The Guardian view on a global farm grab: from the many to the few | Editorial

A new study reveals the disastrous consequences of financialised farming on the environmentIn a collection of agrarian essays entitled The Art of the Commonplace, the American farmer, essayist and poet Wendell Berry wrote that "the care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope."From his farm in Kentucky, Mr Berry has spent decades railing against the expansion, homogenisation and industrialisation of American farms. Rapacious economic imperatives, he argues, are leading to the gradual but inexorable destruction of the land. The ethos of stewardship has been replaced by a remote form of ownership that views fields, rivers and forests solely through the lens of extraction. Local smallholders who, as he puts it, inhabited the land "on its terms, not ours", have either been forced out or co-opted. Continue reading...