British farmers can’t produce pigs as cheaply as the Poles, or cattle feed as cheaply as the Brazilians, or milk as cheaply as the Americans, or fruit as cheaply as the Spanish, and if they can’t pull their socks up, the market dictates, they will just have to go. According to a recent survey by the National Pig Association, about 100 small- to medium-sized pig farmers are likely to quit this year – which is 10% of them. We are losing dairy farmers by the score every month. Horticulture has long since gone by the board (whatever happened to “the garden of England“, aka Kent?). Only about 1% of people in Britain now work on the land.

But it’s the same everywhere. The traditional farmers of Africa and Asia are urged to give up growing food for their own people and raise commodity crops for us, in exchange for our money, which we make by banking. Of course farms should be as big as possible to achieve economies of scale, and labour must be reduced to cut costs, so most of the existing small farmers, men and women, must go. Hundreds of thousands have committed suicide in India, but most flee to the cities to join the estimated billion rural exiles who now live in urban slums (almost a third of the urban population of the country).

Objective data, of the kind that the scientists and economists who advise the powers-that-be claim to base their ideas upon, suggests that the new ways aren’t working – not, at least, if we feel that the job of agriculture is to produce good food. Worldwide, 1 billion people of the present 7 billion are chronically undernourished, while another billion are chronically overnourished – such that according to an article in Nature in May the world population of diabetics now exceeds the combined population of the US and Canada, and almost all because of diet. Damage to the world at large is huge. Mainly because of industrial farming, half of all species on Earth could be extinct by the end of the century. Agriculture occupies 40% of the planet’s land, but its pollution endangers creatures everywhere, including the seas, where farming run-off is destroying the coral reefs.

But the corporate-government complex that runs our lives is committed to the all-out financial competition of the neoliberal global market. So British farmers in British conditions in a British social context are head to head with peasant Africans and US mega-corporates and Ukrainian grain barons (or would be were it not for the EU subsidies) – while farming as a whole must compete for investment with cars, weapons, casinos and hair-dressing.

If British farmers can’t produce more cash in the short term than the Poles or the Brazilians (or the corporates who are billeted in their countries) then they just have to go. Indeed, Tony Blair’s government just a few years ago seriously mooted that British farming should go the way of its mining. It may seem hard, even vile, but, as Lady Thatcher assured us all those years ago, “there is no alternative” – and all British governments since, even those with “Labour” in the title, have taken this as gospel. The strangely-titled National Farmers Union is firmly committed to big business.

The deep trouble is the huge clash between morality, biological reality, and the present economy. Until and unless we bring the three into line, we are bound to be in trouble. More than that, we need to acknowledge that morality (what is good) and biological reality (what is necessary and possible) must lead, and the economy must be secondary. As John Maynard Keynes said many decades ago: economics must “take the back seat” and we should focus first on “our real problems, of life and human relations, of creation, and of behaviour and religion”.

If we don’t acknowledge the moral obligation to provide good food for everyone without wrecking the rest, then what does morality mean? There is no excuse for the present failure – for sound biological thinking shows that good food for everyone should be eminently possible. But report after report – the kind governments and big organisations choose to override – tells us that the best way to ensure that everyone is well fed, sustainably and securely, is through farms that are mixed, complex and low-input (quasi-organic). These must be labour-intensive (or there can be no complexity), so there is no advantage in them being large scale. Such farms are traditional in structure, but they need not be traditional in technology. They would benefit from good technologies and science.

But the small-to-medium mixed farms that could feed us well and provide good jobs are absolutely at odds with the modern perceived imperative to maximise wealth. To survive in the fight for profit, skilled labour must be replaced with big machines and agrochemistry; the husbandry must be simplified – monoculture rules – and all must be done on the largest possible scale. Although industrial farming doesn’t feed everybody, has led to mass unemployment and the poverty and despair that go with it, and is wrecking the fabric of the world, it must prevail because it produces piles of short-term cash for the people who are calling the shots.

We need to turn things round and fast. And we means us, all of us – ordinary Joes, because the governments and corporates who run the world, and their attendant experts and intellectuals, are not going to. The standard ways to bring about change are by reform or revolution – but reform is too slow and today’s politicians and the big business they are beholden to cannot change course. Revolution is too chancy and too dangerous.

So we need the third route – renaissance: build something better in situ. In effect, a people’s takeover. All over the world individuals and communities are starting small mixed farms of the kind the world really needs, while others are starting small shops and farmers’ markets and delivery services to serve those new farms. Thousands of organisations worldwide are seeking to promote and co-ordinate these efforts.

European targets to replace fossil fuels with biofuels are contributing to spikes in food prices and global hunger, according to the latest analyis by Oxfam.

The aid organisation is calling for EU energy ministers meeting in Cyprus on Monday to scrap mandates that commit member states to sourcing 10% of transport energy from renewable sources by 2020. It has calculated that the land required to meet these mandates for biofuels for European cars for one year could feed 127 million people.

A draft proposal leaked last week suggested the European commission was considering capping biofuel mandates at 5% by 2020, in recognition of fears that they compete with food production and are not as environmentally-friendly as first thought. Aid agencies say this is not enough, and want to see them removed altogether.

Biofuel targets introduced in 2009 to help fight climate change have become increasingly controversial. In Europe, the targets will be met almost exclusively from food crops at a time of record prices. Soy and corn prices were at all-time highs in July, and the prices of cereals and vegetable oil remained at peak levels in August, according to the FAO.

The contribution of biofuel targets to mitigating global warming is also being questioned, as demand for crops for biofuels is pushing agricultural production into forests, peatlands and grasslands that had been acting as carbon sinks. Key industry figures, including the CEOs of Unilever and Nestlé and billionare hedge-fund manager Jeremy Grantham, have added their voices to NGO concern that diverting food crops to fuel for American and European cars may trigger a food crisis, following on from the worst US drought in half a century. Last week, French president François Hollande also called for a “pause” in the development of biofuels competing with food.

The UK currently requires 5% of transport energy to come from biofuels. Oxfam’s report, The Hunger Grains (pdf), published on Monday, estimates that meeting the binding EU targets as they are ratcheted up until 2020 will cost every adult UK consumer around £35 a year in higher fuel prices.

The UK government’s own analysis of the impact of meeting the EU target suggests that removing the mandate could reduce food price spikes by up to 35%.

Oxfam’s chief executive Barbara Stocking said: “The EU must recognise the devastating impact its biofuel policies are having on the poorest people through surging food prices, worsening hunger and contributing to climate change.”

Demand for biofuels in Europe is also putting pressure on land and water resources globally. The International Land Coalition has estimated that around two-thirds of all large-scale land deals around the world in the past 10 years have been acquisitions made to grow biofuel crops (pdf) including soya, sugar, palm oil and jatropha. Many of these deals have displaced local communities with claims on the land or have involved laying claim to water rights.