SIR, – Some 300 years ago, Scotland was a peasant society – it was a ‘way of life for the overwhelming majority of Scots’ that ‘had barely changed in centuries’.

But let us consider what a peasant is? – ‘Small agricultural producers who with simple equipment and the labour of their families produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfilment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power’.

Today, there are no more peasants in Scotland. What we have are farmers. But what’s the difference between peasant and farmer? – a farmer does not produce food for himself.

John Berger, in Pig Earth (1979), wrote: "Peasant life is a life committed completely to survival and that today it can be said that the majority in the world are peasants. Yet this fact masks a more significant one. For the first time ever it is possible that the class of survivors may not survive. Within a century there may be no more peasants."

A peasant’s existence meant the survival of humanity and, therefore, a future with food. But, with the approaching and almost complete disappearance of peasants across the world, essentially the word ‘farmer’ has miraculously changed the political landscape in which peasants are no longer exploited and that the ‘farmer’ has replaced the peasant, with a new social status within society and is to be reckoned with – is utter injustice.

‘Mugs’ for that is what farmers have now become – is a derogatory term in which I have not created but that of corporate multi-nationals. Today, the farmer is expected to be a producer of food without making a profit – continuously breaking even.

Constant threats of rent increase, bad harvests, new machinery or parts, the health of crops and livestock and with all that he must put enough aside to pay for the cost of bureaucracy. The question for the farmer is similar to the peasant – it is not how but will we survive?

The farmer can honestly tell himself: ‘no’. Everyday across the UK farmers live oppressively and in misery of the absurd situation in which they have been forced to accept.

Decisions that are made within the EU (without democracy) arise to encourage the import cheap food from around the globe. The absurd logic of capitalists in their obsession of making a profit keeps such a door within the EU wide open – not only with the obvious risk of flooding the market, but a further disappearance of not peasants but farmers.

Without farmers where will the food come from? Logically, survival must begin at home. So, urgently, there is another injustice that happens daily, a kind of madness.

When the farmer has finished a day’s work, the supermarket – which he may have produced food for – must then become the source of his food. Where does this dependence come from? – it is corporate multi-nationals. How is that a genuine future of survival?

In the assumption that such a possibility, a ‘future without food’, could happen to us, what will we do?

As a society, we are dangerously too dependent on supermarkets and it is this dependence that threatens the genuine survival of humanity. Today’s survival is very different reality to the paleolithic people – it is not about survival of population or individual, but profit. With that philosophy, the world can only survive in so far and as long as it is making a profit.

We must do something now – not next week, not next year – for without food there is no future, there is no humanity.

Patrick Phillips

(Address supplied)