sustainable localised ag is incompatible with totalitarian control. people who have food security are very hard to conquer, micromanage and rule, as the US found out in Viet Nam. this is one reason why colonial powers work so hard to stamp out indigenous crops and Enclose land and water in the countries they conquer: not only do they want to steal the soil productivity for their own profit, but they know that people with no food/water security will bow the knee rather than watch their children slowly starve. "foreign aid" is not about charity. it's about control.
a food system based on total centralised control (basically a command economy run by a small number of capitalist barons rather than a small number of communist commmisars, and don't ask me if I can tell the difference 'cos I can't) is, however, massively inefficient. it requires long supply lines and Taylorised/industrial ag practise that is so energy intensive it's the biggest negative-sum game in history (well, perhaps since the Pyramids?). it's only the cheap fossil fuel that enables the non-adaptive, insane practise of simplifying the cultivar palette down to a few primary colours, relying totally on clonal crops, and feeding people a kind of mash processed at enormous energy cost from trash crops (the USian zea mays food chain).
the collapse of the cheap fossil fuel not only implies the collapse of the centralised industrial ag system -- the collapse of the centralised industrial ag system implies a crisis for totalitarian control. relocalisation of food implies devolution (doesn't anyone ever mull over how Cuba 'lightened up' considerably as soon as they were forced by their own Peak Oil sneak preview to devolve food production back to individual farmers and local markets?). devolution means reduced opportunity for centralised profiteering.
so the very steps needed to feed our populations during an energy crunch are the same steps that threaten the fantasies of megalomaniacs who want to "rule the world". three guesses whether these very dangerous men will see reason and let go of their pretensions to power and glory so that ordinary people can eat. it is this -- a crisis of control, not a 'crisis of production' -- that really worries me. industrial ag has crippled our food producing capacity and created artificial scarcity for 3 generations. we'd eat better and more plentifully if we got rid of it. but it's also one of the primary mechanisms of social control that keeps our elites perched on their upper rungs. they have passed laws forbidding people to save and share seeds and plants. there are few laws more abominable. at what point does massive, organised rebellion against this totalising food Enclosure begin in the West (it has already begun -- nay, has never really ended since the enclosures started -- in the 3rd world)?
I know it sounds like I'm ranting, and I am, I am...
the corporate/industrial ag nexus has rendered us more and more vulnerable to the very crises of climate and hydrology that their fossil-intensive and toxic methods have helped to precipitate. and they profit, daily, from our very ignorance, poverty of resource, and vulnerability.
Recommended reading: Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest; James Lieber, Rats in the Grain; Richard Manning, Against the Grain; H Flores, Food Not Lawns; J Gussow, This Organic Life; Magdoff et al, Hungry for Profit; Nyerges, Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City; J Pretty, Agri-Culture; Mollison, Permaculture; Hemenway, Gaia's Garden; Jeavons, How to Grow More Vegetables; Katz, The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved; Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire; Fukuoka, One Straw Revolution; video The Power of Community (Cuba's food production paradigm shift); video Polyface Farm (Joel Salatin on the success of sustainable practise on his family farm)... I could go on... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
