Is the Triumph of Food Sovereignty Inevitable?

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Let’s compare it to Marxism.

 

1. Marx saw industrialism as part of the normal development of history. (So he implicitly saw the modern level of energy consumption as permanent.) He thought it would naturally and inevitably generate a centralized industrial and finance structure and a physically centralized industrial proletariat. He also saw the evolution of democracy as a linear progress.

 

2. Marx thought the material conditions of capitalism would automatically generate proletarian consciousness, which would then drive the proletariat to abolish capitalism and establish communism. These developments would basically be stimulus-response. 

 

3. These ideas, which Marx saw as laws of history/nature, are summed up in the idea of historical materialism.

 

4. But things didn’t happen as Marx projected. Industrialism and finance physically and organizationally dispersed. I’ve previously made the point that corporatism has in a sense turned the tables of guerrilla warfare tactics. It’s corporate power which seems infinitely agile, concentrating at the enemy’s weak points and dispersing at any concentrated enemy attack. Meanwhile it’s the people, civil society, and democracy which have seemed lumbering, clumsy, off-balance, their own weight a weapon against them.

 

The industrial proletariat itself was also physically dispersed through globalization.

 

5. It turned out that the Western proletariat, to the extent it ever did concentrate, was pretty easily co-opted by the corporate system. Instead of naturally and spontaneously developing proletarian consciousness, it was co-opted and infused with petty bourgeois consciousness. The GI Bill, the subsidized car culture and mortgages which fostered suburbia, the ”American Dream” and “Ownership Society” propaganda campaigns, all did their work very effectively.

 

So Marx’s forecast of this particular automatic development of consciousness was disproven. It turns out the proletariat was not automatically going to do that, and was able to be indoctrinated into a different mindset. (This is confirmation of some elements of Lenin’s organizational philosophy.)

 

6. Meanwhile capitalism itself didn’t develop in the way Marx projected. It never liquidated all feudal vestiges, but conserved most of them (really all but the nominal trappings of monarchy, aristocracy, etc.). It turns out that “pure” capitalism was never going to exist, but rather at most a feudal-capitalist hybrid.

 

7. This is because history was in fact more materialistic than Marx’s historical materialist idea. Unlike Marx, history always understood that fossil fuels are not infinite, that the modern era of extreme energy consumption is not normal or natural, but rather a unique, ahistorical blip. It understood that modern industrialism is also a unique and ephemeral circumstance. Therefore it understood that pre-oil modes of organization, what we in the West can loosely call “feudal”, were not being abolished but were merely being temporarily modified for the high-energy age. The “bourgeois revolution” was really a kind of scam, and all the commentators like Tocqueville who noted how much was conserved instead of thrown out were recognizing the basic truth of the development.

 

(In the preceding passage I was using “history” as a metaphor for the truly material, unconscious forces driving the developments. Even at their most insane men can’t act completely against nature, and the finitude of fossil fuels was a constant material fact, even during the glory days of extraction.)

 

8. It turns out that historical materialism itself, and the predictions Marx derived from it, were part of the “superstructure” and one step removed from the real materialism of energy consumption.

 

That’s why Marx’s inevitabilities turned out to be contingent at best, and mostly failed to come true. His physical inevitabilities were wrong, and his psychological inevitabilities failed to materialize. It turns out that within the modern framework economic democracy was not fated to develop the way Marx projected. Does this mean the democratic evolution is not linear, but cyclical, and just as it surged with fossil fuels, so it’s fated to subside with them? Or could the development still be linear, with the modern pseudo-democratic co-optation being a temporary obstacle? More on that below.

 

9. We’re left, first, with the real material inevitabilities. These are the facts of fossil fuel depletion, fossil water depletion, soil exhaustion, and the degradation/depletion of every other natural resource.

 

10. I’ll focus on industrial agriculture. It’s guaranteed to collapse on account of any of four causes – fossil fuel depletion, fossil water depletion, phosphorus depletion, soil exhaustion. (Which of these will be the proximate cause is a horse race.) It could also collapse even ahead of these because of the climate change it’s causing (industrial agriculture is the #1 greenhouse gas emitter), or the superweeds and/or superbugs it’s generating, mostly via GMOs.

 

11. Therefore humanity certainly will return to historically normal modes of food production and distribution. Food production will once again be 100% organic, to use the modern term for the traditional. Markets and distribution will once again be predominantly local/regional. These are physically guaranteed.

 

12. How painful this transformation will be, whether it must mean mass famine, whether we’ll be left at first with woefully denuded soil which will take centuries to rebuild, will be functions of how strong a Food Sovereignty movement we can build prior to and during this collapse, and how forcibly corporatism is able to keep a death grip on power for how long. Corporatism will certainly try to force total devastation upon humanity, since it would rather see humanity starve and die than achieve freedom. It would rather see genocide than relinquish power. It’s too early to know if the forces of evil will be able to hang on once they start to weaken, or whether they’ll collapse quickly in spite of their malevolent will. But there’s no doubt that the stronger humanity’s own organization against this curse and toward its own future, the better a chance we’ll have of averting the worst. But all these things seem to be open questions.

 

13. As for the consciousness of democracy and freedom in themselves, we’ve certainly assimilated the ideas as completely as a species can. This goes with modern agroecological knowledge as one of the two great heritages of modernity we can take with us beyond it, if we choose.

 

14. What does it mean to say humanity “can choose” something? It’s natural for a species to seek its own aggregate survival, under the best conditions possible. We don’t usually say a non-human species “chooses” to seek to survive and triumph. Is there any reason to think homo sapiens is different?

 

15. If not, and if it’s true that our best chance to continue to eat going forward is to organize toward that goal, does this mean that affirmative imperatives like Food Sovereignty (and negative ones like the total abolition of GMOs) are not just political but biological imperatives? And if this is true, does that mean that the triumph of Food Sovereignty is inevitable?

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NOW Obama’s Going to do Good Stuff! (Michael Pollan version)

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Here’s a good test of liberal Obama-worship, a prediction by Michael Pollan:

 

“I think we will stop subsidizing biofuels very soon, perhaps right after the election.”

 

Obama, of course, has been aggressively pro-ethanol so far.

 

Pollan’s a typical case. He spent eight Bush years calling for bottom-up food relocalization and warning against technocratic control of our food, including faith in the central government. As soon as Obama came along, Pollan performed a 180 degree flip-flop. Suddenly the future of the food movement depended on begging elites for Better Policy. This included support for the Food Control Act, whereby Pollan mystically believes that giving far more power to the Monsanto-adjunct FDA will, by magic, make it less pro-Monsanto. Someone with common sense might be forgiven for suspecting that it’ll merely help the FDA further Big Ag’s interest even more aggressively, but then we’re not initiates of the liberal cargo cult.

 

At least Pollan supported the Right to Know initiative, so he’s a somewhat less pure liberal elitist than the scum mentioned in this piece, who opposed the initiative simply because as a good “process” liberal he “distrusts” filthy peasant ballot initiatives as such.

 
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Storm

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I’m back online after five days being knocked off. Two of them without power. Many of my friends are doing far worse. Just a few miles away, the latest company estimates that they’ll get power back by the 11th are improvements on previous estimates.

 

I didn’t miss being online much. As with a previous forced break, I quickly got used to no internet and found it relaxing and productive. The exception was having no e-mail. Ironically, I came back on to find few messages and no one to whom to write, since everyone I know is still offline.

 

Nevertheless, on the whole we did OK. I was at my friend’s farm yesterday (where I grew corn and edamame this year) to help clean up (my third attempt to get through; my attempt on Tuesday was especially interesting and, in hindsight, dangerous). Except for a belfry knocked off the barn, things are in pretty good shape there. No flooding, unlike after Irene a year ago. The community garden looks great, like nothing happened.

 

The gas lines are extraordinary, but a foretaste of what will become more ordinary. The whole thing’s a microcosm of Peak Oil in general. The increasing complexity of the system renders its temporary crippling in the case of each new blow ever more devastating and prolonged. I’m reminded forcefully of how just a year ago the fleeting blizzard wreaked similar havoc. Today’s havoc is far worse. But I think of how in the decades I’ve lived here stuff like this never happened. It’s now getting to be a regular event. I wrote last year how the Olduvai Theory of Peak Oil predicts exactly these phenomena. I think I’ll repost it today.

 

So far I’ve been lucky with the gas. I filled up on Thursday with only a short line to wait. Since then the backups at the handful of stations open have become mind-boggling. (Thursday the radio said only 20% of NJ stations were open. The proportion around here is far less.) A big part of the tension and anguish is how few people understand what’s happening with fossil fuels and the limits to complexity. In a crisis people need a way to understand what’s happening. I’ve heard some wild stuff, and of course the standard government-will-save-us (“Obama-will-save-us”, depending on the speaker) nonsense about strategic oil reserves and buying oil from more “countries”. The truth would serve people better. Part of the movement’s job is to spread the truth.

 

Speaking of which, the Food Freedom movement needs a new Internet profile. The existing sites and blogs are insufficient, ad hoc, and have mostly a reformist pro-government tone. Don’t get me started on the NGO-Monsanto complex who want the Food Control Act to become aggressively effective. I feel combined despair and contempt when I see how supporters of the Right to Know initiative in California have let themselves be thrown onto the defensive. (One of the few e-mails I had was from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, parroting the craven defensive line.)

 

The right response to corporate lies is to redouble the offensive, repeat and escalate the aggressive charges, and throw the lies back in their face, blaming them for everything that happens. This the only thing that works, and it’s also the truth.

 

So the Community Food/Food Relocalization movement, and the broader Food Sovereignty movement, need a new forum dedicated to vigorous discussion of true principles and the strategy, tactics, and operational goals that follow from these. 

 
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True and False Solar Cornucopias

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This post quotes from a paper to be delivered next year casting doubt on what I’ve called green cornucopianism.

 

Although Malthus’s worries about land shortages were transcended by world-historical events as well as by Ricardo’s and Marx’s different versions of technological optimism, they were soon reincarnated in Jevons’s warnings about the depletion of coal. Today economists generally dismiss the pessimism not only of Malthus and Jevons, but also of current concerns over peak oil, by expressing faith in human ingenuity. To retrospectively ridicule pessimists by referring to technological progress that they did not anticipate has become an established pattern of mainstream thought. Almost regardless of ideological persuasion, the seemingly self-evident concept of “technological progress” inherited from early industrialism has been resorted to as an article of faith serving to dispel the specter of truncated growth. The increasingly acknowledged threats of peak oil and global warming are thus generally countered with visions of a future civilization based on solar power.

 

All this modern technological progress was caused by fossil fuels. Now they’re saying technology will provide a replacement for fossil fuels. That’s saying something rather different, although the technocrats and flacks are too stupid to realize it.

 

(Judging by the paper’s title, it may go in for another kind of idiocy, that without fossil-fueled “growth” we’re in for scarcity and ”zero-sum” horrors. But this is the same lie propagated by the growthsters. Agroecological science has proven that smallholder-based organic production using minimal or no fossil fuels outproduces oil-slathered industrial ag, in calories and nutrition. Pre-oil scarcity, where it existed, was primarily the result of malevolent socioeconomic structures, just as today; and secondarily of insufficient knowledge. We now have the knowledge. All we need to make the post-oil future a future of abundance is the Food Sovereignty movement which shall overcome the tyranny of today and tomorrow. This is the way we can and must occupy the sun.

 

But to use concentrated solar panels to privatize and enclose it cannot work physically, cannot work economically, and cannot “feed the world” or liberate humanity. The only thing which can render the post-oil world a world of scarcity is the same thing which imposes global scarcity today: scarcity-dependent and -imposing socioeconomic structures. Corporate tyranny.

 

As I wrote last Thanksgiving: Occupy the Sun!)

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The Real Purpose of Svalbard

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What’s the real purpose of Svalbard?

 

1. For the short to mid-run: Monsanto and the other rackets chuck a few bucks into the kitty funding this effort, while the vast majority of the funds come from the public of countries around the world. (As the Global Crop Diversity Trust chirps, this is a “public-private partnership”, and we know what that means.)

 

The Trust (a corporate front group which is simply a conduit for US govt, CGIAR globalization cadre, and biotech racket lies and policy) then uses the people’s money to do the work of collecting and assembling the seeds.

 

Then, as per the membership agreement, Monsanto, Dupont, and the rest can use the seeds for their proprietary research. Any patented product they develop out of this biopiracy will then be used as a weapon against the farmers and people of the region where the original variety came from and anywhere else it can be deployed.

 

If you doubt this, or if any hack defender of the program denies it, simply ask why Dupont, Syngenta, and other biotech corporations “donate” to it. It’ll be cute to hear the hacks at the Trust say they do it out of the kindness of their hearts.

 

2. Over the long run: When/if corporate agriculture catastrophically fails (it will, but those within the system probably have lots of different levels of consciousness vs. delusion on this), they can use the seeds to have food grown for themselves.

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New Orleans-Style Shock Doctrine Possibilities in New Jersey

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These are some speculative thoughts inspired by history and some unconfirmed anecdotes I’ve heard. The fact is that significant areas of NJ were severely flooded by hurricane Irene (not to mention a second thorough soaking which followed a week later). These included residential and commercial areas, including some which still held a high proportion of local businesses. It’s this last group which got me thinking.

 

Obama declared the place a federal disaster and made one of his stupid drive-by appearances. (Governor Christie got into a nice little spat with some fellow Republicans over it – you know how these hypocrites are the moment it’s their turn to mooch). In theory disaster aid means subsidized loans from the Small Business Association and grants to municipalities. (Only infrequently direct grants to homeowners.) Given Obama’s record, it’s hard to believe he’s not going to corporatize this as much as possible. But I admit I can’t find anything indicating that yet. All NJ media stories I could find (here’s a typical one) merely regurgitated the administration press release.

 

It’s true that especially the people of poor neighborhoods in Paterson and elsewhere doubt they’ll actually get help. They know the record of this government in general and in disasters like New Orleans in particular. They believe government is trying to just temporarily mollify them with rhetoric. In practice it will either neglect or assault them.

 

In New Orleans government collaborated with corporate predators to use the destruction as a pretext to seize and privatize large swaths of public land and infrastructure. Naomi Klein described the crimes in Shock Doctrine:

 

The news racing around the shelter [in Baton Rouge] that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: “I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.” All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a “smaller, safer city”–which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of “fresh starts” and “clean sheets,” you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway….

Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that “they’ve had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn’t do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. … This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!”….

Over at the shelter, Jamar Perry, a young resident of New Orleans, could think of nothing else. “I really don’t see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn’t have died.”

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us in the food line overheard and whipped around. “What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn’t an opportunity. It’s a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?”

A mother with two kids chimed in. “No, they’re not blind, they’re evil. They see just fine.”

 

This included the idea that the corporate-government nexus should launch a full-scale assault upon the people while they were dazed and disoriented, much like police thugs arresting someone at 2AM. This shock treatment idea was premeditated by Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues going back to the 50s:

 

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as the shock doctrine. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That’s our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile “free-market” ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo.”

 

So it was in New Orleans. (Many commentators scoffed at or considered overblown and “conspiratorial” the allegation that federal government consciously sought this goal. The Bush administration denied it. Characteristically, it was left to the Obama crew to openly admit it.)

 

So what could be the parallel in NJ? It’s true that infrastructure like public schools don’t look like an immediate easy target and weren’t tremendously damaged anyway. But anecdotally, there’s already speculation about what damage to individual businesses will be covered by government and/or private insurance*, as well as reports than in some places not previously prone to flooding (but hit hard by this storm), many had foregone flood insurance completely. This is based on anecdotes I was told, not on anything I read, nor could I find confirmation (or disproof) in the media. So I don’t know how much this is true, but certainly it all rings true. The specter looms of harried municipalities turning in desperation to lowball offers from corporate developers and retailers (themselves, no doubt, well larded by federal aid), at the same time that devastated local businesses are left unable to rebuild. We know where that all leads.

 

We’ll see if this acceleration of Walmartization, whether as acutely intentional or chronically inertial disaster capitalism, turns out to be the case. If I hear anything new I’ll let you know. If anyone has more information let us know.

 

[*Meanwhile, as disasters continue to compound, ever more financially devastating, we have to wonder how long it'll be before insurers try to abrogate as a group with regard to some disaster. I'm sure that where it comes to any particular disaster there's a theoretical out which could absolve insurers of having to pay, just like health insurers always look for ways to refuse payment. I'm sure Congress and many courts would be friendly.

 

One historical precedent is Kristallnacht. Synagogues, cemetaries, and Jewish-owned businesses all over Germany were damaged or destroyed in a one-night pogrom. Most of these were duly insured. The insurance companies raised a stink over paying on these claims. Although of course they didn't publicly say so, they knew that the allegedly "spontaneous" mob action was really orchestrated by the regime from above. Why should they get stuck holding the financial bag for all that damage?

 

In his capacity as head of the Four Year Plan, the command economy coordination structure, Goering issued a ruling that the insurers weren't liable for claims arising from Kristallnacht. (The logic was basically that through their provocations the Jews had brought the spontaneous people's reaction upon themselves.)

 

We have the same ingredients today - tyrannical elitist government, insurance rackets trying to minimize payouts even on claims everyone recognizes are legitimate, complete contempt for the people. So while federal insurance can be counted on to continue to assist big developers in their endless rebuilding on flood plains, we can equally expect all types of insurance to try to evade paying where it comes to keeping local small businesses in business.]

 

Before I close this passel of speculation, I want to make a comment on system disaster assistance in general. Federal assistance is under the general aegis of FEMA, a highly disputed organization. The system calls it a selfless public servant, detractors accuse it of setting up concentration camps. While the camps certainly exist on paper and to some extent in reality and can be used for any purpose, so far in practice FEMA’s record has been typical corporatism – do all one can to promote corporate interests while neglecting one’s ostensible responsibilities as much as possible, doing only the bare minimum. This record (as well as a basic hollowed-out incompetence) was also borne out by the New Orleans experience.

 

I think Derrick Jensen gets it right – FEMA is by design a tool which can be used for pretty much any purpose. I’ll add that by now it’s likely to be incompetent at its “good” uses. But this may mean it’ll also be incompetent at tyrannical uses.

 

Some commentators noticed another New Orleans parallel. Just as with Katrina, the pre-storm call from “authorities” was for people to prepare or evacuate on an individual basis, usually including the same callous assumptions* about people’s ability to get out. There was little in the way of any kind of collective effort. This is by design, part of the general anti-cooperative ethos of the entire unsociety.

 

[*I did see one local newspaper account. People had been driven from their homes by evacuation orders and rising floodwaters. Now the waters were allegedly threatening the hotel into which they'd been driven. The police showed up there to order another evacuation, but as a group the refugees angrily declared they had nowhere left to go. The police left. (The hotel never did flood.)

 

The article, of course, said the police "allowed" them to stay. No, it sounded more like the people made it clear they weren't leaving short of the police arresting and dragging them away. Facing such defiance, the cops backed down. They weren't capable of handling it.

 

Just one little example of the way power flows have always worked throughout history. No one in power ever "allows" anything. The people take what they can.]

 

Whatever the momentary character of a disaster or the government response to it, one rule we can recognize is that the government does not mean well, and its efforts will be incompetent at best, malevolent at worst. We can rely only on ourselves. We can choose to do so the way we have been, as atomized individuals, or we can do it cooperatively as part of the relocalization movement. (How best to do this has been debated before within the movement.) One thing to always keep in mind is that you DO NOT want to end up in anything like a refugee camp. This must be avoided if at all possible.

 

Well, I hope this post wasn’t too episodic and rambling. It’s just some thoughts and possibilities I wanted to rope together into a preliminary assessment/prognostication. Food for thought.

 

Food Sovereignty and Agroecology (the UN Special Report)

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I’m not an expert on farming. I’m just starting to learn about it through gardening, saving seeds, working at a farmers’ market, and as in this case reading and writing about it. Probably most of my readers fall into this category as well, although some have more knowledge than I do.

 

But I think propagating and discussing knowledge is one of the key elements of our movement, so part of the way I’m trying to learn about what we’re trying to do is to educate myself as much as possible on the state of the agronomic science, and report on how the evidence supports Food Sovereignty in every way. That’s why I wrote my earlier posts on farming, and that’s why I want to continue analyzing the best stuff I’ve read.

 

Today I’m going to summarize the recent Report from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter. This position is not in the UN’s mainstream; the Special Rapporteur is, I gather, more like a marginalized Elizabeth Warren type. It also contains several reformist concessions to the corporatist status quo. Nevertheless, on the whole it presents an alternative to corporatist agriculture. It explicitly enshrines agroecology as the desired paradigm for food production, and implicitly exalts food sovereignty as the desired ideology and mode of social organization. It also does a great job of assembling all the recent science and scholarship on the issue, which proves the superiority of agroecology to corporate agriculture in every way – productivity, nutrition, resiliency, accessibility, stability, democracy.

 

The introduction describes how, after decades of neglect, the food stagflation which started in 2007 has triggered an increase in agricultural investment. But this isn’t the old style public interest investment which worked so well; it’s neoliberal “investment”. What’s more, investment as such isn’t sufficient to deal with the food crisis, since this crisis is part of a much greater civilizational crisis. The food solution must also be a socioeconomic, political, and environmental solution. It must not only maintain quantity of production but greatly improve quality, be more ecologically sound, and improve the position of small and mid-size farmers. The science proves agroecology can do these.

 

It is possible, however, to significantly improve agricultural productivity where it has been lagging behind, and thus raise production where it needs most to be raised (i.e. in poor, food-deficit countries), while at the same time improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and preserving ecosystems.
(section 3)

 

It’s just a matter of political will. This will require a comprehensive transformation, a philosophy and a set of practices which will obliterate neoliberalism. The philosophy is Food Sovereignty and the set of practices is agroecology.

 

The report starts out describing how even corporations and neoliberal agencies are starting to pay attention to agroecology (2) (which is a bad thing in the short run; but I think in the long run it’s still a good thing when they move beyond the “ignore you” stage to the “try to co-opt you” stage Gandhi forgot to mention). It says that continuing to increase gross yield (if that were possible) isn’t sufficient (3-4). Thus it implicitly admits that the necessary transformation cannot occur under capitalism. Agroecology and food sovereignty are directly opposed to neoliberalism, in philosophy, intent, and practice (3-4).

 

Schutter gives a Diagnosis (5-11); food systems must achieve Availability, Accessibility, Adequacy. I agree with these serviceable measures, since once we apply the principle, You Will the End, You Will the Means, they sum up what we need.

 

Availability: Sufficient food to meet human needs. We have more than sufficient physical bounty, but commodified agriculture generates artificial scarcity as its goal. We won’t have this physical cornucopia for long, however, because industrial agriculture will fail. Fossil fuels will fail, and GMOs will fail. So by the availability criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology.

 

Accessibility: Physical and economic. This implicitly means doing away with the commodification straitjacket. Food sovereignty has to mean access to the land for anyone willing to work it, with no squatting rights (propertarian “ownership”) for those who refuse to work. We must farm what we own and own what we farm. By the access criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology.

 

Adequacy: Dietary/nutritional, safety, culture. Industrial agriculture has stripped food of its taste and nutrients, while pumping it full of toxins and slathering it with poison. On a more macro level, it has stripped and poisoned the soil, the water, the air, and ravaged natural and socioeconomic systems. It has culturally impoverished us, cutting us off from our land, from knowledge of our earth and our food that grows from it. It has perpetrated sublimated genocide through the forced extinction of most of the cultivars which were bred over tens of thousands of years. Seeds are vectors of culture. To forcibly prevent their cultivation, economically or by other means, is a crime against humanity. By the adequacy criterion, we must transform to relocalized smallholder agroecology. (And jettison the “intellectual property” tyranny.)

 

The report states (7) that first of all we must transform away from cereal production for animal feed (“nearly half of the world’s cereal production”). This in itself could feed 3.5 billion more people than are fed already, even accounting for less meat in the food supply. (Under corporate agriculture, ten grain calories are required to produce one calorie of beef; think of the vastly greater efficiency of letting people eat this grain. But this would require us to measure things according to a realistic definition of efficiency, not the Orwellian corporate definition.)

 

There are plenty more economies to be realized through upgrading agricultural practice (corporate ag wastes immense amounts of potential food in the field, albeit in ways which increase its profits and socialize the losses) and eradicating ethanol subsidies and mandates (7).

 

This transformation will improve the economic position of small farmers (8). To this day, the cause of hunger is never insufficient physical stocks but artificially induced poverty among the very people who grow the food or would be growing it if they hadn’t been illicitly excluded from the land. It’s a self-evident calculus: The more people who redeem their rightful food sovereignty by becoming autonomous and cooperative producers, the fewer who will be hungry. (For the reformists, the report discusses how studies have proven that “GDP growth originating in agriculture” is twice as effective in reducing poverty as any other GDP growth, and that “the multiplier effects are significantly higher when growth is triggered by higher incomes for smallholders” than for any other kind of income increase. So those guys should be on board with food sovereignty as well.)

 

Section 10 states:

 

Most efforts in the past have focused on improving seeds and ensuring that farmers
are provided with a set of inputs that can increase yields, replicating the model of industrial
processes in which external inputs serve to produce outputs in a linear model of production.
Instead, agroecology seeks to improve the sustainability of agroecosystems by mimicking
nature instead of industry. This report suggests that scaling up agroecological practices
can simultaneously increase farm productivity and food security, improve incomes and
rural livelihoods, and reverse the trend towards species loss and genetic erosion.

 

The rest of the report describes how agroecology will accomplish these goals where industrial agriculture failed.

 

Agroecology is both a science and a set of practices. It was created by the
convergence of two scientific disciplines: agronomy and ecology. As a science,
agroecology is the “application of ecological science to the study, design and management
of sustainable agroecosystems.”
(12)

 

It’s the best for soil, for nutrition, energy usage, integration of crops and livestock, crop diversification, self-sufficiency for farmers and communities, the interaction and productivity of the entire system rather than isolated (monoculture) species.

 

Agroecology is knowledge-intensive. (We recently talked about the importance of propagating knowledge.) The emphasis is on the horizontal, decentralized development and spread of knowledge. As much as possible it’s farmer-driven (12, 38). Enough practical and scientific knowledge has already accumulated to prove that agroecology is the most productive system and is in harmony with the democratic principles of food sovereignty (14).

 

Although the Oil Age is ending, the agricultural knowledge we’ve amassed during it is the key to maintaining a higher level of production than in pre-oil times, and doing so in a democratic rather than feudal way. (Of course, neoliberal corporatism wants to restore the worst of feudalism in both the physical and political senses.)

 

A wide panoply of techniques based on the agroecological perspective have been
developed and successfully tested in a range of regions. These approaches involve the
maintenance or introduction of agricultural biodiversity (diversity of crops, livestock,
agroforestry, fish, pollinators, insects, soil biota and other components that occur in and
around production systems) to achieve the desired results in production and sustainability.
(16)

 

These practices include integrated nutrient management, agroforestry (20), water harvesting, integration of livestock into farming systems, and the push-pull system (19). I’ll add that the full virtue of these will be realized to the extent they’re deployed by the people rather than through corporatism (the report seems to have a temporizing tone in some places).

 

These are the answer to the scoffers who cite the Maya, Anasazi, Hohokam and others who malfarmed themselves out of existence in the pre-oil age. Their self-defeating practices were the unwise pre-oil equivalent of industrial agriculture. Today we have the knowledge to do much better. Again, it’s simply a matter of political will.

 

Sections 17 and 18 detail the improved yields to be gained by agroecology.

 

17. Such resource-conserving, low-external-input techniques have a proven potential to
significantly improve yields. In what may be the most systematic study of the potential of
such techniques to date, Jules Pretty et al. compared the impacts of 286 recent sustainable
agriculture projects in 57 poor countries covering 37 million hectares (3 per cent of the
cultivated area in developing countries). They found that such interventions increased
productivity on 12.6 millions farms, with an average crop increase of 79 per cent, while
improving the supply of critical environmental services. Disaggregated data from this
research showed that average food production per household rose by 1.7 tonnes per year
(up by 73 per cent) for 4.42 million small farmers growing cereals and roots on 3.6 million
hectares, and that increase in food production was 17 tonnes per year (up 150 per cent) for
146,000 farmers on 542,000 hectares cultivating roots (potato, sweet potato, cassava). After
UNCTAD and UNEP reanalyzed the database to produce a summary of the impacts in
Africa, it was found that the average crop yield increase was even higher for these projects
than the global average of 79 per cent at 116 per cent increase for all African projects and
128 per cent increase for projects in East Africa.

18. The most recent large-scale study points to the same conclusions. Research
commissioned by the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures project of the UK
Government reviewed 40 projects in 20 African countries where sustainable intensification
was developed during the 2000s. The projects included crop improvements (particularly
improvements through participatory plant breeding on hitherto neglected orphan crops),
integrated pest management, soil conservation and agro-forestry. By early 2010, these
projects had documented benefits for 10.39 million farmers and their families and
improvements on approximately 12.75 million hectares. Crop yields more than doubled on
average (increasing 2.13-fold) over a period of 3-10 years, resulting in an increase in
aggregate food production of 5.79 million tonnes per year, equivalent to 557 kg per farming
household.

 

Section 21 describes how agroecology helps break the cycle of debt by liberating farmers from synthetic fertilizer, through sound practices of livestock integration (including keeping their manure on the farm) and cover crops (“green manure”). Section 22 cites the Badgley study which proves that “on a global scale, leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use” (Footnote 37). Imagine the economic and democratic savings from that!

 

Agroecology is labor-intensive (23). While kleptocracy intends to deploy us all as slave labor, a human community could turn this labor-intensiveness into a full-employment boon of meaningful work. Human beings love working the land, growing their own food, where they’re truly doing it for themselves and their communities rather than for some alien boss. Agroecological practices also make for more pleasant work. There’s more shade (from trees planted for many purposes) and no smell and toxicity from pesticides and herbicides. And once we achieve the social revolution, it’ll all be our work. That’s the most important thing of all. (For the reformists, I’ll add that according to section 23 the cost of creating agricultural jobs has been found to be much less than in other sectors. So sincere trickle-downers should also be on board with this.)

 

Section 25 (not Peak Oil-aware) describes how “agroecological practices are fully compatible with a gradual mechanization of farming”. The need for new machines for no-till agriculture and direct seeding will generate new manufacturing jobs, if societies choose to host these jobs. Agroforestry is also a proven job creator.

 

Sections 26 and 27 describe how agroecology will solve the malnutrition problem generated by cereal monoculture. Commodity cereals contain mostly carbohydrates; they lack protein and are denuded of vitamins and minerals. Crop diversity, as is provided by agroecology, is necessary for human nutritional needs. Women and children will especially benefit (27). This diversity of grown species will also be resilient in the face of natural challenges and the ravages of our environmental vandalism. Sections 28-30 detail how agroecology will be the most resilient practice in the face of climate change, particularly its increasing incidence of extreme weather events and migration of pests and weeds. (Climate change assists vermin everywhere. I’ll add that corporate agriculture and husbandry in general, GMOs and CAFOs in particular, intentionally drive a biological arms race with intentionally fostered superweeds and superbugs. This is the business plan of these biotech and pharmacological ”industries”. It’s obvious that humanity must lose this struggle, unless we purge ourselves of our own indigenous vermin.) This resiliency will be a primary value if the human race is to continue to physically exist at all.

 

Agroecology also uses less fossil fuel energy (31), which is perhaps the most critical issue of all. Either we’re going to figure out how to feed ourselves without cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, or we’re going to starve. (The report thinks climate change is more important than Peak Oil, but in fact only the latter can possible mitigate the former. Even with my can-do political attitude, I regard voluntary GHG mitigation as a lost cause.) That implies the political solution as well, since neoliberal corporatism intends to expend through starvation as many people as necessary to construct its neo-feudal slave agriculture, while it uses the residual fossil fuels to maintain its luxuries and enforce its police state. Getting back to the importance of knowledge and education, Cuba provides the classic example of the importance of knowledge in transforming food production from an environment where oil is taken for granted to one where it’s scarce.

 

What can be done to achieve wide application of agroecology, toward food sovereignty? The report emphasizes democratic farmer participation toward dissemination of the best knowledge (32). Section 33 details how farmer field schools have been proven to teach farmers how to significantly reduce pesticide use while increasing yields, and do all of it in an environment which empowers them, helps organize them, and always furthers their education. Sections 32-3 list many organizations involved in this work. Even existing governments like that of Brazil are incorporating agroecology and farmer participation in their investment programs (34). Even where this investment remains predominantly corporatist, wherever it helps gather agroecological knowledge and gives farmers democratic experience, it helps food sovereignty toward its goal.

 

Section 35 describes two types of “scaling up” of agroecology: Horizontal (acreage) and vertical (expansion of education, finance, distribution networks, etc.). The report focuses mainly on the vertical expansion. (Previous reports, as cited in footnote 66, discussed horizontal expansion, for example issues of access to land, water, and seeds. I haven’t read these reports yet but I’m going to.)

 

The report calls for old-style public interest investment (37), which I doubt is going to happen. (To give credit where credit is due, the extinct developing-country investment programs were an example of a New Deal-style government program that worked to spread prosperity and freedom. That, of course, is why the IMF targeted those programs for extirpation. And that attrition is why reformism can’t work. Even if we could get such programs back alongside the rackets, they’d just be wiped out again by those rackets. Why do people want to continue fighting this endless fight?) Section 37 does give a good account of how reformist investment programs could work if we weren’t already under the thumb of kleptocracy.

 

Section 38 returns to the emphasis on knowledge. Again, the report calls for public investment in horizontal agricultural education, which is proven to have the most important impact on poverty in developing countries. While we may not have much faith in governments undertaking this education, we can agree with the need for this education, and the need to find a way to achieve it ourselves.

 

The report goes on to call upon governments, corporations, and NGO donors to work on all this (43-7). But the meaningful prescription is implied in sections 39-42, which envision a democracy of food emphasizing the primacy of small farmers and co-ops.

 

I think the importance of a report like this isn’t its intrinsic call for reform, which I think is in vain, but its implicit call for revolution. Physically, morally, politically, the corporate status quo in food stands for the ultimate death of humanity. Certainly politically, as food tyranny is imposed. And probably physically as well, as we shall not be able to withstand the end of oil as well as the incipient pest afflictions, pandemics, and crop failures nature will impose on our unresilient monoculture system.

 

I add to those the tragedy of our bottlenecked economic prospects.

 

But there is one path and only one path out of our physical, economic, and political predicament. This is the path of Food Sovereignty and agroecology. These comprise a unit, and they unify with democracy and humanity. Our course is clear.

Toward A Sustainable and Democratic Agriculture

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What’s the real nature of our agricultural system? As this paper argues, “Agriculture was not designed to be sustainable.” It was designed to support colonial and later corporate empires. This is why it has always emphasized maximum commodity production.

 

That’s why this is true: 

But those seeking to ensure food production in a post-oil future must first explicitly acknowledge that agriculture was never designed to be sustainable – not ecologically, not economically, and not socially sustainable, at least for primary producers. It would be a coincidence of miraculous proportions if agriculture would be sustainable, simply because it was designed to do things which are incompatible with sustainability. Thus, efforts to adjust, refine, or otherwise tweak contemporary agriculture to sustain productivity are starting from a flawed design. 

Once again we see that reformism cannot work, because the problems we have are not the result of “abuses” of an otherwise sound system. We’d be trying to reform something which is structurally flawed. To promote on a large scale the kind of agriculture which does not, for example, export massive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus generating hideous environmental problems, is to promote not a reform but a revolutionary transformation.

 

You can’t render something sustainable which was designed to be unsustainable. As steady-state economy guru Herman Daly puts it, if something’s designed to be an airplane, you’re not going to be able to retrofit it as a helicopter in midflight. As they say, “You can’t get there from here.”

 

For agriculture, the goal is a transformation to post-oil production. It will have to be relocalized and decentralized. Food markets have to return to their natural local/regional basis. We’ll be unwinding much of the processing infrastructure. Organic production will be necessary but not sufficient, as not just farming inputs but the entire system of farming need to transform. We have tremendous work to do. Even basic research and education is in a parlous state. (Compare how Cuba was able to swiftly take advantage of longstanding research into organic production with minimal fossil fuel and other imported inputs when the collapse of the USSR cut off its oil subsidy. This was a perfect example of the right ideas already laying around, ready to be picked up. But from what I gather few outside Cuba have bothered to study what they’ve accomplished in the last 20 years.) And farmers will need to survive the entire revolutionary process.

 

This leads to the political implications of the transformation. Agronomy has proven that small and mid-size organic production is comparable to corporate monoculture under normal circumstances. Under conditions of adverse weather (which will become the norm as climate change progresses) organic outproduces corporate. And organic is in a far better position to maintain caloric output in the absence of cheap fossil fuels, while corporate production would immediately suffer catastrophic failure. So this establishes that we need tens of millions of small and midsize organic farms. But this cannot happen under the existing political and economic dispensation. Therefore, even if one is ideologically willing to buy into land propertarianism, on a practical level we can no longer afford such a luxury. If we want to continue eating post-oil, we have to move to a land dispensation based on food production stewardship. You will the end, you will the means.

 

I add that under such a dispensation, where anyone willing to work has access to the necessary land, we’ll achieve, for the first time in history, a society of fully employed autonomous and cooperative workers, all enjoying full control and use of what they produce. This economic democracy will in turn offer the most healthy environment for true political democracy to also finally come into its own.

 

Today’s agriculture is dependent upon the basic subsidies of cheap oil and environmental externalizations, as well as how the economically unviable farmers, really terminal sharecroppers, are carried by taxpayer subsidies. If any of these props fails, and they’ll all soon fail, the corporate system collapses.

 

Meanwhile, organic farmers receive almost nothing in return for the environmental (and sociopolitical) services they provide. On the contrary, they’re expected to fend for themselves amid the hostile depravity of the massively subsidized commodity system. 

if every farmer had had to absorb all of the costs routinely externalized on farms today, many common practices would be unimaginable because they would be prohibitively expensive;

and if farmers were paid for all the downstream benefits society receives from ecologically sound management, such as clean air and water, robust and functional biodiversity, and food free of pharmaceuticals, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and human pathogens, many practices common on organic farms would be ubiquitous on conventional farms as well…..

Why Will Organic Become Mainstream? Organic will predominate in the future because:

Rising energy costs will preclude continued reliance upon energy-dependent inputs. Synthetic N alone currently accounts for about 40% of the energy budget of grain crops, encouraging a shift toward biological N fixation, but also toward less extreme levels of labile N.

The rising costs of ‘fixing symptoms’ created by ecologically dysfunctional production systems will demand less intrusive, more ecologically sound approaches. For example, the weeds promoted by simple crop rotations will be viewed as a symptom of an unsound system, rather than as a problem. The solution then is not just to kill the weeds which will just reappear next year, but to strategically design rotations and other practices to narrow the weed niche.
Organic practices are designed to internalize costs of production, reducing or eliminating the off-farm impacts objectionable to society.

To illustrate the concept of internalizing costs, stockless organic horticultural farmers surveyed by Clark and Maitland (2004) actually marketed hort crops from a given field just 4 years in 10.

In effect, they sacrificed hort crop income to grow hay, grain, or other service crops to add or scavenge N, suppress weeds and pests, and improve the soil. Organic practices are designed to internalize costs which are routinely externalized by conventional farming. Organic farmers do not ask society to absorb the cost of antibiotic resistant bacteria entering the food chain (Martinez, 2009) or endocrine-disruptor impacts on stream organisms (Orlando et al., 2009) or birth defects deriving from biocide use (Winchester et al., 2009).

As reviewed by MacRae et al. (2004), EU nations subsidize ecologically sound management exactly for this reason – to pay farmers for the extra costs incurred in order to internalize costs of production. Farmers are paid for societal services beyond the market-driven premium paid by individuals. Thus, ecologically sound management will be advantaged when input costs become prohibitive, and when society rejects the costs externalized by contemporary farming. 

In addition to the practical truth of that, there’s another moral argument for the Land Recourse. Farmers, and particularly organic (or would-be organic) farmers have not been paid for their services. They’ve been robbed by the assaults and coercions of corporate agriculture. Therefore, farmers as a group are owed a vast reparation. The corporatized and otherwise enclosed land should square it. (This applies to every other kind of bankster and corporate crime; and it applies not just to practicing farmers but to all of us, insofar as we become the farmers/growers/relocalists civilization must produce.)

 

The wide adoption of organic production won’t depress yields even under today’s conditions, as the science has proven over and over: 

When studied systematically, however, organic yields can be quite comparable to conventional yields, particularly after the 3-5 year transition interval. In MD, USDA researchers (Cavigelli et al. 2008) reported 6-year yields in corn, soy, and wheat under conventional (no-till and chisel plow) and organic management (2, 3, and 4 (+)-year rotations). Organic corn yield in the longest rotation was 24% lower than from conventional yield, an effect which was attributed largely to insufficient N and weed control issues (73 and 23% of yield reduction, respectively). Organic soy yield was 16% lower than conventional, but wheat yield did not differ between systems.

After the transition interval, Pimentel et al. (2005) found no difference in corn yield or in soy yield between conventional and organic systems in a 21-year trial conducted in PA. Similarly, over a 9 year interval in Iowa, Delate et al. (2008) showed no significant difference in yield for corn, for soy, or for wheat yields when grown in conventional versus organic systems.

Clearly, organic management is able to provide on-farm N and pest control comparable to what is purchased off-farm in conventional systems. However, it must be noted that the longer rotations typical of organic management mean corn may be grown once in 5 or 7 years, compared to in alternate years in a typical corn-soy rotation.

Thus, total corn production in 10 years time will be much less in an organic system….

Furthermore, organic and low-input yields reportedly already surpass conventional yields in the Third World (Badgley et al. 2007). According to the UNEP-UNCTAD (2008), the issue in the third world is not ‘how to feed people’, but rather, ‘how to end poverty and hunger’. Organic farming is viewed there as an enabling or empowering vehicle for social change and development, not just a way of producing food. How you frame the question predetermines the range of possible answers. The answers to ‘how to end poverty and hunger’ are quite different from ‘how to feed the world’. 

The lower corn production is a feature of greater overall food production, as most corn isn’t grown for human food, but goes into gas tanks, to sweeten junk food, and to provide feedstock for Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Replacing this complete waste of calories with sound farming methods will result in a greater net production of food for people. More on that below.

 

Like I said, all that referred to today’s circumstance of still relatively cheap oil and phosphorus, as well as the temporary zombification of the depleted soil with synthetic fertilizers. But none of these conditions will hold for long. We’re on Peak Oil’s “bumpy plateau” of production, but within the next few years the production decline will begin in earnest. Peak Phosphorus also looms. And the soil cannot long withstand being constantly jolted into productivity with ever-increasing applications of synthfert. (The same dynamic prevails with pesticides and herbicides, both also rapidly hitting the wall of diminishing returns, both also dependent upon cheap fossil fuels.)

 

The answer to questions about feeding the world is clearly that corporate agriculture will soon be unable to do so, while only relocalized organic and defossilized agriculture will be physically able to do so. As said in the final sentences of the quote I gave above, the real question isn’t physical but political. Will Food Sovereignty win its political struggle? This will decide whether or not the world will continue to eat. Food Sovereignty is physically capable of feeding the world, and nothing else is. (And as always we should remember that if Food Sovereignty wins out, we’ll be putting vast amounts of arable but unproductively hoarded land into production.)

 

So only decentralized organic production can be sustainable. And what is sustainability? As the paper laments, the term hasn’t received a clear definition, and has been eroded and often denuded. (See here for Walmart’s “sustainability” scam, a typical example.)

 

For a rigorous definition, we can start with physical facts: A sustainable system will not be dependent upon fossil fuels or global distribution networks. Nor can it be dependent upon any other input which depends upon either of these. And while so far we’ve gotten away with trashing the environment, nature’s payback is gathering force, and we won’t skate much longer. Agriculture has to exist within nature. Therefore no agricultural system is sustainable if it flouts the ways of nature, let alone assails them. But our corporate agriculture does nothing but flout and assault. So corporate agriculture is unsustainable.

 

I’ll go further to say that since corporate agriculture is the result of inherent corporate logic, it follows that any agriculture within a corporatist context will be unsustainable. So corporations in themselves and any economic system based upon their logic cannot coexist with our continued ability to eat.

 

Therefore, while it’s not clear that the moral imperative of economic democracy is part of the definition of sustainability, we reach the same conclusion by the practical route. The physical sustenance of civilization depends upon the establishment of economic democracy, including the abolition of corporations.

 

(I’ll add that even if that weren’t true, even if practical sustainability could in theory coexist with economic tyranny, it would have no legitimacy unless it sought accord with the goal of destroying this tyranny. Nothing is legitimate other than within this moral context. I’d say any definition of anything which isn’t subsumed in the framework of seeking democracy becomes moot, since it would then be objectively pro-criminal and unworthy of humanity.)

 

So we have the basic definition and facts. But the picture isn’t yet complete, since organic inputs in themselves aren’t sufficient for the transformation we need. I mentioned above how it was irrelevant that organic would produce less corn over a ten year period, because we’ll need to transform much of our cereal based agriculture to something radically different anyway.

 

Today’s organic agriculture is still largely based on production for the global system, often on commodity crops, and therefore is part of the metabolic rift between the land and where the waste goes (and the fact that such “waste” exists at all). It’s not even remotely as bad as corporate agriculture, but it’s still in significant ways ”agriculture” as we know it. It’s not sustainable.

 

To complete the vision of how to feed the world, we need to apply the principle that agriculture must cooperate with nature, not fight it. In North America especially, this means moving away from large-seeded annuals like cereal commodity crops, and toward grassy perennials. This will be integrated into a system of rotating crops and pasturage. 

[E]cologically sound agriculture – including organic agriculture – will necessarily rely less on annuals and more on perennials – with a central role for grass-fed livestock. And let me re-affirm that this does not mean less vegetables, as these account for barely 2% of arable land in ON. The problem is the predominance of large-seeded annual grains, which currently occupy over half of the arable land in ON, grown largely although not solely for livestock feed to enable the confinement industry. 

Growing commodity annuals aggravates all the problems of soil nutrition, erosion, environmental toxicity, and the waste crises of the metabolic rift. Growing grasses where nature intends them to be grown will restore the natural balances and rebuild the soil. The grasses will be transformed into food for people through livestock grazing. This will more than make up for the foregone calories of cereal production, since the vast majority of what will be replaced wasn’t going to human food anyway. And since production of vegetable annuals takes up such a small portion of the land as it is, we’ll be able to maintain and increase fruit and vegetable production through sound crop rotation as part of the overall grass-based system.

 

So there’s a basic outline of where we need to go if we want to grow enough food to feed ourselves and if we want to establish democracy. The dual goal: We need to feed ourselves; and we need to feed ourselves. Nothing less will suffice, nothing less will be sustainable, for us physically as hominids, and for us politically as citizens and human beings. 

The Revolution of Food

 

Two years ago a hideous surge in food prices triggered spontaneous crowd scenes the MSM termed “food riots”. These stout writers and editors didn’t let us know how they think they’d fare if they and their families were being intentionally starved amid plenteous food, on account of purely artificial scarcity generated by purely political choices made by criminals. Today this food stagflation is upon us again, and this time it looks permanent.

 

We’ve long known the nature of these political decisions. It’s fundamental to capitalism that scarcity be generated amidst plenty. This is accomplished by stealing the vast majority of what the productive people grow and craft. In the case of agriculture, the basic mechanisms of this crime were land enclosure in the West and globalization for much of the global South. The result in both cases was to drive vast amounts of people off the land, generating mass migrations similar to the barbarian migrations into Europe in the first millennium. This migration headed to the shantytowns of the cities (and their ghetto and project and trailer park, and now tent city, equivalents in America). In the wake of globalization, in line with the new feudalism, the South is undergoing a new onslaught of land enclosures, as regional kleptocracies “sell” vast amounts of land in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and elsewhere to corporations and conglomerates from places like Sweden, the UK, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and of course Wall Street.

 

The number one reason for this new colonial land grab is to grow jatropha and palm oil feedstock for biofuels. This is just the latest and most malevolent result of the West’s biofuel mandates, a policy as wicked as it is irrational. Within a country like the US, ethanol mandates are pure corporate welfare, and globally they serve only to degrade the environment, cause further rainforest destruction and greenhouse gas emissions, and drive up the price of food by diverting it from the mouths of billions of the most vulnerable to the gas tanks of the richest and fattest. Now they’re also the engine of the new feudal enclosures.

 

These assaults on the Southern farmer are the latest depredation of the same globalization in agriculture which has dumped subsidized Western commodities on the domestic markets of almost every country. The goal here was to force all agriculture on Earth, the vast amount of which is logically subsistence agriculture and agriculture grown for local and regional markets, to conform to the practices, prices, and power relations of globalized corporate commodity agriculture. At the same time the IMF, as part of its structural adjustment assaults, forced most of these countries to dismantle their well-functioning state investment programs whose explicit goals had been to assure decent prices for their farmers and make affordable credit available to them. This helped keep much of the wealth generated by small farmers in the hands of those farmers. (If one chose, one could cite this as an example of a liberal government program which worked well. In that case, the Western liberals’ betrayal of such enlightened Southern governments in favor of Western globalization and agribusiness is just another on the ledger of their great crimes.) Today the dumping includes subsidized GMO crops as well as the proprietary seeds, which cabals like Bill Gates’ AGRA (Alliance for A Green Revolution in Africa) are trying to force upon these already beleaguered farmers, to further enforce this global indenture.

 

Another major driver of grain prices, similar to biofuel mandates, is the diversion of grain from food to feed for livestock. As more people in the East can afford to eat more meat, this generates more demand for the inefficient use of grain to feed cattle and pork rather than be used directly for food. The conversion rates are c. 7 grain calories to produce 1 calorie of beef; for pork it’s 4-5:1. People wanting to eat more meat isn’t intrinsically wicked the way using food to fuel one’s SUV is. What is evil is the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) mode of animal farming which has been designed to foster this conversion process. Everywhere CAFOs exist they’ve destroyed all independent cow and pig farmers and radically accelerated the food conversion process and concomitant structural price increase for grain. This process, too, has been subsidized by Western governments. 

 

Today every survey of food stagflation cites biofuel mandates, CAFOs (though they usually blame the consumers themselves; this was Bush’s favorite culprit) and the decline of agricultural investment as two of the main drivers. Over the last ten years, we can add food speculation to the indictment against Western capitalism. There’s been a lot of controversy lately over how much of an effect on prices food speculators really have. It’s true that they don’t have the same structural effect as subsidized commodity dumping, subsidized proprietary inputs and seeds, the forced privatization of investment, and biofuel mandates. These are all structural crimes. In light of these, speculators may serve as a scapegoat for some who want to politically shield these interests. Then we have globalization ideologues like Paul “It’s not class warfare” Krugman who are ardent to absolve all direct criminal actors of blame. So in desperation he blames poor harvests, this time in Russia, which are perhaps effects of climate change and its volatile weather patterns. He claims that the absence of evidence of significant grain hoarding proves his case. He trots out his stupid supply-demand graph which conveniently assumes and therefore conceals all the structural criminal aspects of the system, the crimes he spent years fighting to see committed. “Once we ignore the artificial scarcity built into the system, and all the rents it extracts, then we can call it a ‘market’. And once we’ve rationalized, moralized, normalized the status quo in this way, it’s easy to see that speculators can’t have any effect compared to a failed harvest.” 

 

But this whole line of argument is ridiculous. The very fact that climate change may be affecting harvests renders the effects of speculation all the more destructive, as the margin is that much more thin. The market already teeters on the brink of a price explosion even under the best conditions, on account of the system’s already being a hostage to global commodification in all its aspects. Under these conditions of structurally hardwired volatility, how much would a speculator have to hoard in order to drive up prices enough that his bets would win? I bet it’s not much. What other manipulations could a player like Goldman Sachs perform?

 

It’s common sense that if banksters start messing around with a market and the price explodes, they played a role in it, even if exactly how they did it isn’t always immediately clear. As Sherlock Holmes said to Watson, “If I asked you to prove two plus two is four you might have some trouble doing it, even though you know it’s true.”

 

So we have permanent food stagflation afflicting billions in the non-West as well as, increasingly, the West itself. We know this is not the result of supply-demand fundamentals, since supply has been grotesquely manipulated by power. Subsidies in the form of direct payments, tariffs, IP policy, and one-way globalization “treaties” which boil down to “free markets for me, prostrate victimization for you”, more than make up for any revenue which would otherwise be lost according to textbook supply inefficiencies. Globalization was never anything but colonialism by other means. And just as the original imperialism eventually came home politically to Europe in the form of totalitarian politics, so today’s globalization is coming home in the form of totalitarian corporate economic rule.

 

This is the essence of globalization, and it’s the structural reason for food stagflation as we descend into global depression and permanent mass unemployment (also an intentional policy). Food speculation is the last straw added to the already burning pile. Given how the banksters were the ones who coordinated the globalization onslaught, set in motion the process of mass permanent job destruction, and have now intentionally crashed the world’s real economy and used this as the pretext to steal trillions more in the form of the Bailout, it’s not surprising that their speculation in food is the most inflammatory element of the price explosion, even if relative to the structure its effect is supplementary. In essence, speculating in food, just like any predatory manipulation of food supplies, is a crime against humanity. All of commodity agriculture, and all proprietarianism related to it (it’s conceptually impossible to have a property right in any food plant, since commercialized plant varieties are already the result of thousands of years of grower selection and breeding, and any new work is merely a miniscule add-on, like placing a pebble on a mountain; any intellectual property is already long since hardwired into its public domain existence), is such a crime. So if food speculators are becoming the public face of infamy, this is really an armed robber and mass murderer being hanged for one of his lesser muggings. He still deserves it, of course. I’ll go along with whatever’s most politically effective, since it’s the same capital criminal. But our analysis should identify what’s fundamental (globalization itself, capitalism itself) and what’s ancillary. 

 

The peoples of the world know these crimes for what they are, evidently far better than those of the West itself. It makes sense – they have far more experience as the victims of these crimes. Unlike in 2008, they’re reacting to this new, permanent round of food price crime, not with ”food riots” but with revolutions. I have high hopes that we’re finally seeing the anti-colonial movement resuming after so many decades of having been hijacked and subverted. This time the people of the world won’t fall for the lies of the West. They’ve been through this too many times before. This is the final bid for liberation, and although many of its initial demands will be political, it’s more profoundly about the people taking control of their economies. Most of all, it’s about food. These are lessons we’ll have to bring home to ourselves to meet the totalitarianism now coming home to us. Here too, it’ll be about food.

 

Meanwhile, I haven’t been seeing much of the MSM calling this a food riot anymore. That must be why they sound so confused, tentative, disgruntled - such easy dismissals will no longer be easy for them. Oh no! Somebody’s actually making them work! Horrible. Hopefully we’ll soon be making them work as well.

Corporatism’s Toxic Touch

 

One of the many frauds Obama proffered in his Assault on the Union was his false paean to green energy. I know faith in such cherished ideals dies hard, but under kleptocracy “green energy” is a scam. Its only goal is to open up more corporate welfare ditches, help figure out ways for the elites to maintain their Sodomite lifestyles post-Peak Oil, and do it in a greenwashed way.

 

Cap-and-trade is a similar scam.

 

That’s just one example of corporatism’s corruption of everything it touches. Even Midas’ perverted touch merely turned things to inert, sterile gold. But corporatism’s touch turns everything to virulent, aggressive, communicable poison.

 

The same goes for every other neoliberal talking point. “Competitiveness” is one of the worst whips driving us along this death march. What human being still wants this hideous fascist competition? It’s been proven to bring nothing but murder, war, need, fear, despair, and devastation. It’s pure evil, and today the propaganda of it is simply the face of evil.

 

And how Orwellian is “government overregulation”? We know exactly what that means – strip all regulation and restraint from corporations and the rich, while imposing ever more totalitarian regulation on small economic actors and the people. Obama himself just signed the Food Tyranny bill, a major escalation of aggressive government regulation – but only of small producers and distributors, of course.

 

Yes, let’s get rid of ALL government regulation. That means all government assaults on our rights as citizens and human beings. And it means eradicating big corporations and all the regulations and taxes those corporations impose upon us.

 

1. Corporations are artificial creatures of the government. So by definition they are extensions of the government, and all corporate power is laundered government power. Every regulation and tax a big corporation inflicts upon us is really a government regulation and tax.

 

2. Corporations directly write or implicitly dictate all government laws, regulations, and taxes anyway. So any direct government regulation or tax is being imposed upon us by the big corporations.

 

So however you look at it, whether you approach it from the “left” or the “right”, whether one’s preferred mode of thought and expression is anti-corporate or anti-government, either way it comes down to the same thing.

 

This is one tyrannical nexus of regulation and taxation, corporate and government, all of it purely predatory and parasitic. The only answer, the only way forward, is to rid ourselves of this evil nexus in all its manifestations.