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The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
(www.monbiot.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Okay, I've read half way through before realizing that this is part of a fight (discussion?) between two prominent proponents of urbanism/tech and small-scale farming?
I know where my heart is - with the small scale farmers. However mentioning the heart would already disqualify me from this discussion.
I also know that I am 110% the well-fed food-nostalgist who has her imported coffee in the morning and her self-raised pork and home-grown veg at night. Why? Because that's how far I manage to go with my skillset to keep at least some of traditional knowledge alive.
I think there is something deeply dishonest in the numbers he presents - for one, he mentions famines with political causes. Lets be honest - most of them are - so not small-scale farming was to blame, but colonization or insane top-down political decisions. Then, about how yields are calculated: how do you calculate the yield of a truly biodiverse farm? Between animals, vegetables, energy in form of wood, energy and nutrition in form of manure and mushrooms I might have over 50 species here, plus the ones I forage. Try and compare this to 'x tons of [crop] per ha'.
What we see in the numbers of famine and today's feeble attempts to recreate traditional farming is that colonization, urbanization and industry has caused an enormous loss of skills. With every displaced person who had to leave their family garden we lost a small patch of high density food landscape and the skills to tend it.
I also don't understand why Monbiot accuses people of wanting to go back in time. It's a bit unfair, because nobody really goes and 1 to 1 recreates the farming life of last century (unless you are in a cult or sth). We combine old and new, we use electricity, we get stuff in from elsewhere if we must. We actually start reconsidering which tech is worth using, and which does more damage than good.
Wanting to recover the traditional tech that was good and useful and got destroyed by industry or politics isn't hollow nostalgia. Wanting to shorten food transport chains where it's possible isn't promoting starvation.
Nah, I can see where Monbiot is coming from in some way. A lot of the homesteading nostalgia movement, especially when people are just starting out with it, is so naively optimistic, so arrogantly sure of itself while proposing their way as the only way ... But to reduce the small-scale farming movement to just this is dishonest and is not the discussion the green left (if such exists) should be having - but hey if those bros want to write whole books to fight each other let them do it.
TLDR: Tradition yes, tech also yes. Stop fighting dudes.
Regarding the famine topic: I understood that differently. I think he is saying that (previously quite common) famines are all but eradicated except for those caused by political issues like wars etc. I think this is true and easy to overlook as indeed there is a mostly well working global market to transport grain surplus over long distances (although the Ukraine war has shown it is more brittle than most people assumed).
Small scale farming does not really produce large quantities of grain surpluses that can be easily shipped around the world or stored in large emergency stocks.
In a way this is of course more efficient, because why produce such surpluses that outside of emergencies have no real use and need to be sold cheaply to be converted to industrial alcohol or fed to industrial livestock factory farms.
But the question is, what can replace those large grain producing farms as a stabilizing factor counteracting natural variability of regional food production? Sure, localized backyard farming helps a bit, but I think it is likely insufficient and mainly helps against malnutrition by supplementing main staples with additional food of higher nutritional value.
You mention somewhere that you think people move to the city mostly because living conditions are better, I think that is only true in some cases. Sometimes, conditions in their rural home regions or homelands are made unliveable for political reasons, so people are forced into cities. Some people are being made promises about their possibilities in a city. Sometimes a mix of both. Not every rural family who ended up in a city ends up thriving.
I'm also still somewhat suspicious about big grain and the numbers presented. Are we really working with accurate numbers here, or are these numbers incidentally collected and published by big grain and their friends from the fossil fuel industry? I remember having read something about small farm producing a majority of the food, only to find out that it refers to these numbers from the World Economic Forum of all places, where a farm is considered small at under 200 hectares which is just plain ridiculous. The article then goes on about big almond/pistachio farmers, more of those super-food growing water wasters and landscape destroyers. So all these numbers are made up by somebody with one interest or another, and paper is patient, as we say in German.
I guess this whole discussion suffers from one enormous problem: both sides go on a lot (often based on a very blurry understanding of history) about 'people should', which is
I believe the preference for rural/urban or any spot on the spectrum in between the two is diverse, and close to the heart/identity side of a person, maybe comparable to gender. At least it is like that for me. Moving out of the city and re-peasanting myself was a very early step of self-confirmation for me, and setting myself up with the right mix of rural and urban is important to me. If I was forced to live in a city (at least the currently available versions of cities) I would be considered mentally disabled very probably. And it being as clear and obvious as this for me meant it took me forever to understand that this didn't mean that living rural is 'the right thing to do'^TM^ , but that each person has their preferences, and that some people are happily and fully urban.
What I think we could do, instead of argueing what is better, is recognize the difference between these poles of the urban/rural spectrum and recognize they exist. I imagine, in a caricature of the real thing, some academically educated urban folk, all clean and sitting politely at a table, and a horde of mud-slinging peasants has their elbows perched on the other end, spitting while they speak and smelling funny, and hopefully some translator to aid the conversation. The challenge is in understanding where each side is coming from. The tendency of some young people to want to change their surroundings (like me from urban to rural, and the other way around for many kids who grew up rural) can help with providing a living bridge between the two 'cultures' (not sure what a friendly, but difference-affirming term could be?) in a solarpunk future, maybe.
As for the numbers, sure big agriculture is good with lobbying governments, but the author of the OP article is a relatively well known environmentalist from the UK that did a lot of research on this for his recent book. I find it rather unlikely that these are fudged numbers from lobby firms.
But I also think people are misunderstanding what he mainly says. He doesn't say that relatively small scale farming can't on average feed the human population, but rather that our current model of resilience against the natural variability of food production (which is going to get much worse with climate change) is build on a massive overproduction of cheap grains that can be easily stored and shipped around the world.
Unless we want to face massive naturally induced famines again, we either need to maintain this model (which seems increasingly unlikely to be physically possible) or urgently find another way to improve food resilience, and small scale farming doesn't seem to be able to do so.
And on a side note: brutal conflicts between small scale farmers and nomadic people that are reacting to natural variability of food availability are almost as old as humanity itself, and really not a future I would like to see on a global scale.
Obviously rural areas need some people involved in agricultural production year round and I never said anything else.
But I do think that it is somewhat of a problem that the majority of the rural inhabitants have very little to do with any of that these days. Add to that the continuing encroachment of sprawling suburbs that destroy valuable farmland and you really have a set of extremely unsustainable living conditions only made possible due to the cheap supply of fossils fuels.