A Compassionate World

The secret to effective campaigns is strength in diversity. People coming together from different places to resolve a shared problem. One recent example was our successful campaign which halted plans for a mega-dairy in the Lincolnshire countryside. I call this strategy Convergent Campaigning, which I discussed in an earlier blog.

Compassion works co-operatively with a diversity of interests, including farmers, retailers and like-minded organisations. For example, we partnered with Friends of the Earth to produce a report, Eating the Planet?, which showed we can feed the world without factory farming. We also recognise retailers, producers and manufacturers with our Good Farm Animal Welfare Awards to thank them for the smart and compassionate choices they make.

This week, I’ve been reading a new report published by Oxfam, Growing a Better Future, which not only expresses the same concerns we considered in Eating the Planet?, but also reaches similar conclusions, if from a different perspective. Oxfam is, of course, one of the world’s leading organisations dedicated to ending poverty and suffering. It is highly respected and one that I personally admire.

In Growing a Better Future Oxfam adds its respected authority to the criticism levelled at factory farming and its support to the range of alternative methods of food production to replace it.

“The vast imbalance in public investment in agriculture must be righted, redirecting the billions now being ploughed into unsustainable industrial farming in rich countries towards meeting the needs of small-scale food producers in developing countries. For that is where the major gains in productivity, sustainable intensification, poverty reduction, and resilience can be achieved.”

This is convergent campaigning in practice. Seemingly different organisations like Oxfam and Compassion reaching consensus on not only the problems but also the solutions to the issues we have as common concerns.

Writing in The Guardian this week Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London, described a “new mixture of consensus and fault lines is emerging about world food.” But, he notes, there is not yet the “political leverage to begin the big changes that are necessary.” Professor Lang goes on to question, as I did here, the UK Government’s recent call for “sustainable intensification.”

“Is another round of technical intensification needed to raise productivity? That’s what the UK’s Foresight report argued a few months ago, calling for the oxymoronic “sustainable intensification”. Or is it a matter best addressed by more equitable distribution of wealth? This is what Oxfam and others argue, saying there is enough food to go around if properly shared.”

If sustainable intensification is a euphemism for “new and improved” factory farming, which I fear is what the UK government thinks it is, then, no, sustainable intensification is not part of the solution to the problem of feeding the world. My recent posts here on land grabbing highlight the need to address such issues as equitable distribution of wealth and resources. In short, whenever possible, land should be used to grow food to feed directly to people in that region.

So, I welcome Oxfam’s new report. I encourage you to read it. Then, with the convergence of voices such as yours, ours, Oxfam’s and others, we will be able to raise the political leverage needed to begin the big changes that are necessary.

Let’s all make our voices heard!