Small Farms Solutions: The Kleptogarchy part 26

Posted: September 21, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Population | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Small Farms Solution

“Well, I think the answer lies in the soil”, the comedy character Arthur Fallowfield said in response to virtually any question put to him in the BBC radio comedy show Beyond Our Ken, broadcast between 1958 and 1964. The show starred Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams played Arthur Fallowfield, and we listened after lunch on Sunday afternoons. A lot of the jokes were beyond me, but my dad used to laugh out loud, and I remember Arthur Fallowfield. Now I see the line as an elemental truth. No soil, no civilisation. To rescue our civilisation from the catastrophic danger zone, we have to save, improve, replenish our soils, and that requires a movement back to the land, to undertake regenerative farming, in which organic matter in soils is constantly replenished.

Soil is fragile. Rain caused this erosion in Warmwell, Dorset.
Hotter climate, more intense rains, more erosion. Photo by Rodney
Burton, Geograph Project. Creative Commons licence.

We know that small farms are beneficial to countryside communities. In Whose Land Is It Anyway?, published in 1982, Richard Norton-Taylor wrote “Small farms help to prevent rural depopulation, they allow more entrants into farming, they reduce dependence on large and distant companies, absentee landlords”. He drew attention to government neglect of small farms, pointing out that “British policy-makers equate size, that is to say, bigness, with efficiency”. Despite the policies of ‘big is best’, he suggested that many farmers on expanded acreages “are trapped in a vicious circle: the higher their costs, the more they try to produce; but they are encouraged to believe that the surest way to produce more, so as to cover their costs, is to rely more on (increasingly expensive) chemicals and machines”, while “the long-term interest and health of the land and soil is pushed well into the background”.[1] It was not fashionable in the early 1980s to write about organic farming – farming without manufactured synthetic agrochemicals — but Richard Norton-Taylor quoted a 1981 US Department of Agriculture report on organic farms, which found that they were almost two and a half times more productive than ‘conventional’ farms, per unit of energy consumed.[2]

Chris Smaje’s 2020 book A Small Farm Future makes a powerful case for resettling the countryside, although there is still a widespread view that rural landscapes should be ‘protected’ from development. By 2050, Chris Smaje proposes, home gardeners will be producing potatoes, other vegetables, fruit and eggs for themselves, their families and friends, on 90% of the total garden acreage. A similarly high proportion of green spaces in towns and cities will be given over to horticultural produce plus pork. Market gardens would cover twice their current area, and feature some livestock for manure. Slightly larger smallholdings would grow some cereals and produce organic beef and dairy products. Mixed farms of around 40 acres – a common size before the Industrial Revolution – would also grow field-scale vegetables and fibre crops. Existing rough grazing would be rewilded, there would be some larger specialist farms, especially for dairy products, and to a large extent people’s labour would replace carbon-intensive inputs.[3] 

The great barrier restricting this vision is the price of land, out of all proportion to the value of the produce from it. Land is a financial asset, a means to gain privacy, a status symbol, a cultural repository, a theatre for field sports, a space for military manoeuvres, a mantle over minerals, a landscape for leisure. If society should collapse, land gains even more significance. If there is an economic boom, ditto. Land with a house, or permission for a house, becomes a development site and vastly more expensive still. Farms have been beyond the pockets of most new entrants for decades, and now housing is following suit. In England, 65% of households owned or were buying a home in 2019-20, compared with 71% in 2003-04, and among those aged 25-34, the ownership rate slumped from 59% in 2003-04 to 41% in 2019-20, an average drop of just over one percentage point for every year.[4]

How can land become affordable to people who want to farm it and often live on it too? If there were a dramatic fall in world population, pressure on land would diminish. This happened in England after the Black Death of 1347-1350. The plague deaths led to labour shortages and better conditions for peasants. Historian Paul Slack explained:

“After climbing from height to height, life abandoned the far mountains and sank back to the plain. There was a change in the conditions of existence too. Plague and famine had struck unevenly: more of the poor died than of the rich. More died in towns than in the countryside. This led to a different kind of migration than had occurred in the centuries of expansion. Countrymen moved to towns to fill the gaps left by the plague, though the overall population of towns remained less than it had been. Peasants moved from bad land to good.”[5]

Paul Slack noted that, after the chaos of the plague years:

“All over Europe the wages of the labourer rose. As the pressure of overpopulation decreased, and as cultivation became concentrated on the better lands, so the amount of food per head increased. The price of corn fell and poor men were able to improve their standards, from rye to wheat, and from wheat to meat.”[6]

Deaths improved the living standards of the survivors. When there is less competition for land, the price falls. The process of depopulation is often fatal, literally. As John Michael Greer highlights[7] in The Ecotechnic Future:

“A basic fact of our predicament is the hard reality that today’s human population is fat larger than the world’s carrying capacity. What William Catton[8] called ‘ghost acreage’ – the vast boost to subsistence that fossil fuels give to growing, storing and distributing food – has allowed the world’s human population in the last few centuries to balloon to disastrously high levels. As the industrial age ends, the surpluses of food and other resources and the infrastructure of public health that supported this expansion will end as well, with predictable impacts on the size of the human population.”

The theft of finite resources, and the widespread refusal of corporations and governments to cover the costs of the dangerous externalities which they have deliberately omitted from their balance sheets, have swollen the klepto-system to such a size that it threatens, in decades rather than centuries, to annihilate swathes of the world’s soils, fresh water, floras and fauna, including our not-so-clever selves.

[1] From pages 113 and 114 of Whose Land Is It anyway? by Richard Norton-Taylor, published by Turnstone Press, 1982. Mr Norton-Taylor wrote for The Guardian from 1975 to 2016 and in 2021 was an investigative journalist for Declassified UK.

[2] Ibid page 190.

[3] A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje, published by Chelsea Green, 2020, from Table 11.1, alternative agriculture Britain 2050 – land use, inputs and products.

[4] ‘Extending Home Ownership: Government Initiatives’, House of Commons Library, March 30th 2021, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03668/, accessed June 13th 2022.

[5] From ‘Population Crisis’ by Paul Slack in History of the English Speaking Peoples Vol.5 p.713, expanded from the text by Sir Winston Churchill, edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Hugh Trevor-Roper and AJP Taylor. BPC Publishing, 1969 and 1971. Paul Slack (1943- ) was Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Ecotechnic Future p.41, in chapter 3, A Short History of the Future.

[8] William R Catton Jr (1926-2015) was Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. His books included Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (2009).

Toxic Urbanisation: The Kleptogarchy part 2

Posted: August 12, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Climate, Environment, Population | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

BY PDR

The landmark Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the time the Labour politician and future Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was published in October 2006. Nicholas Stern, a British economist, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and now Lord Stern of Brentford, calculated that to stabilise emissions of CO2 and other greenhouses gases would cost 1% of gross national product (GNP) globally, while if there were no action GNP could fall eventually by 20% or more.

The Stern Review tiptoed through the data, careful not to sound too alarmist, although it did call climate change the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen, and stressed that the benefits of early action far outweighed the costs of not acting. Without action, the review said, the overall costs of climate change would be equivalent to losing at least 5% of GDP, extending possibly to 20% and above. Initially the review proposed that investment of 1% of global GDP could be enough to stem the climate crisis, but only two years later in 2008, the 1% was doubled to 2%. This, it was thought, could be enough to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at 500 to 550 parts per million (ppm) by 2050.

Sir Nicholas Stern raised awareness
in the UK about climate change when
his report was published in 2006.
Photo by Johann Morgenbesser, Vienna, Austria.
Creative Commons licence.

A ceiling this low now looks improbable. From 372 ppm in April 1999, concentrations measured from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory rose to 421 ppm in April 2022. Estimates reported on the website http://www.co2.earth indicate that by 2087 there could be 611 ppm, an almost two-thirds increase in just 88 years, a nano speck in geological time. The fossil coal we have burnt within a tiny window of 250 years originated between 290 and 354 million years ago.

We need to stop burning coal but China, which accounts for more than more than half the world’s annual consumption, plans to continue. The China Electricity Council has suggested that by 2030 coal-powered generating capacity should reach 1,300GW, up from 1,050GW in 2020. This is a very long way from a cut! China rushed headlong to industrialise, quickly constructing new mega cities, dams, airports and factory complexes on former rural land. The small farmers since displaced by urbanisation were the majority when Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power in 194. Then 89% of China’s 540 million people lived and worked in the countryside. By 2020, only 40% of the vastly increased 1,412 million population were country dwellers. This was a numerical rise from 481 million to 565 million, but in 1949 just 59 million lived in towns and cities, compared to 847 million two generations later. The 847 million in large towns and cities are the drivers of the ‘economic miracle’ that is a short cut to the edge of a toxic, unliveable planet. The 847 million are a colossal barrier to any Chinese effort to limit, let alone stop, severe climate change. They must be kept on side if the Communist Party is to remain in power, and that means providing them with work and wages sufficient to buy food, housing, utilities, and consumer goods. A major ‘return to the land’ drive would be exceptionally difficult because land fertility was sacrificed in the drive to industrialise. The Chinese Government is a barrier to meaningful climate policies both at home and in its spheres of influence abroad.

It’s not just China experiencing sudden urbanisation, of course. In 1960 66%, 1.971 billion, of the world’s 3.032 billion population was classed as rural, according to the World Bank. Sixty years later in 2020 44%, 3.430 billion of the much larger 7.795 billion population was rural. Over the six decades the urban population grew from 1.061 billion to 4.365 billion – a more than fourfold increase., while the rural population expanded by less than three-quarters.

Cities depend on the capacity of rural areas to feed them, and that is looking less and less certain. The World Bank summarises:

“Many countries are facing growing levels of food insecurity, reversing years of development gains, and threatening the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Even before Covid-19 reduced incomes and disrupted supply chains, chronic and acute hunger were on the rise due to various factors, including conflict, socio-economic conditions, natural hazards, climate change and pests. The impact of war in the Ukraine adds risks to global food security, with food prices likely to remain high for the foreseeable future and expected to push millions of additional people into acute food insecurity.[1]

Hungry cities are a political powder keg, sources of social unrest. Failures to deal with the externalities of are greenhouse gas emissions, and their wider impacts, are worsening hunger. The failures owe much to corporations’ grim determination to extract profits by shifting the costs of climate and environmental damage onto the generality of society.

Tom Burgis’s explanation, in his 2021 book Kleptopia,[2] is fear:

“the fear that soon there will not be enough to go round, that on a simmering planet the time is approaching for those who have gathered all they can unto themselves to cut free from the many, from the others.” (p.338) The fear of losing out when the music stops, when somebody else is holding the parcel, intensifies kleptocratic tendencies, to hide and hoard resources that kleptocrats believe will enable them to survive the heat, droughts and scarcities that they themselves have hastened and intensified.

[1]Food Security Update from the World Bank, May 5th 2022.   https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update, accessed May 21st 2022.

[2]Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, 2020 and 2021. See bibliography, to be published later in this series.

Unfed Cityworld

Posted: June 26, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Population | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Flows of migrants from country to city will, if unchecked, leave insufficient people to grow our food. Few policymakers see this as a problem, as they assume that farming will become more and more mechanised, and that synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides will carry on substituting for rotations, hoes and companion planting.

Villages far from cities are often ghettos of the elderly, who may be proficient in food production but whose skills die with them. The greying of the world’s rural heartlands poses a huge question: should the long food supply chains ever rupture, for lack of fuel, water, soil, or any other essential input, there would be major trouble in the cities. The global population is expanding by some 81 million a year, while water and soil are depleting, and the supply of fuel for the whole urban superstructure is precarious.

A spate of TV programmes about the ‘real’ Brazil, shown before the 2014 football World Cup kicked off in Sao Paulo, showed viewers shanty-town favelas; families gleaning rubbish for saleable recyclables; guns, drugs and prostitution. Yet Brazil is not a ‘poor’ country. The World Bank classes it as ‘upper middle income’ with GDP of US$2.253 trillion in 2012, $11,338 for each of the 198.7 million population. One of its big cities, Curitiba, home to 1.8 million people, is a famous exemplar of sustainable design, admired for its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network, its recycling rate of over 70%, its parks designed for leisure and to absorb floodwaters, its live-work homes, its encouragement for agriculture outside the city, and its city leaders’ capacity for problem-solving.[i]

The world would need 45 new Curitibas every year just to house the extra population. China has a plan to meet the challenge, building what are called ‘eco-cities’ but which are planted in often inhospitable landscapes, and require long, energy-intensive supply lines. The building boom is no respecter of topography – at Lanzhou in Gansu province, north-west China, the plan is to flatten some 700 low mountains to create the space for a desert metropolis.[ii]

XXXXX

Foshan, China: trying to cultivate polluted soils next to a factory. Farmers in China have no rights over their land, and so local government administrations, keen to make money from land dealing, can and often do expel them. Photo: South China Morning Post, published in ‘Toxic soil pollution report sparks new fears over safety of mainland’s home-grown food’, http://www.scmp.com, April 18th 2014 

One billion Chinese people are expected to live in cities by 2030, leaving only 300 million in the (much damaged) countryside. Unless there is land reform, there is little chance of farmers being able to feed the massive urban population. That is a major reason for Chinese organisations buying up arable land all over the world, including Brazil.

McKinsey & Company’s Global Institute advocates concentrated cities in China, building over 7%-8% of arable land by 2030. Dispersed cities, McKinsey argued, would cover more than 20% of arable land over the same time span.[iii] As China has only 7% of the world’s arable land, just 0.09 of a hectare per person, there is scant scope to lose any more at all. Each year since 2000, about 1% of China’s meagre total has been covered by factories and other industrial developments.

Moran Zhang lists the ailments afflicting China’s crop-growing land:

  • One-fifth of it has polluted soils.
  • Over-use of nitrogen fertilisers is turning land acidic.
  • Farmers lack incentive to improve their land, because they have no rights over it. All land belongs to the state, and local governments derive more than a quarter of their revenues from land grabs – taking land from farmers and selling it to developers. Farmers are offered minimal compensation, about 2% of current market value, and with this they have to find new homes, new ways of making a living.[iv] Disenfranchised farmers have little choice but to become city dwellers.[v]

Who will feed them and the other hundreds of millions in China’s cities? How? To rely on unfettered exports from countries in Latin America and Africa, where most of the 2.7 billion hectares which could be pressed into service for crop production are located, is surely unwise because of the negative consequences – loss of plants and wildlife in habitats currently rich, the adverse impact on climates of vegetation loss, rising demand for food from the local, fast-expanding populations, the energy costs of moving food around the world.

Ex-farmers will be living in Chinese cities, in homes currently empty – there are ghost blocks aplenty, the outcome of speculation – and in homes yet to be built, usually flats without gardens. Few planners appear to be paying attention to questions of sustainable food production, to the additional rural populations necessary to farm in ways which do not deplete soil or water, or to homes and supplementary livelihoods for these populations. Even talking about a reversal of the migration to cities is often judged as quaintly old-fashioned, even Luddite.

Pat Dodd Racher

(Extract from a chapter of a book to be published in coming months)

[i] It’s ironic, though, that manufacture of vehicles and vehicle parts is a key element of Curitiba’s economic base. German, Japanese, French and Chinese auto firms have chosen the city as a base. The young, dynamic workforce is an attraction for manufacturers and good for city finances, because these are taxpayers. Only 6% of Curitibans are aged 65+! Information from the Brookings Institution, ‘Curitiba metropolitan area profile’; ‘Sing a song of sustainable cities’, TED talk by former city mayor Jaime Lerner; and slides at http://www.slideshare.net/mrcornish/sustainable-curitiba.

[ii] ‘China to flatten 700 mountains for new metropolis in the desert’, by Jonathan Kaiman, www.theguardian.com, December 6th 2012.

[iii] ‘Preparing for China’s urban billion’, McKinsey Global Institute, March 2009.

[iv] ‘7 reasons why you don’t want to be a farmer in China’ by Moran Zhang, http://www.ibtimes.com, August 22nd 2013.

[v] City dwellers have to cope with great pollution challenges of their own. In Lanzhou, 2.4 million people were told not to drink the tap water in June 2014. It was contaminated with benzene. Source: Xinhua News Agency, June 12th 2014.