[Just a note. Harvey better get Cockburn on board with the global environment and climate trip.]
I started this post for another thread. But it applies to what Harvey was writing about. The basic idea was that global food systems put local production out of business. Yet it was local production and local cultural traditions that were more sustainable and less wasteful of resources. The point goes to the direction of re-tooling toward less growth.
Monday evening I was listening to Eric Holt-Gimenez talk about world food and development policies. He articulates how the neoliberal systems created the crisis and are now involved with extending themselves as a solution to crisis they created. Here is the show. It has a long music intro which can be hopped over:
http://election.kpfa.org/archive/id/57141
And Food First website:
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/about/who/staff/eholtgim
H-G does a great job of connecting most of the dots between local farmers up through higher levels of institutions and policies that compose the neoliberal global systems.
Here an except of H-G from Huffington Post:
``After a short stint at USDA, Rajiv Shah has been picked by the Obama Administration to head up the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). With his confirmation pending, one wonders why Mr. Shah, a candidate with limited international development experience and just six months of government service under his belt, was chosen for such an important post. This selection follows on his prior appointment as the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the time of his appointment, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack referred to Mr. Shah as "a globally recognized leader in science, health and economics." But with no formal background in agriculture and no substantive research record, this recognition came about as much because of the high-profile of Mr. Shah's position at the Gates Foundation than anything...''
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/obamas-pick-for-head-of-u_b_396154.html
I think USAID together with USDA are the leads for the US global politics of food. Shah was picked for his connections with Gates Foundation, GMOs (genetic modified organisms), and neoliberal global development policy.
Here is a Nation article by Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck (of Food First), Ending Africa's Hunger from Sept 2, 2009:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/patel_et_al
It explains most of the connections.
The connection to Copenhagen needs to be made.
I suspect (but don't know) that the most vulnerable system to global warming is fresh water and next down is food production, supply, and distribution systems.
Food First notes that most of the immigrants looking for work in the US and EU are small farmers, ranchers, and workers from Latin America and Africa, and connects their presence in the north to neoliberal policies that drove them out of agriculture in the south. I know from personal experience the same forces are at work in China, because my land lord was born and raise a peasant. Ironically, he is a communist (but ill informed). His main problem is he doesn't know how to control his daughter who runs the building. He is now working for her in maintenance and repair and part time janitor work at BHS.
The next step is to see that there are relationships between fossil fuel production and use, and agricultural production and use. I think the relationship has worked to escalate and intensify the carbon emission systems. You can find the link to GMOs by looking through what Monsanto makes. They make fertilizers, herbicides, seed grains and live stock growth hormones. The GMOs are patented seed owned by Monsanto. Another place to look is ADM Archer Midland Daniels. Here this little paragraph:
``The company is now facing its first-ever markets campaign, as the environmental group Rainforest Action Network is imploring the halt of agricultural expansion into tropical rainforests in Brazil and Southeast Asia.[16] Like other agribusiness, ADM only processes the raw materials from crops grown by third parties. However, ADM is a major purchaser and trader of the agricultural commodities that are motivating the destruction of rainforests and has a controlling interest in Wilmar, the company most responsible for new industrial palm oil plantation expansion in Indonesia, and one of the largest investors in biofuels. As such, ADM has the ability to significantly influence the market.''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland
So what we face is a vicious circle where the same government policies and corporate systems or neoliberalism that helped increase global warming, ruined the economy, exported jobs, screwed up our land, food and diets, caused poverty and hunger are now proposed to solve these problems. This is just like the health care privatization plan now about to undergo an even faster intensification in a system that mandates an extension of our own impoverishment.
I think the entire armature of global neoliberalism has been exposed, almost stripped naked by current events which are after all one series of failures after another. Most of the Democratic party through their own in actions and swindles have equally exposed their treachery and complicity.
Even if neoliberal establishment can apply temporary patches and blast us with propaganda, it isn't going to work for very long. All the failures were structural failures of the capitalist system. Since there were no structural fixes these are all pre-set to collapse again.
The way I see a role for the dispossessed part of the global intellectual class is to figure out in detail how neoliberal policy and neoliberal disasters are linked together and articulate these relationships in simple, clear, and scientifically supportable stories. It is both a propaganda role and also an alternative information role.
Most working class people I've known, don't know these stories and their own place in them. What they know is how these systems have made their lives harder, possibly ruined their lives, but they are short on explanations. The way I see a contribution is to create those explanations. This means a lot more than the usual rhetoric about class oppression. They need concrete and empirical explanations, with a deep background in various applied sciences. Most working people know something about the bosses or el norte but that's about it.
What I liked most about Eric Holt-Gimenez was his ability to tell stories that linked up to a global picture like the one Harvey just painted in the essay.
CG