Paul Collier

A burst of applause and a resounding cheer for someone who is rather an intellectual hero: simply for telling it like it is.

Paul Collier:

In response to 19th-century industrialisation the British aristocracy rediscovered medieval chivalry. The romantic fashion was in part comic: jousts, castles and armour. But it had darker consequences; the privileging of honour over intelligence, which became the bedrock vision of the English gentleman, had its apotheosis in the heroic stupidities of the first world war. Now, in response to modern agriculture, the aristocracy, with Prince Charles in the vanguard, has rediscovered organic peasant farming. Again it has its comic side: organic peasant produce is a luxury - you will find Duchy Originals, the prince's crested brand, in the better supermarkets; and the lifestyle is for sale in his attractive model village of Poundbury. But my concern is its darker consequences. Organic peasant agriculture is a solution for the angst of affluence, but not hunger. Its apotheosis is the ban on GM crops.

Worth noting that all of the prominent greenies are indeed toffs.

Europe can afford romanticism, but the African poor cannot. The return to organic peasant agriculture is an appealing fantasy with disturbing consequences. The GM ban has already persisted for 12 years: how much more hunger must be endured before it is faced down?

Quite.

I'd add one further point. For there to be peasant agriculture requires that there be peasants and that people live as peasants, doing the backbreaking work that peasants have to do. That is, to get to the desired Green goal, hundreds of millions if not billions of our fellow humans, every one as precious as you or I, have to be condemned to Marx's idiocy of rural life.

Very caring of the toffs, isn't it?

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