Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPrince Charles urged agricultural reforms on Wednesday in a speech at Georgetown University.
Less than a week after the wedding of his son William to Kate Middleton, Prince Charles was in Washington on Wednesday to, among other things, speak at a Georgetown University conference on the future of food and sustainable agriculture, a pet issue of his for nearly 30 years. The heir to the British throne gave an earnest and statistics-heavy address touching on such staples of the natural food movement as the virtues of composting and the need to maintain biodiversity.
But first he expressed his gratitude for having been invited to speak at Georgetown, where he last appeared in 2005 to deliver remarks on faith and social responsibility.
“It certainly makes a change from making embarrassing speeches about my eldest son at wedding receptions and things like that,” he said at the outset of his 45-minute address.
The prince, wearing an impeccable double-breasted navy blue suit and a royal blue tie, focused on current methods of mechanized factory farming and meat production, saying they were depleting the soil, devouring water
supplies, exacerbating climate change and poisoning streams and oceans. He said that such methods, heavily dependent on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, produced unhealthy foods and drove small
local growers out of business.
He said that the world faced the challenge of feeding a population rapidly headed toward nine billion people without destroying the environment that humans depend on.
“This is a complex and interrelated system and it is simply not possible to single out just one objective, like maximizing production, without ensuring that the system that produces increased yields meets society’s other needs,” he said.
“We haven’t much choice in the matter,” he said. “We are going to have to take some very brave steps. We have to develop more sustainable and durable means of food production.”
The Prince of Wales has adopted sustainable and organic farming methods on some royal lands that he manages, although it is less clear that he has turned a profit doing so. But it has become one of his signature issues, and he promoted organic farming methods in a documentary, “Harmony,” that was broadcast last year in Britain and the United States.
He offered what he called a “pen sketch” of evidence of the problem with a string of statistics culled from United Nations reports and elsewhere. The global demand for food will rise by 70 percent by 2050. “The world has to find a way to feed a staggering 220,000 new mouths every day, 450 just since I started talking,” he told the audience at the conference, sponsored by Georgetown and The Washington Post.
He said that farmland was being lost to development at an astonishing rate, both in the developing world and industrialized countries. In the United States, he noted, an area the size of Indiana has been built over since 1982.
In China and India, soil is being washed away at 40 times the rate at which it can be replenished. And he said that while two billion people were hungry or malnourished, one billion others were overweight or obese.
“It is an increasingly insane picture,” the Prince of Wales said.
He said that organic, locally grown food accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of sales in the United States and Europe because it remains more expensive than food produced by industrial methods. One of the reasons for the huge price discrepancy, he said, is that governments encouraged large-scale corporate farming through a variety of subsidies.
These include direct support like payments to farmers and tariffs on imported agricultural goods and indirect subsidies by not charging for the external costs of such farming methods, like air and water pollution and emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases.
The royal family has long received sizable government subsidies for its vast landholdings, many of which are classified as agricultural property.
“As things stand, doing the right thing is penalized,” the prince said. “Has the time arrived that we need to take a long hard look at how public subsidies are geared?”
He said that governments should “grasp one of the biggest nettles of them all” by replacing the subsidies for food factories that mistreat animals and harm the land with incentives for a more humane and durable form of agriculture.
“The point,” he said, “is to achieve a situation where the production of healthy food is rewarded and becomes more affordable and the earth’s capital is not so eroded.”
Prince Charles was to meet with President Obama later Wednesday.