Additionally, it is just so cool that James finds it inconceivable that there might could be other social and ecological contradictions to capitalist agriculture and low commodity prices, like
- the contradictory need to generate ever-more acutely toxic pesticides
and herbicides as pests/weeds cyclically generate resistance to the
over-application of chemicals on monocropped lands (now extending to
herbicides);
- the staggeringly inefficient misallocation of water resources to the
production of already overproduced staple crops that don't go to feeding or
clothing human beings in arid areas;
- the pollution and drawing down of any number of water tables;
- all of the social and ecological consequences of mechanization;
- the ever-more distant from the field concentration of power initially
in transportation, then processing and now retail sectors of national and
global economies; or
- the explosive growth in urban areas and slums - and their social,
health and ecological contradictions - across the global south as a result
of the dislocations of the above mentioned processes.
The point left-populist, left-weberian, anarchist and socialist scholars have been making for 100 years is that increasing productivity and rationalization in agriculture - because of the contradictions of the system - causes hunger, malnutrition, obesity and generally shitty food. Rather than more people being fed better, it produces more people, some of whom are fed better, most of whom who are fed well-enough feed themselves crappy, uninspired food produced and consumed as part of crappy, uninspiring social relationships, and huge numbers of people fed far far worse all around.
The whole idea of socialism is to increase the quality of life for people and the planet, not the quantity of commodities and people. The point is to produce better food, distributed more equitably so that people overfed on lousy food eat less, better and in a way that enriches rather than impoverishes their humanity and that people underfed are fed more, better and in ways that enrich rather than exacerbates the denigration of their humanity. Modern agrifood systems, however productive on their own terms - the wrong terms, fundamentally stand in the way of these developments.
On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 4:05 AM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Shane and Alan think that Brad is wrong to point to increased agricultural
> productivity as a gain. They could not be more wrong. There are four billion
> + people living today - two out of every three in the world - who would not
> be, but for the gains in agricultural productivity over the last 110 years.
>
> An American farmer in 1900 fed seven people; today his great grandson feeds
> 96 people. World grain output rose from 400 million tons in 1900 to 1.9
> billion tons in 1998. The spectre of soil exhaustion has been threatened
> over and over again since Malthus' day, but in fact yields per hectare have
> contined to rise ever since (from 1.1 tons to 2.7 tons between 1981 and
> 2000).
>
> The threat to food has not come from soil exhaustion, but from policies of
> land retirement adopted by the big producers like the European Union which
> has retired 3.8 million hectares under the set aside scheme. World wide land
> area re-designated as national park - where farming is not forbidden, but
> discouraged - has grown from 2.4 million sq KM to 18.8 million sq KM between
> 1962 and 2003. In 2005 those managed land retirement schemes began to force
> food prices upwards.
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319