ahistoricity, seems to think keyhole gardens are utterly novel and “home-grown” in Lesotho. Actually, they have a long history. I first came across them in a demonstration garden by Horticulture Therapy (now known as Thrive). They are round beds, raised to make it easy for people in a wheelchair to tend to the plants, and sized so that one can reach the middle of the bed either from outside the circle or from inside the slot that gives the garden its name. To be honest, I’m not sure who invented them. Permaculture practitioners often take credit for popularising the concept, but I’m sure I’ve seen earlier designs, including lung-like ones in which branching paths end in alveoli that allow access to the entire bed.

The point about keyhole type designs (whether raised for wheelchair users or not) is that they eliminate the need to tread on the soil, which is bad because it can lead to compaction and all the evils that brings. Keyholes, however, are just one manifestation of no-dig gardening. ((Which I am not going to link to because there are so many sites, I don’t want to single out any one of them.)) The shape of the bed is immaterial; what matters is that you don’t step on it and that you don’t destroy the soil structure by turning it upside down once or twice a year. And no-dig of this sort is just one manifestation of very intensive horticulture. ((To which I will definitely link: John Jeavons and Mel Bartholomew are the gurus, although there are others.)) And the weird part about no-dig, intensive horticulture is that it seems to be the child of affluence and self-sufficiency.

The poor, who need more than ever to be self-sufficient, have not generally been treated to these techniques.

It isn’t glamorous and it isn’t high tech, but it can deliver far more food than any other method. Not the calories of starchy staples, perhaps, although potatoes and other roots and tubers certainly do well in no-dig beds, but a wonderfully nutritious and satisfying diversity of fruit and vegetables. Furthermore, as the Lesotho example shows, there’s often a surplus to sell nearby.

One problem, I suspect, is that precisely because it isn’t high-tech and glamorous, intensive no-dig horticulture requires cadres of trainers. The system also needs to be tailored to people’s preferences and local conditions. I expect that the best way to propagate it would be to have demonstration villages that could train trainers and send them out into their world to spread the news. Wait a minute! Isn’t that something that Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages could be doing? ((What do you mean they don’t work?)) But I digress.

It seems to me, sitting here at the back of the Hall of Flags in the belly of the FAO beast, that widespread adoption of intensive, no-dig horticulture wherever poor people have access to at least a little land could do an enormous amount of good. There are opportunities for entrepreneurship and empowerment, and a prospect of real improvement. I just have no idea how to get something like that rolling.

The snatches I’m hearing from the statements and discussions (and I’m not privy to much corridor conversation) are all about high-yielding seeds and fertilizers (made from expensive oil) and irrigation. That package may have done as much good as it can.

Would it hurt to devote a small percentage of the millions being pledged to a different approach? Come to that, would anybody who is as appalled as I am about the same-old same-old being peddled as a solution care to bankroll something different?

A little while ago a commenter asked why I hate subsidies so. I said I’d try and work something up, but the truth is that because this isn’t really my field of expertise, I rely on others. What I’ve read in the past has convinced me that production subsidies in general are a very poor idea, but I would only be parroting what I’ve read if I were to explain why. Fortunately I don’t have to.

There’s a somewhat brief discussion at an Economist blog. Better yet, Tim Haab at Environmental Economics has recently done a very good job of explaining, in reply to a student question. This is Haab’s own summary:

Who benefits from U.S. farm subsidies?

1. U.S. farmers—increased income

2. Foreign consumers—lower prices and increased quantity supplied of staples

Who is hurt by U.S. farm subsidies?

1. U.S. consumers—someone has to pay for the subsidies and that will come in the form of higher taxes and higher domestic food prices.

2. Foreign farmers—crowded out of the market by the surplus crop generated in the U.S.

Actually, you can delete U.S. from that without altering the arguments one bit. Subsidies generally create a surplus, and governments sell that surplus on world markets at whatever price they can get to reduce the cost of the subsidy. That can be good news for famine relief agencies, who may be able to get their supplies at low cost. But the gifts to rich country farmers damage farmers in poorer countries, who cannot compete with subsidized imports. They also damage the health of consumers there and at home, because the products that are available cheaply are generally rich in energy but very poor in other nutrients. Subsisting on a diet of cheap wheat flour fried in cheap oil and dusted with cheap sugar may prevent hunger, but it brings ill health in its wake.

There are many other ill effects of subsidies that people more expert than me have examined at length, but that’s enough to be getting on with and I think it justifies my dislike for them. In fact a few years ago the organization I work for, which is dedicated to improving the lot of poor rural farmers, was examining its future and wondering what directions it should take. At a retreat we were asked what the single most important contribution we could make would be. I said, “quit and devote ourselves to dismantling agricultural subsidies”. There was a somewhat embarrassing silence.

There are ways of supporting farmers that don’t encourage over-production. One is to pay the farmers not for what they grow but for how they grow it. Pay them for managing the landscape, in other words, and for providing goods and services such as cleaner water, hedgerows, public access and that sort of thing. One that I used to be a bit familiar with was Tir Cymen, a scheme in Wales ((Which, strangely, is not easy to find written-up on the intertubes.)). Farmers had to draw up a plan for environmental management, which if approved resulted in additional payments to them. As I recall it was pretty successful, and there other similar schemes dotted around Europe, which is still struggling to get rid of its main forms of (production) subsidy.

Most subsidy schemes in the developed world were created some time ago when there was a desire to support small farmers and secure domestic food supplies. They have been subverted by changes in the nature of farming, such that most of the cash goes to a few farmers (or farming companies) and the small farmers continue to struggle. The big ones, the ones getting the big money, can afford to lobby hard to protect their incomes. In times of crisis starving people may benefit from subsidized food, but rich governments might actually save money by simply buying food when emergencies require it and giving that food to the relief agencies.

All that is why I hate subsidies. Over to you …