It’s Good to be Prince

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales was in the United States this week, just days after the royal wedding of his son. His main gig was a keynote address at “The Future of Food” conference at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Washington Post.

As Cathryn wrote in a post last fall here, Prince Charles is a critic of modern agricultural practices. Because he has “tried to farm as sustainably as possible for some twenty-six years,” the prince believes that we can feed nine billion people on this planet with a food system that is “not dependent upon the use of chemical pesticides, fungicides and insecticides; nor, for that matter, upon artificial fertilizers and growth-promoters or G.M.”

I like the way the prince references the “facts” he uses to back up his concerns about the “perilous state” of our food future. “Here in the U.S., I am told, four out of every ten bushels of corn are now grown to fuel motor vehicles,” he said. He was also told that one acre of farmland in the United States “is lost to development every minute of every day.” He didn’t say who told him these facts.

The prince seems to bemoan the fact that modern food production techniques are more efficient and result in cheaper food than organic or his definition of sustainable. He blames that mainly on subsidies that favor “overwhelmingly those kinds of agricultural techniques that are responsible for the many problems” he outlined, including food insecurity, declining yield increases, climate change, growing demand for food and fuel, heavy reliance on fossil fuels and land and water usage, and he says that the cost of the “damages” to nature are not figured in to the cost of modern food production. However, he admits that moving to the kind of “sustainable food production” system that he envisions may result in higher food prices.

“Nobody wants food prices to go up, but if it is the case that the present low price of intensively produced food in developed countries is actually an illusion, only made possible by transferring the costs of cleaning up pollution or dealing with human health problems onto other agencies, then could correcting these anomalies result in a more beneficial arena where nobody is actually worse off in net terms? It would simply be a more honest form of accounting.” (Read the whole speech here.)

It’s good to be prince and to be able to afford a carefully monitored organic food system that uses heritage seeds and preserves rare breeds, but most of us just want healthy, nutritious and affordable food.