Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 4, 2026 | No Comments
It’s a hoary old topic on this site, I know, but in this post I’m going to trail an article I’ve just published on the appropriately named GM Watch site called How not to feed the world: five questions for George Monbiot. I won’t repeat here what I say there. Instead, I’m just going to fill out a few points, hopefully in an interesting way despite the familiarity of the issue.
First, some background for the uninitiated. In his 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, the prominent British journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot championed an industrial process for making edible protein from bacteria via a technique that he (wrongly) calls ‘precision fermentation’. In doing so, he got the energy costs of this process wrong, greatly underestimating them. I pointed this error out in my own book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, a rejoinder to Regenesis, and the error has now been confirmed in the scientific literature.
The error matters, because unless you take an extremely cornucopian view of energy futures it means there’s no possibility of this bacterial method meeting humanity’s mass protein needs – and this undermines a good deal of the programme in George’s book. That programme follows the usual ecomodernist playbook of a retooled status quo: abundant low-carbon energy, dense urban residence, high-energy food production, and rewilding of former farmland – all based on the assumption of benevolent corporate management jointly by the public and private sectors.
George hasn’t to my knowledge publicly corrected his mistake, but with the energetic implausibility of bacterial protein as a mass food now established, it seemed to me that he’d gone quieter about bacterial food and devoted himself to other, albeit also questionable, food tech projects. But he’s been boosting bacterial protein again on recent podcasts, while also making wild accusations about me. He didn’t take kindly to my critique of his book, hitting back with a vitriolic response, and he’s continuing to portray me as a malign and amoral figure.
There’s not much I can do about that, but I can at least put on record some of the flaws and questionable implications – indeed the moral and political failings – of George’s own positions on food. The difficulty with these kinds of stereotypically male war-of-words debates is that disinterested bystanders tend to glaze over, their attention drawn to the boys-will-be-boys debating style, rather than to the importance of the underlying issues. I think George has largely avoided addressing the issues of substance I’ve raised, preferring a soundbite-and-fury approach. This makes my next step easy. Until he answers the questions I’ve asked in my GM Watch piece calmly, properly and rationally, I don’t need to say anything else – other than continuing to ask him to address them. At least this will spare me (and you, my cherished readers) from having to write or read anything more on the topic.
My five questions in a nutshell are:
So now I’ll riff a little bit around those five questions – in reverse sequence, why not? For this is a time when the usual order of things seems to be going awry.
5. Working for The Man. The main reason I chose to write Saying NO… and challenge George is that he still has a reputation as a radical, left-wing opponent of neoliberalism and private capital accumulation, and yet the implications of his food system writings are absolutely in line with them. As a colleague put it to me, “George has become the man he used to criticise – he just doesn’t realise it”. And neither do a lot of well-meaning people who are unfamiliar with food and farming issues, but trust his radical reputation to guide them to an appropriate understanding. For all his condemnations of neoliberalism, disaster capitalism, wealth accumulation and the like, these are exactly where his current positions on food and farming land. And this is causing a lot of political damage – much more so than if his positions were mouthed by the usual corporate suspects.
4. Yields. I discuss in the GM Watch piece the problem with the ideas of ‘land sparing’ and high crop yields that George has espoused in his recent writings. In a nutshell, given present overproduction, increased yields rarely benefit farmers, consumers or nature. The main beneficiaries are the producers of supposedly yield-boosting inputs, in other words agribusiness corporations. An interesting recent paper has updated the lengthy critical literature on ‘land sparing’, subjecting George’s takes on it to specific criticism.
In his rejoinder to my book, George said that I take a “proudly low-yield” approach to staple food production. He continued, “This is why farmers who do not share his [i.e. my] worldview pursue higher yields: these yields make it economically worthwhile to produce staple foods that can be sold to other people. We should thank our lucky stars for such people”.
Notice the confusion here between high yields and what’s ‘economically worthwhile’, which have no necessary relation. It’s elementary mistakes like this that make it difficult to have a serious discussion. In the passage George identifies, I say nothing about the relative yields of different production scales and methods, which can often be much the same. I do say that small-scale farmers are disadvantaged in selling cheap staple foods due to low profit margins, which is a different point entirely – and one that could lead into a more generative discussion about different food system models.
George used to understand the difference between what farming systems yield in terms of generating local livelihoods and what they yield in terms of profit, but apparently not anymore – and this is troubling because there’s more than a hint of enclosure-mindedness in the lucky stars of his new approach. It’s not hard to imagine government expropriation of small farmers in the context of food and other crises, justified on the grounds of ‘higher yielding’ (for which read ‘more profitable’) industrial farming. Since George now ridicules agrarian localism as ‘cottagecore fantasy’, it’s worth reading his 2012 article linked above to see how far his position has changed. He writes of early 19th century English scenes where “The meadows resounded with children pranking and frolicking and gathering cowslips for their May Day games; the woods were alive with catcalls and laughter; around the shepherds’ fires, people sang ballads and told tales”. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything quite so cottagecore!
Dismissals of agrarian localism as romanticism are common coin among self-appointed, and often industry-linked, food system commenters, but its possibilities remain alive in global politics and scholarship. In his excellent book The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, Glenn Davis Stone notes
the frequent attacks by those connected to industrial agriculture on intensive sustainable (smallholder) agriculture as stagnant and its advocates as unscientific and romantic. But … there is a sound and unromantic science to this dynamic form of farming that may be our best hope for a sustainable food future (p.13)
So here are some key questions that would be worth discussing if we could get beyond the dismissive rhetoric: many small-scale farmers producing mixed food and fibre for local livelihoods with low-energy methods, or few farmers/factories producing monocultures for profit in global commodity chains with high-energy methods? Which is likely to be more sustainable and resilient in the long term? Which generates greatest wellbeing across society as a whole?
3. Cheap food. While a lower checkout price may benefit an individual person in poverty, a global food system geared to low food prices doesn’t benefit poor people in general. This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s a well-known finding in the research literature – mentioned even in references that George cites in Regenesis. It’s baffling that anyone writing about global food systems who cares about fairness neglects this.
2. Re-ruralisation/peasantisation. In his response to my book, George went into full snark mode with his take on my supposedly utopian view of collapse and future ruralisation: “When the fugitives disperse into the countryside, the inhabitants will doubtless greet them with open arms, saying, “Welcome sister! Welcome brother! Here, have some fertile land … and all the other means to grow your own food and live happy lives as re-peasants in our agrarian wonderland.” If history is any guide, this is not quite how it’s likely to pan out.”
I’d welcome a page reference to where I supposedly imply this, but having just re-read James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed I was struck by the fact that if you do take real history as your guide rather than Whiggish retellings of it then this pretty much is how it’s often panned out, folksy hyperbole aside. The premodern history of Southeast Asia that Scott tells typically involved the need to people state-governed spaces. Likewise for upland non-state spaces. Genealogical incorporation of migrants is one of the main ways it was done.
This feels true in other times and places too. Thinking about my own situation as a modern small-scale grower, the need to get more people involved on the land and the difficulties of doing so when the relationship with them is commercial rather than kin-based have loomed large. The writings of agrarian scholars like Jan Douwe van der Ploeg on re-peasantisation in modern times are also relevant. There’s a lot of actual history that bucks George’s assumptions.
Of course, migration and land access don’t always play out in this incorporative way, even if I didn’t expect George to go quite so Nigel Farage with his convictions about the inevitable tensions of migration. Nor is genealogical incorporation necessarily a picnic. But it’s worth pondering the contemporary implications of a historically ubiquitous problem – a lot of land, not many people – in the face of (eco)modernist assumptions that the fundamental historical problem of agrarianism is always too many people and not enough land. Even in today’s more heavily populated world, the problem of hollowed out rural and farm communities is real, and so is the associated one of creating more peopled low-impact local agrarianisms.
Incidentally, there’s a fascinating chapter in Scott’s book about usually doomed millenarian religious-political uprisings in the Southeast Asian uplands led by charismatic Buddhist monks. Villagers would abandon their fields and farmwork to pursue the mysteries and passions of a commitment to political autonomy and equality, placing these even above the humdrum reality of providing food for themselves.
Scott does a good job of showing how these movements, inexplicable to western minds, made sense in their own context. This is one of the great virtues of anthropology as cultural comparison – not only can it make intelligible the apparently irrational behaviour of other peoples, it can also make intelligible the cultural assumptions by which we consider our own behaviour to be more rational than it actually is. On which note, someday I hope to write an anthropological account of ecomodernism as a doomed millenarian religious-political movement of the West, where people abandoned rationality to pursue the mysteries and passions of their neo-religious commitment to getting food out of thin air, limitless energy, perpetual progress and other such cargo above the humdrum reality of embodied and locally-emplaced work.
1. Correcting errors. Anyway, despite the historical prevalence of incorporating incomers, it’s true that in rapid collapse situations where a lot of desperate people are on the move and looking for a place to settle, the potential for violent conflict is high. This is why I’ve added my voice to warnings about the dangers of our non-resilient, fossil-energised, over-urbanised, over-globalised and over-monetised evanescent world of neoliberal trade. One can take different views about that, but surely what nobody should conscionably do in the face of those possible violent consequences is dodge evidence about the limitations of technologies purporting to keep existing lifeways afloat. Which is one reason I’m astounded that George, so far as I’m aware, hasn’t publicly recanted his claim that bacterial protein can be produced using 16.7 kWh of electricity per kilogramme, which (being generous) is less than a quarter of the true figure.
Frankly, I’ve found the ‘debate’ with George over bacterial food sadly eye-opening, in large part because his behaviour has undermined my faith in the integrity that I’d naively thought he represented as a public intellectual of a scholarly bent. In that world, I’d thought, if you demonstrably get a fact wrong you own up to it, rather than engaging in bluster and obscuring tactics. This is especially so if the real-world consequence is to falsely inflate people’s belief in a supposed ‘saviour’ technology. In that world too, I’d thought, you normally try to get to the nub of the political or intellectual disagreements with your interlocutors rather than likening them to Nazis and other low blows. How wrong I was.
Likewise, I’ve been disappointed by the engagements with me, or the lack of them, among some of George’s colleagues and the wider ecosystem of public intellectuals around ‘disruptive’ new food technologies. This included a bizarre set of tweets aimed at me by Guy Shrubsole, a bizarre email exchange with Brendan Montague, editor of the so-called ‘Ecologist’ magazine, who’d published George’s highly-charged response to my book but was none too keen on publishing a reply from me, and a conversation with Professor Mike Berners-Lee that with hindsight I probably shouldn’t have started, and he probably shouldn’t have ended. The improbabilities of manufactured food could do without academic greenwashing.
Ah well, it’s been educational too. George positions me as a privileged white guy wanting to pursue my fantasies and caring little for other people in my supposedly ‘populationist’ thinking, but I now see more clearly than before that this is the exact problem in all the fantasy tech-bro ecomodernism, anti-agrarianism, ‘land-sparing’, right-to-roaming and lone enraptured male mentalities among many of Britain’s leading environmental writers, most of them being other white guys who can boast the difficult achievement of being even more privileged than me. Their writings are bromides to soothe the troubled consciences of good-hearted, middle-class urban progressives, but alas without ethically serious future-focused politics and analysis. Heaven forbid that any of these folks should have to give up their roaming rights and cheerleading for new corporate food technologies and actually start working some land.
On which note, I remember seeing a farmer’s comment on an online forum somewhere referring to my book along the lines of “I always thought Monbiot was talking b******s. It’s nice to see that proper clever people are proving it”. It provoked a sad smile from me. Others have lamented that my arguments with George divide the left (not that I have much power to do that, compared to his reach). While I’m not sure I’m really part of ‘the left’ anymore, through his stances and behaviour around Regenesis I’m certain that George isn’t, except performatively. Anyway, until ‘the left’ is able to take agrarianism and ruralism seriously, it absolutely needs to be divided.
Ecomodernism is the ultimate white guy fantasy of power, control and freedom, whereas agrarianism is a worldwide phenomenon involving folks figuring out how to get by. The more that people congratulate themselves for asking big, privileged questions like ‘how can we feed the world?’ – questions that usually lead to problematic technologies like powdered bacteria, which certainly won’t – the more they’re likely to bring forth a world of agrarianism in which they’ve simply made the problem of getting by harder.
Kasia Paprocki Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh …which is relevant to this post in showing how poor small-scale farmers in Bangladesh typically don’t buy into the saviour narratives of ‘development’ experts or ecomodernists who want to get them off the land and into cities and factories. And also in showing how a good deal of the vulnerability of these farmers arises out of earlier attempts to foist technological ‘development’ upon them.
Patrick Galbraith Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside …a wry sideways look at land issues in Britain which is relevant to this post in several ways – including its strictures against the ‘right to roam’ movement which takes the aforementioned Guy Shrubsole to task, and as a clarion call for authors: if you get something wrong in a book, own up and correct it.
M. John Harrison The End of Everything – which I picked up due to my interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. To be honest, the book is a bit too weird to meet my needs on that front. But it’s still relevant to this post in its implication that if people go all in with ‘disruptive’ new technology we might get more than we bargained for.
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