The TTIPing Point



A view during my one-man climate march through the hills last Sunday



So Scots will remain in the UK, for the time being. It's now all out in the open – we know exactly how many people north of the border would really rather it was a country boundary. And as the estranging process of devolution gathers pace (who chose that word anyway? It's clearly not the opposite of evolution since Scots are not as far as I know demanding time is wound back to Cro-Magnon man..) our Prime Minister states his intention to solve the “West Lothian” question in the same timescale. Not having the internet to hand as I write this blog I'm unable to attempt to look smart by explaining why this issue has that particular name, but I'm quite happy to remain in blissful ignorance (and to keep those of you who share my ignorance, in it) of what is after all a piece of trivia that would just clutter up our brains.

I do know that it involves fixing the apparent unfairness of Scottish MP's being able to poke their noses into English-only problems, whilst the reverse is not possible (the Scottish parliament being notorious for not welcoming the views and votes of English MP's.)  Whilst some people are getting very hot under the collar about this I personally find it hard to muster much annoyance. I wonder whether Scottish MP's actually care enough about English-only issues to bother turning up to those debates anyway. I humbly submit that there is a much more concerning attack on our creaking democracy going on which if it was actually reported on and generally understood it would surely knock the West Lothian question into a cocked hat.

Imagine a world in which a government introduces some regulation to help limit the impact on the environment from industrial processes, say to stop a chemical company from discharging waste effluent into streams. This company, a multinational corporation, then sues the government through a clause in an international trade deal for bringing in a law that impacts its profits. The government is forced to repeal the law or face unlimited fines.

Unless you happen to be a starry-eyed neo-liberal, the above scenario will surely strike you, like me, as a Bad Thing. Something from the latest tranche of dystopian fiction maybe? But no – since last year the US and EU have been negotiating the largest trade agreement outside of the WTO and it includes this very clause.

The trade deal has the bland name “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP for short) and is intended to boost economic growth, a laudable aim no doubt although there are some of us who think that we are reaching an end to global economic growth and should be finding ways of stabilising our economies in a zero growth world. Anyhow, TTIP has a clause called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which apparently is already standard in many bilateral trade agreements, whereby corporations can sue governments for making decisions that affect their profits.  Enshrining it as part of this huge trade agreement is the last nail in the coffin for our democratic ideals. However shoddy the reality of our democracy, at least in principle our elected governments must maintain legal authority over corporations.

The TTIP negotiations are ongoing, so now is the time to make a fuss. Read this briefing from the World Development Movement. Alert your MP, even if they are Scottish, as this is by no means an English-only problem.

Weighing a huge marrow I discovered lurking in the polytunnel. It's 3.2kg!

Not So Sonic Youth

The last of my 'Majestic' potatoes

The local vicar is, it turns out, the sort who likes to get people involved. Not for him a congregation who just shuffle in on Sundays. The very first time he came to visit me, ostensibly to check out my rows of vegetables (being a keen gardener himself), he ascertained that I play piano and guitar and I found myself being offered the role of youth group musical director (unpaid). Making a few non-committal enquiries I discovered that someone had been lined up to do this in the summer but hadn't ultimately showed up. There is apparently one lad who plays a bit of guitar, and another who owns a drum kit (his ability to play it remains unclear). How keen these two were to form some kind of band in the church youth group, and who else had musical ability and/or interest, was also unknown. The enthusiasm for music forming a core part of the youth group appeared to emanate predominantly from the vicar himself.

As I am planning to spend winter down in Dorset at Pilsdon Community, I had to decline the role. But he looked so disappointed, remarking that he would therefore have to do it himself, that I offered to come along in the meantime and accompany him on the piano. The group is held every other Friday evening so it wouldn't be a huge time commitment, and I thought it might be fun to get out and do something completely different.

The polytunnel is in full colour finally

So after a brief practice session in the vestry in which I found myself actually playing Kum By Yah on a plinky electronic keyboard as the vicar strummed his guitar, we drove off to the village where it was held, half an hour away. Thankfully the hall had a decent acoustic piano so the keyboard could remain in the car. I was also glad to see that there were other attractions for the young people laid on – table tennis, swingball and an electronic darts board against which darts loved to bounce off and break into pieces.

Turnout was low. At no point in the evening did the number of youth match the number of adults (four). And of the three teenagers present, none of them had brought a musical instrument or expressed any desire to play one. The only exception was when three of us adults were bashing through Yellow Submarine, one of the lads accompanied us on a single drum, with a single stick.

10kg of runner beans

So not perhaps an unmitigated success this time. The vicar and the youth leader, who apparently has to cover the whole of northwest Wales, plan to expand the age range a bit next time and plug it a bit more in the village. But an evening in a room with both a decent piano and a table tennis table (I was roundly thrashed by the vicar who mis-spent his childhood playing it) is an evening well spent, in my view, so I'm rather looking forward to the next session.



My stall at last Sunday's monthly farmer's market at the local village



Beavering Away

Caterpillar and fly share a broccoli stalk

We stood, lining the slight grassy bank, facing the sinking sun in silence. The wide hills around thrummed with intensity. Swifts darted and whirled, skirting low above the water in front of us, a pool glinting. All our attention was fixed on this still pond with its tiny incongruous island. Nobody spoke, minutes passed. And then at last there was movement, ripples coming from behind a reed bank. Into view swam a brown object, a nose, a head, a back, pushing itself through the water with slow dignity. We were in the presence of a mammal that until several centuries ago lived in abundance on these Isles, until little by little humans managed to kill them all.

A carrot flower

This mammal, the beaver, is in fact the world's second largest rodent, after the capybara. A few have been released into the Scottish wilderness as a trial but as yet it is still illegal to set them free in Wales. This pond home for two beavers, one male and one female, was ringed with some serious fencing, with wire mesh on the inside of the wooden stakes to prevent escape by gnawing.

A compost toilet under construction at Blaeneinion

We watched as the male beaver took his stately swim, pausing now and again, once resting at a shallow point allowing us to see more of him. The female never appeared. He was out extraordinarily early in the evening anyway, perhaps sensing a group of visitors to impress. We had expected to glimpse them much later, as dusk came on, so our tour of Blaeneinion was put immediately out of kilter by his unexpected appearance.

Sharon* who lives and works here, was our guide. A few years ago a small wildlife trust asked her to buy them a farm somewhere in the UK, live there and plant it full of trees. After a year of two of asking “Are you sure?”, she ended up doing it, moving from north London to the remote fastness of Artists Valley, mid Wales. Sure enough, she (with some help!) has already planted thousands of trees, many of them edible, all native and deciduous, so in years to come people will be able to wander through the woodland picking berries and nuts as they go. Some, like the walnut, take a human lifetime to mature fully. Not many endeavours in these capricious times are measured in decades, will come to fruition a century hence.

A murky cameraphone shot of the heart of Blaeneinion

She keeps geese and chickens, and grows a range of vegetables in a massive polytunnel and outdoor raised beds made from railway sleepers which, like me, she supplies to the Machynlleth veg bag scheme. To make ends meet (the charity provides her no income) she also finds time to run a B&B. Maybe the sublime weather helped but it did seem a magical place, so beautiful and remote - it takes a good twenty minutes to drive up the winding narrow lane from the main road to the top.  If ever you want to get away from your humdrum and routine life you could do worse than spend a week up here, roaming the hills and generally communing with creation. She occasionally organises volunteer weeks to plant trees too - check out their website here. I'm definitely going back. Mind you I've no choice, our next veg bag scheme growers meeting is to be held there.

Finally a few photos of my garden in the early September sunshine:

The tomatoes finally began to ripen

*Her real name.

Harvest

My delivery last week to the veg bag scheme : cabbages, cucumbers, runner beans, beetroot and courgettes

Being the sole owner and manager of a vegetable garden in late summer means I am having to find something to do with the large quantities of foodstuff sprouting everywhere. So far I've had just shy of three hundred courgettes off my twelve monsters in the polytunnel (and that's counting two small courgettes as one). Fifty-three fat cucumbers have been plucked from their seven vines with many more developing. 25 kg of runner beans have so far been snipped from amongst the two hundred bean poles (and I'm writing this before the regular Tuesday harvest). Eighty decent beetroot have been wrenched from their birthplace with perhaps the same again still growing. Thirty-five big green cabbage heads are no longer attached to their cabbagey bodies; more are awaiting their cruel day of dismemberment. Not to mention all the mange tout, spinach, salad leaves, coriander, basil, carrots, french beans, chard, tomatoes, sweet peppers, jalapenos, kale, leeks and squash that are being or will soon be harvested.

Making some money from these valuable commodities is clearly a sensible goal to be pursuing considering it is my one and only business, and naturally I have been finding ways and means to part people from their coinage in exchange for the privilege of owning 'New Leaf'-branded fresh and edible merchandise. Being eaten by myself is another worthy fate for my veg, although it tends to be the mis-shapen or the slightly nibbled that ends up on my plate, along with at least one courgette per meal (I haven't managed to sell all three hundred).

Vegetables also make fine gifts, if offered at the right occasion (i.e. not when someone's just about to go on a fortnight's holiday) although it seems everyone is fed up with courgettes and runner beans at the moment so it's best to choose your present wisely.  And a fourth usage is bartering, simply swapping them for something else in a presumably mutually beneficial exchange. I haven't done much of the latter, in fact probably the closest to this I've got is to provide a variety of my veg to a carpenter friend of mine who gave up an afternoon and several pieces of plywood to fix my trailer floor, a transaction which it's hard to view as perfectly equally beneficial, but hey, he really likes spinach!

A trailer in need of repair

The fifth and perhaps least desirable end-game for a vegetable of mine is to end up on the compost heap. Those that couldn't be sold, bartered, given away, and were excess to my own eating requirements, languish in the storage cupboard (which looks oddly like my caravan's shower cubicle) until they begin to rot, whereupon I sling them into the kitchen-waste compost dalek. At least in there they will finally fulfil a purpose – once fully decomposed the rich and nutritious compost that ensues will feed future generations of vegetables.

 

I knocked the rest of the rotten flooring out

To those such as myself who have dedicated themselves to growing food uncontaminated by pesticides a recent news article covering a report from the University of Exeter makes unnerving reading. Professor Sarah Gurr reveals in her study that Britain has “significantly underestimated” the risk that crop pests pose to its food supply. Food-growing nations like ours will be “overwhelmed” by pests within the next 30 years due to climate change, inadequate biosecurity measures, and new varieties. Will this doomsday scenario play into the hands of the likes of Monsanto who will be beavering away to provide new poisons to deal with the new pests (which will no doubt continue to evolve)? Or will we find other less environmentally harmful ways to deal with this problem, perhaps encouraging the right predators, or even changing the types of food we eat? Who knows what kind of veg I'll be growing on my plot in thirty years time. Watch this space.

As good as new!