Sunday, August 8, 2010
AGRICULTURE THE END OF CHEAP POWER AND WEAK GOVERNMENTS
In the past, for almost all of recorded history, all people lived on food grown largely by local agriculture. Where they got too far into one kind of 'cash' crop or narrow agricultural produce, they often suffered the consequences.
Many readers of Irish descent are here solely because their great great great grandparents starved to death in the potato famine, barely 150 years ago.
French vineyards, their big cash crop at that time, were virtually wiped out at about the same time.
Most peasants mostly never left the vicinity of their birth.
They worked as serfs or peasants, and lived by working soil where they lived.
There were some notable exceptions, empires, which had cities, and armies, provisioned either from nearby hinterlands, or from granaries within transportation distances.
A good example is the use the Roman Empire made of the Italian hinterland, but also supplemented by the Egyptian grain trade, and others.
Today we have agribusiness, engineered narrowing, selection, production, and cartellization of food itself,
and cities are generally no longer even in a weak position, as they usually have been, to fall back on uncartellized hinterlands, for food. They are in virtually no position to do so, with exceptions.
Americans have, as a society, as have many globalized others, only in this century, let their sense for food survival, not to even get into food 'security', slide.
It is just another example, as so many others, where everyone came to rely on compartmentalized specialists, so called scientists, companies, legislators, etc., on the assumption that human progress was somehow under way.
The world wars seem to have played a crucial part in this willingness to give up whole areas of traditional life for the sake of an ostensibly better specialized method. The experts' word, whatever the expert was, came to be taken for granted.
So if 'fragile' global food commerce networks weaken, and they are already situated within notoriously fragile developing and developed economies (all economies are now 'fragile', (discography: Yes 'Fragile')), as every economics pundit will confirm, or become too expensive (foreign demand push/pull free enterprise),
or even toxic, as has increasingly been the case,
or get bought by wealthier folks here or there,or for some reason break down,
what do people then do?
Is requiring local agricultural capacity, or even basic electric power, something governments should be required to make provision for, at the local level?
How about letting your state or county government handle something like that?
Who else is going to do something like that?
Surely you don't want a federal bureaucracy getting into something like that.
No; I say leave it to local boards of county commissioners to control, at the local level, or even to city commissions, or why not even tiny community associations (direct democracy), with their boots on the ground. Let them worry about stuff like that.
And, isn't that something also best left to clever market forces, big players like ENRON, or some other big outfits, Wal-Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, Halliburton, Con Agra, Purina, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Dow, BP, something like that?
Those on whom hungry, or starving, 'consumers', in droves, can rely, when, not if, it ever really hits the fan?
Notable examples of the kinds of things that happen, even now, show up in places like Florida before or during hurricane seasons, where hoarders buy up all of such and such from the stores. Petroleum is frequently in peculiarly short supply, here and there; market forces for sure.
Many readers of Irish descent are here solely because their great great great grandparents starved to death in the potato famine, barely 150 years ago.
French vineyards, their big cash crop at that time, were virtually wiped out at about the same time.
Most peasants mostly never left the vicinity of their birth.
They worked as serfs or peasants, and lived by working soil where they lived.
There were some notable exceptions, empires, which had cities, and armies, provisioned either from nearby hinterlands, or from granaries within transportation distances.
A good example is the use the Roman Empire made of the Italian hinterland, but also supplemented by the Egyptian grain trade, and others.
Today we have agribusiness, engineered narrowing, selection, production, and cartellization of food itself,
and cities are generally no longer even in a weak position, as they usually have been, to fall back on uncartellized hinterlands, for food. They are in virtually no position to do so, with exceptions.
Americans have, as a society, as have many globalized others, only in this century, let their sense for food survival, not to even get into food 'security', slide.
It is just another example, as so many others, where everyone came to rely on compartmentalized specialists, so called scientists, companies, legislators, etc., on the assumption that human progress was somehow under way.
The world wars seem to have played a crucial part in this willingness to give up whole areas of traditional life for the sake of an ostensibly better specialized method. The experts' word, whatever the expert was, came to be taken for granted.
So if 'fragile' global food commerce networks weaken, and they are already situated within notoriously fragile developing and developed economies (all economies are now 'fragile', (discography: Yes 'Fragile')), as every economics pundit will confirm, or become too expensive (foreign demand push/pull free enterprise),
or even toxic, as has increasingly been the case,
or get bought by wealthier folks here or there,or for some reason break down,
what do people then do?
Is requiring local agricultural capacity, or even basic electric power, something governments should be required to make provision for, at the local level?
How about letting your state or county government handle something like that?
Who else is going to do something like that?
Surely you don't want a federal bureaucracy getting into something like that.
No; I say leave it to local boards of county commissioners to control, at the local level, or even to city commissions, or why not even tiny community associations (direct democracy), with their boots on the ground. Let them worry about stuff like that.
And, isn't that something also best left to clever market forces, big players like ENRON, or some other big outfits, Wal-Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, Halliburton, Con Agra, Purina, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Dow, BP, something like that?
Those on whom hungry, or starving, 'consumers', in droves, can rely, when, not if, it ever really hits the fan?
Notable examples of the kinds of things that happen, even now, show up in places like Florida before or during hurricane seasons, where hoarders buy up all of such and such from the stores. Petroleum is frequently in peculiarly short supply, here and there; market forces for sure.
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