British agriculture and farming would have to support over 60 million mouths

Comment on BNP Policies : BNP Agriculture Policy by David.

British agriculture and farming would have to support over 60 million mouths today and probably a lot more than double that sometime in the future (population is not under control and won’t be in our life time). There are far more densely packed countries than Britain, we can theoretically support a lot more people as long as we see ourselves as part of the world and are willing to trade for resources like food.

Food is no different to any other resource, if we didn’t buy in gas from Russia, we’d freeze in winter. We are no longer living in a world where our land can supply most of the raw resources we need to live. Most of the resources under our land and seas have been used up and so we have no choice but to trade for them until (if ever) we replace them with renewable sources (like energy from the sun, sea and air).

I’m sure as a BNP voter you are completely against immigration, OK fair enough, imagine we’ve stopped immigration completely, we’ll still get to a population amount that this country can not sustain (stopping immigration just slows population growth, it doesn’t reverse it) without importing food from other countries, we have to see ourselves as part of the world and trade in a way where we are so closely linked with our neighbours (and them with us) we can not ever go to serious conflict with each other.

Reading what the BNP says this is the exact opposite of what they want.

We do not have the land like the USA and Russia have for mass agriculture and though I’m sure over time we’ll have better farming techniques (like farming on more than one level, GM crops if we ever grow up and embrace the technology), we live on a relatively small island and will struggle to feed us all, just like we can no longer supply our energy needs.

If you’ve looked into mass farming on the scale they use in places like the USA and Brazil you’d understand it’s part of the solution. Enormous farms that stretch as far as the eye can see producing relatively cheap food on almost a factory scale. There’s no way we could do anything like that in Britain, we’ve already cut down the majority of our forests and already use the majority of our fertile land for farming, we have no where to expand further farming into!

Imagine what we could do with a continent like Africa if it were managed better and technology was embraced.

As a side note: in Britain people break into land growing genetically modified test crops to destroy them, in Africa people break into farms growing genetically modified test crops to steal them so they can grow them on their farms! The difference is we don’t perceive a need for GM crops, a continent like Africa does.

The future will be mass farming on the large continents with fertile land and we’ll trade for what we need. Yes we should maximise our own farm production, but unless we had a substantial decrease in the number of people living on our island AND that number won’t increase significantly, we can not produce all our own food.

Fortunately we live in a global economy, so as long as we have many stable trading partners we’ll not starve or go cold in winter.

BTW although I don’t think we’ll be able to produce all our food needs I do believe with technology advances we’ll be able to supply all out energy needs. Reality is we’ll have to supply our own energy needs since fossil fuels are running out. Sooner we get on with it the better.

David