This land is our land!

The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.

The first Digger Manifesto, April 20, 1649

by Roz Paterson

The True Levellers, or Diggers, would be appalled but probably not that surprised by what it happening at Manor Gardens Allotments in south London today.
The land given in perpetuity to the working-class people of Hackney, by philanthropist Major Arthur Villiers, and cultivated since by generations of locals and immigrants, from Jamaica, Africa, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, is due to be flattened to make way for the vast, and vastly over-budget, Olympic 2012 development.
Ironically, this long-loved, well-cultivated and historic green space is due to be levelled - and replaced with a footpath!
As for the people who come here one, two, seven days a week to grow food from the good earth, and a few nice blooms while they’re at it, they can like it or lump it. The offer of a temporary relocation to relatively distant Marsh Lane, in Leyton, is not even worthy of a response as far as many of these urban gardeners are concerned.
The London Development Agency (LDA), in charge of Olympic ops, are disdainful of the allotment-holders, to say the least. They want shiny, new, bland things. Not middle-aged fellas in grubby togs supping tea from mugs and talking about their tomatoes. And the pleas from the allotment-holders, most of whom in fact do not fit the above-mentioned stereotype, to embrace rather than demolish them, is falling on deaf ears.
Unfortunately, unlike in Denmark since 2001, allotments are not protected by law in the UK and poor old Major Villiers’ precious gift to the working poor, borne of his horror at the carnage of working-class boys in WWI, and the poverty of their families at home, could well be crushed by the bulldozers, while the people he sought to help are turfed out without so much as a packet of seeds by way of compensation.
Which is a crying shame, because the history of allotments is a fascinating and too often unrecorded one, of how the poor got by while the wealthy were making wars and ruining the economy.
Ever since the rich and favoured classes began enclosing common lands, there has been a growing body of rural dispossessed, people with no land on which to subsist who must therefore work for wages in order to live.
The most famous resistance movement to this was the Diggers, a 20-strong band of poor men who invaded St George’s Hill in Surrey, a stretch of waste land, in order to cultivate it for food, much as the Landless Peasants’ Movement of Brazil does today.
The Diggers reasoned that, as the King and the landed classes had been defeated during the English Civil War, it was only right that the common people should once more take possession of the land.
But the government eyed this thriving and expanding colony with alarm, fearful of the implications, and in time forcibly disbanded it, burning their cottages and tearing up their crops.
The Diggers may have been cut down, but the demand for land kept rising.
Some landlords granted plots for cultivation to their labourers, but many didn’t. In fact, it took nearly two centuries - till 1845 - for the General Inclosure Act, which made the provision of allotments to the working classes mandatory.
In the spirit of that law, and the Diggers, city allotments are an equitable affair. Everyone pays the same peppercorn rent, for the same size of plot, and the same conditions apply to all. If you look after the land, use it well, and respect your fellow plot-holders, then it’s yours for as long as you  want it. If you neglect it, it’s taken back and handed on to someone else.
Rents rise only very incrementally, and there is no right-to-buy, which means, in theory, they should be held in trust for future generations, but these precious green oases in our increasingly over-subscribed urban centres are increasingly eyed by witless developers, as the Manor Gardens experience shows.
Though allotments reached a high-point during the Depression of the 1930s and again during WWII, when all kinds of green spaces were turned over to dig for victory, the movement slumped from the 1950s onwards, around the same time the cheap, processed food industry began to take off, stimulating the beginning of the modern divorce from the land.
And it is that same processed food industry, and that same alienation from the land, that is sparking a return to allotment-holding all across the UK.
Increasingly, people want to know what they’re eating, and where it comes from, they want green fields in the cities, and that sense of oneness that cultivation of land gives you, with nature, and with other people, from all backgrounds, and all ethnicities.
Indeed, great waves of immigrants have fed into the allotment movement, seeking to grow the food they knew from home, such as garlic and aubergines, sweetcorn, bitter gourds and callaloo. Foodstuffs that have now entered our gardening mainstream, but which took root in simple, homespun ways.
These plots of land are our history, and could be a major part of our future if we are to reorientate our lives towards the local rather than global. We leave them to the crass developers at our peril.
n To sign the petition to save Manor Garden Allotments, visit www.lifeisland.org and follow the links

Dig for victory

They swoop by night, silent, determined, bearing trowels, fertiliser and usually some rather nice bedding plants and a couple of hardy shrubs.
Welcome to the shadowy world of Guerrilla Gardening, born in New York, where the vision of a stray tomato plant struggling up through the weeds and litter of a vacant lot in Hell’s Kitchen inspired a crowd of activists to reclaim their urban wasteground, and now sprouting up across the world, from Libya to Liverpool.
Guerrilla Gardeners set their sights on neglected city spaces, anything from tragic traffic islands to dirty great gap sites created to make way for theoretical motorways, and turn them into islands of life.
Blink and you could miss the architects of these oases, but where once was a walled-round plot of crisp pokes and petrified kebab remains languishing outside a shopping centre on the high street, are now a host of perky snowdrops and a rooted Xmas tree.
And to keep it looking good, look out for seemingly casual passers-by who whip a weed or two into their handbag as they pass, or do a quick late summer pruning by the light of a street-lamp. n www.guerrillagardening.org

Facts behind bird flu

Why the government would rather protect questionable practices in food industry than the nation’s health
Since the discovery of H5N1, or ‘bird flu’, at a Bernard Matthews food plant in Suffolk earlier this month, the government has been falling over itself to counteract the flow of information on this potentially deadly disease.
But, writes Roz Paterson, for a massive amount of people trapped in poverty there’s no option but to keep on buying the only food we can afford, as ministers cross their fingers and hope for the best, while protecting the junk food industry from us, the consumers, and try to lay the blame on organic and free-range farmers.
Their lives are short, only 41 days, and spent in truly shocking conditions. Up to 50,000 of them may be crammed into dark, airless sheds at one time, their bodies rendered grotesquely obese through an intense, high-protein diet, their skin blistered and ulcerated by the ammonia from the faeces they sit in, day in, day out, their leg bones disintegrating due to bacterial infection, their hearts failing, their immune systems at rock bottom.
Does this sound like a safe environment for food production to you?
The UK government, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) may continue to insist that the catastrophic conditions in which poultry is reared in factory farms are not linked to the mutation and spread of H5N1, the deadly form of bird flu that last week reared its head on a Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Norfolk, but the accumulating evidence now suggests otherwise.
H5N1 can certainly occur in wild birds, initially pegged by government ministers as the root cause of bird flu transmission, but research indicates that the ideal breeding ground for this deadly and highly contagious disease is in the intensive conditions described above, where birds, bred for increased meat and egg production, have almost no natural immunity to disease and succumb in their tens of thousands, not least because they cannot help but breathe one another’s air.
And its spread is facilitated by a globalised poultry market that sees eggs, birds, feed and meat cuts zig-zag hundreds of thousands of miles across the planet, from Thailand and China and Indonesia, to India and Nigeria and Holland, to the UK and the US and France and Sweden
At the Bernard Matthews farm for instance, no less than 160,000 birds were gassed once the outbreak was confirmed, and investigations now reveal a trail that extends to Hungary, Europe’s current favourite low-wage economy, from whence turkey off-cuts and waste were exported, from a Bernard Matthews subsidiary, to the UK for processing.
Bird flu broke out recently in Hungary, though over 100 miles away from this subsidiary. However, it could have been transmitted through contaminated farm equipment, or at a centralised abattoir, or indeed, by wild birds who picked up contaminated feed from open-air skips.
An important caveat here is that wild birds, though they can transmit H5N1, usually die quite quickly from the disease, so intercontinental carriage is virtually impossible.
Tracking down animal disease has now become an international game of detection, involving dozens of stopping off points, and thousands of contamination possibilities.
The implications for human consumers, who may be as susceptible to it as we have proved to be to BSE, are spine-chilling. Already, books are being written describing how, as individuals, we can deal with a worldwide flu epidemic when the healthcare system breaks down under the weight of it.
This could prove to be the wildest scaremongering, but the potential for wildfire infection is there, thanks to the international trade in intensively farmed poultry.
So why is our government so wedded to the myth that bird flu is spread on the wing by wild ducks? That free-range hens are asking for it? That the only safe food is the kind bred indoors, with as little natural input as possible?
Could it be for the same reason that, rather than tell us simply to stop eating junk food, and forcibly removing it from state school canteens, they prefer to blizzard us with baffling info about salt, RDAs and fruit portions while churning out the old mantra about consumer choice?
In truth, our government is so in cahoots with the processed food industry, the industrial giants that force-feed us - and their livestock - chemical gloop disguised as foodstuffs, that it will swear black is white rather than regulate it.
And to hell with the consequences for human health and animal welfare. Frankly, we’re way down the list of their priorities.
The increasingly loosened regulation of our food industry, or rather, the fact that it has become so divorced from its origins and is passed through so many pairs of hands during processing, enormously multiplying the potential spread of germs, before it even reaches us, is allowing all kinds of diseases and conditions to flourish, from common or garden food poisoning to such exotica as bird flu.
Bird flu has actually been about for over 100 years, and comes in 144 different strains, either low pathogenic or high pathogenic.
Low pathogenic strains, like H5 or H7, can mutate into lethal strains such as H5N1, but likely wouldn’t, according to vegan organisation Viva!, if it wasn’t for factory farming
Compassion in World Farming, who campaign against factory farming, say it’s a no-brainer: factory farming is to blame, adding that they “factor in the flow of goods within and between countries. The potential for disease spread is high.”
The industry is already notorious for its contribution to the spread of salmonella, E.coli, campylobacter and Newcastle disease. It’s no leap to add H5N1 to its list of offences.
Factory farming of poultry has been a massive growth industry in Southeast Asia in the last 30 years, and is the source of much of the 200 million cheap chickens we import to the UK every year. British producers just cannot compete with their low wages, and ‘utilisation of the whole bird’ regulations, or lack of them.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Southeast Asia is where the H5N1 story seems to have begun. British ministers point eagerly to the fact that, of the 164 human fatalities recorded so far, many have related to small, free-range chicken farms and wild birds. What they don’t point out, however, is that these cases had links to nearby factory farms.
In one instance, in Turkey, there was a massive cull of free-range chickens following the death of three children. But in fact, the bird flu reached them via the sick and dying chickens sold to locals dirt cheap from a factory farm, where bird flu had broken out.
Tragically, we eat an awful lot of cheap chicken, partly because, more than any other nation in Europe, our food choices are determined by price, and partly because, following the BSE crisis and the red meat/heart disease link, we reason that poultry must be healthier.
That we put this stuff in our mouths without realising the potential consequences is surely related to our increasing alienation from food production. The fact that we even tolerate Bernard Matthews calling itself ‘Europe’s biggest turkey manufacturer’ - as if turkeys were not living creatures at all, but a man-made commodity from start to finish - says it all.
Further, we have been so inundated with food scares that we now no longer flinch at being told no-one is quite sure whether those contaminated off-cuts in Norfolk entered the human food chain or not. There may be a recall of processed turkey products in the coming days, but there may not, as such a move would do terrible damage to an industry that thrives in junk food Britain. Chances are, we’ll keep eating Turkey TwizzlersTM and nuggets and wait for the panic to subside, not least because so many of us really cannot afford to do otherwise.
A few years ago, a reporter asking people in Glasgow whether they would stop eating meat following the establishment of the BSE/vCJD link was horrified to hear that some people had no option. Cheap meat is a staple of poverty.
The government, of course, is supposed to protect us from things like this, but be assured, it is keeping its fingers crossed rather than taking any real action on this, just as it did over BSE, when a now infamous government minister pushed a beefburger on his trusting young daughter.
Or rather, it is protecting the industry from us, not the other way round.
The government’s attitude may be even more callous than at first it appears.
Not only is it keeping schtum on the relation between factory farming and bird flu, it would seem that it is happy to be complicit in a conspiracy that links the disease with organic and free-range farming, thus paving the way for ‘regulation’ of this precious strand of agriculture.
Regulation, in this case, meaning herding the birds indoors, and rearing them in conditions not a million miles removed from those of factory farms, thereby blurring the distinction between factory and free-range.
Labour minister Ben Bradshaw, laughably entitled Animal Welfare Minister, when overwhelming evidence forced him to stop blaming wild birds for the Bernard Matthews massacre, went on to say that bird flu was associated with “developing nations where poultry is kept in small numbers in open farms.”
As if keeping fewer chickens could in any way facilitate more disease!
This is disingenuous to the nth degree, given the rise of factory farming in these self-same nations, and the fact that backyard outbreaks, as bird flu in small flocks are called, always seem to be related in some way to factory farms.
While the government, and its industry pals, try to skew the bird flu debate in such a way that we run screaming from free-range eggs, Robin Maynard, campaigns director at the Soil Association, notes that in fact there is “interesting evidence” to suggest that organically reared birds may have stronger immune systems than their counterparts in factory farms, and thus a higher resistance to bird flu. This kind of thing doesn’t deter the likes of Margaret Say, Southeast Asian director for the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council, who said:
“We cannot control migratory birds but we can surely work hard to close down as many backyard farms as possible.”
She doesn’t just mean family chicken coops in Indonesia, she also means free-range farms, in fact the whole free-range industry. In Margaret Say’s world, all animal husbandry will be conducted indoors, in cages, with ammonia burns.
It gets worse. Bird flu could also be utilised as a gateway for genetically engineered chickens.
According to Laurence Tiley, professor of Molecular Virology at Cambridge University, transgenic ‘flu-resistant’ chickens are in the pipeline. Never mind that GM, in its crude technologies and meddling with species barriers, actually facilitates viruses leaping from one species to another.
He continues, unabashed:
“Once we have regulatory approval, we believe it will take between four and five years to breed enough transgenic chickens to replace the entire world population.”
A nightmare visited Norfolk last week, but instead of rooting out the root causes, it seems our government, in tandem with industry and several world authorities, would rather exploit our fears to their own ends, shutting out the light on natural poultry farming and condemning domestic birds to a non-life. And us to endless, and as yet unimaginable, health risks.
Just how is cheap meat produced?
Factory farms are a pressure cooker for disease. One glance at conditions makes it clear why.
To be certified organic, a poultry farmer must ensure there is at least one acre of space per 400 birds.
By contrast, factory farmed birds have on average only space equivalent to an A4 sheet of paper each, giving them no room to stand up and move around.
Consequently, they cannot move out of their own excreta, and suffer horrendous skin conditions, including open, weeping wounds, as a result.
Laying hens are often stored in stacked cages, allowing their faeces to drop down onto other birds, thus facilitating the spread of any kind of contamination.
Factory farmed birds are reared in quantities as great as 50,000. The floor is generally invisible, but be assured - it’s coated in shit - and the air is thick with dust, encouraging the development of respiratory diseases which are not only ghastly for the bird, but impair their already weak immune systems, further enabling the spread of any disease that penetrates the flock.
They live an incredibly unnatural life.

Force-feeding
During the 1960s, when intensive farming was in its infancy, it took 84 days for a newly hatched chicken to reach its optimum broiler weight.
Now, thanks to force-feeding and high-protein diets, chickens can be fattened to the required 2-2.5kg in just 41 days.
For their bodies, this has terrible consequences.
Many are lame because their legs simply do no develop enough to support their engorged bodies.
Many never reach the slaughterhouse, having dropped dead of acute heart failure before they even reach 41 days.
An RSPCA advert highlighting the horrors of a broiler chicken’s life was banned in 2001 from television broadcast because it was ‘too political’.
It is acceptable in the UK to broadcast commercial after commercial promoting processed food, but not to question its methods of production.
Thus we live in ignorance of how our most popular meat is actually produced.