CounterPunch - The Politics of Food is Politics

This is a good article (exerpt below) which hopefully will get people thinking outside the box a bit more. I felt it left out or neglected some important points, however, which I sent as a comment to CounterPunch and the authors. My comment follows below the article exerpts. H/T to Pine Belt Progressive’s post for the link to the CounterPunch article and many others of interest.

An Alternative Agriculture is Possible
The Politics of Food is Politics
By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism.

How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation? (It’s also directly related, by the way, to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of “demand” — more on this below.) They’re intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.

It’s not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while.

and further down in this lengthy article…

What intensive biotic polyculture does not do is maximise money profits, minimise labour inputs, or facilitate large-scale extractive cash-cropping.

For these reasons — not for any failure to produce food for eating — it is derided by industrial agribiz “experts” as impractical, inefficient, inadequate, etc. In fact, poly/permaculture’s abundant success in producing food for eating is one of the things that makes it a frightening prospect for those who control people by controlling people’s access to food.

What they don’t want us to know is that it works. Eisenia hortensis — the European nightcrawler (earthworm) — under ideal worm-farming (vermiculture) conditions double their volume through reproduction every 90 days. Each individual worm can eat approximately half its body weight each day. A pound of E. hortensis, then, can consume a half-pound of non-oily, vegetable kitchen scraps each day. The majority of that mass is excreted as an extremely high quality compost, with a bit of fluid (worm tea) left over (considered by many to be the organic uber-fertilizer). So, potentially, one pound of worms can convert around 180 pounds of kitchen scraps each year into the highest quality organic soil additive. Every five pounds of worm-castings can convert one-square surface-foot of soil into a super-producer for a four months. So one pound of worms can sustain 12 square surface-feet of garden throughout the year for the highest levels of productivity.

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money… which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.

My comment was as follows:

Hi,
Thanks for publishing this article ( http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html ) in CounterPunch. I hope increasing numbers of people will begin to look at alternatives as these issues become more glaring. A couple of comments-

The worldwide population explosion which we have seen in the last century or so seems to me to be an issue which is directly related to the “green revolution” and did not seem to be sufficiently addressed in your article. Growing vegetables through localized permaculture is a great step in the right direction, but the planet has never before tried to meet the minimum daily protein requirements of 6 billion+ people through such practices. Human beings now constitute the largest species by biomass on the planet with cows coming in at #2. So, while growing “victory gardens” is an admirable and necessary step in the right direction, it is probably insufficient in terms of meeting protein requirements- which is a large part of what the mass produced grains and legumes of the “green revolution” have done, while allowing the population to expand at an unsustainable exponential rate.

Eating lower on the food chain to meet protein requirements is certainly a step in the right direction which would be helpful; another is looking into neglected alternatives such as localized spirulina cultivation, for example. Due to its quick rate of growth, spirulina can optimally provide forty times the protein yield per acre of the next highest (soy) source.

On my blog @ http://wecanchangetheworld.wordpress.com, I provide some links for things such as How to Grow Your Own Spirulina, Mud Pot Spirulina cultivation, etc. Unfortunately, until peoples’ awareness shifts towards thinking about alternatives such as this, finding sources of live Spirulina cultures (aside from miniscule starts from algae collections such as the one at UTex, that is) seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Not being a chemistry expert, I can’t guarantee results, but it looks to me as though an appropriately measured mixture of wood ash, drug free urine and water (with a bit of iron added) would provide a good (if perhaps not ideal) culture medium for homegrown Spirulina. Not exactly expensive, in other words.

Anyway, thanks for being willing to begin the discussion on this important and timely issue. Below are some spirulina links if you are interested in reading more on the topic:

http://www.daenvis.org/technology/Spirulina.htm
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/petites-nouvelles/manuel/grow.htm

 

Meanwhile, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle cites Raj Patel, the author of “Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System” for 5 primary reasons for high food prices:

– Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and oil prices are soaring.

– As nations get richer they demand more meat, shifting grain “out of the bowls of the poorest people into the stomachs of livestock.”

– Biofuel production is boosting prices.

– Poor harvests may be the front end of climate change.

– Speculation on food prices fuels spikes.

The Big Picture wonders about the role the Federal Reserve is playing in this issue.

Tags: sustainability, spirulina, food, hunger, permaculture, CounterPunch