It was very strange on Friday to read Vavilov’s views on the limited scope for agriculture in Palestine and then, on Sunday, an article by the excellent Joanna Blythman recounting a trip she recently made to the area; the foods she enjoyed, the efforts of Palestinian farmers, the obstacles they face and their growing successes.
Blythman makes much of the attachment of Palestinians to their land and their olive trees, and it is hard not to be outraged at the cavalier way in which Israel’s security concerns separate a family from its land, its history and its means of support. But she also takes an awful lot on trust. I’ve visited Israeli and Palestinian farmers too, and to assume that because a farmer says he cannot afford chemicals and that he is organic in everything except certification is to accept an awful lot. On both sides of the borders I saw empty cans of Lindane, a deeply suspect pesticide that had been banned in Israel (and 50 other countries) but, along with sundry other supplies, was apparently being smuggled in from Gaza. Admittedly that was while ago, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What hasn’t changed is the role of government. In 1926, Vavilov noted:
It is absolutely obvious only that the system of government and the building up of Palestine is not radical but often counterproductive. … It is impossible to escape the detrimental effects of the national disunity and the discord that seem to be what is primarily being cultivated in this country.
Blythman tells a similar story:
In Jerusalem, Avi Levi, director of the Israeli environmental group Green Action, ever mindful of the necessity of reducing food miles, believes that Israel should be Palestine’s most important export market. He brings fairly traded Palestinian olive oil into Israel and sells it through consumer co-ops. If the oil came directly it would travel 50km, but because it can only come in through four or five Israeli checkpoints, and must travel by a circuitous route around the separation wall, Israeli road blocks, random “gates”, and cannot be transported on settler-only roads, the journey clocks up 150km. Physical and fiscal impediments to trade mean that Palestine’s economy is constantly disrupted. As a result it can be cheaper for Palestinians to buy vegetables from a distant Israeli polytunnel than from a nearby Palestinian village.
This, surely, is a form of madness that Vavilov would have recognized and, one expects, deplored.
