[p2p-research] debate on open agriculture

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

May I propose the following vision for debate, which says that local
agriculture will never be competitive with the industrial version?

I would like to publish some of your contributions on the p2p blog,

Michel

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/3207/
Postapocalyptic Gardens <http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/3207/>
*Marcelo Rinesi* <http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/bio/rinesi/> Marcelo
Rinesi<http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/bio/rinesi/>
*Frontier Economy<http://www.frontiereconomy.com/2009/07/postapocalyptic-gardens/>
*
Posted: Jul 2, 2009

 Growing your own food might be fun, but it’s not the best survival
strategy.

There’s a small but growing movement for locally-grown and even home-grown
food in cities and suburbs. Some of the reasons behind this movement are
aesthetic — indeed, ‘vertical farming’ buildings seen in recent
architectural proposals can be strikingly beautiful — ecological,
nutritional, recreational, and economic. Some of these reasons are
unimpeachable, as gardening can be an intellectually, psychologically, and
socially rewarding activity, but the economic arguments for it, which are
usually the basis for the promotion of the activity as a mass endeavor,
merit a closer analysis.

Home gardening as a significant food source for consumption and barter has
been a regular fixture in many civilizations, and its resurgence, specially
in the United States, seems to be tied to both the economic recession and
the rising price of food. As the first trend has lowered wages, the
application of personal time to growing food has come to appear a reasonable
investment.

However, there’s a significant difference between growing food as a
substitute for less productive recreational activities, and growing food as
a substitute for time employed at work. In the latter case, it seems
unlikely that an amateur, small-scale operation can produce food more
cheaply, when all costs, specially time, have been properly accounted for,
than a large-scale industrial operation. In any normal situation, working an
extra hour gives you the additional income to buy more or better foodstuff
than you can grow in that hour.

What some proponents of local food production argue, though, is that
conditions are straying from what has so far been considered normal. In
particular, they point towards the possibility of high energy costs and a
deteriorated infrastructure pushing transportation costs to the point where
locally grown food will be economically competitive by virtue of its
proximity, as well as by the reduced benefit of energy-intensive physical
capital to agricultural productivity.

In the context of such an scenario (which we believe unlikely, although not
impossible if the transition to large-scale renewable energy fails), it’s
important to note that even in the absence of cheap energy, small-scale
agriculture has never been an economically efficient choice for individuals
or societies. Most economic profits — and the best food — usually went to
those who controlled large extents of fertile rural land, or energy sources
like mills (powered by the wind or a river) or large groups of slaves.

Technology and society has, thankfully, changed since those times, but the
economic lessons learned along the way remain. In an hypothetical post-oil
dystopian future of very expensive energy and high transportation costs,
growing food in a small garden will be less profitable, or in other terms,
will lead to poorer nutrition, than owning a wind turbine or a dozen, a
laboratory capable of producing antibiotics, or a network of solar-powered
railroads.

We enthusiastically support green cities, but not a retreat to an economy
confined to the local scale. A complex, distributed, specialized economy is,
despite its larger requirements for coordination and management, immensely
more effective than any collection of isolated or semi-isolated households
and small communities could be, and whatever challenges we will have to face
in the coming decades, we stand a better chance with more resources at our
disposal, not less.


-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
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Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

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