[p2p-research] debate on open agriculture

[Michel Bauwens]

As a matter of fact, Havana and Shanghai produce a majority of their
vegetables, and China's urban population meets around 85% of its
vegetable needs through rooftop and vacant lot gardening.

Kevin,

do you have any sources on this?

I heard 60%, but I cannot believe that contempary shangai would still allow
this, there are hardly any rooftop gardens left ...

On sam's excellent food site, only available after registration, I saw
estimates that local food production could move from 5 to 25% of the food
supply but not more,

Michel

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/21/09, Stan Rhodes <stanleyrhodes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Regarding diffusion of skill, the trend I see: technology and knowledge
> > lowering barriers to entry so more people can choose from a larger pool
> of
> > interests, and go farther in their handful of interests.  The skills are
> > actually diffused in and across technology itself--shoulders of giants
> and
> > all that.  If you look at hobbies, they may be increasingly diverse
> between
> > people, but each person only has a handful.  There is variance, of
> > course--some people have wider "interest pools" than others--but I think
> you
> > can see the trend.  Even with incredibly low barriers to entry across a
> huge
> > pool of possible activities, I strongly suspect we'll see specialization
> in
> > only a handful per person.
>
> That may well be, but it seems likely to me that the reduced capital
> outlays and other entry barriers, and a shift in price as it becomes
> impossible to externalize the real costsof agribusiness, means that
> the mix will shift considerably toward home and neighborhood
> production.  A great deal of division of labor can be achieved by
> specialization at the neighborhood level--not only one person
> producing specialty crops for a number of other families, but a
> skilled seamstress sewing for the neighborhood (as opposed to a larger
> number of families with under- or unused sewing machines gathering
> dust, or the sewing being done indifferently well).
>
> >  So, while you say there might be rational economic incentives for
> diffusion
> > of skill in make-vs-buy, I'm not seeing those incentives with food or
> much
> > else, because the strongest economic incentive is for a person to
> specialize
> > in what interests them, with one or more of those skillsets being of high
> > market value--their breadwinner.  I strongly suspect that manufacturing
> of
> > the future will be similar, but I will save my alternate visions of the
> > future of manufacturing for some other time.
>
> > Regarding cities and food, the future will be far more dense than WW2
> era,
> > not less dense, which is good, because increased density tends to
> correlate
> > with more power efficiency (less power used per capita).  I can't see
> many
> > victory gardens in Tokyo or Hong Kong.
>
> > While gardens aren't a very productive use of dense urban land, I could
> > easily see edible landscaping throughout urban greenspaces (which need to
> be
> > multi-purpose), and roof gardens (are they worth the cost and upkeep? no
> > idea).
>
> As a matter of fact, Havana and Shanghai produce a majority of their
> vegetables, and China's urban population meets around 85% of its
> vegetable needs through rooftop and vacant lot gardening.
>
> However, I don't know if you have a garden (I do, and picked my
> > first eggplant this weekend), but, I would be hard-pressed to produce
> 40-50%
> > of in-season veggies.  Similar to the market gardeners you mentioned, we
> do
> > have full-time specialized garderners here, whom you can pay to come in
> and
> > take care of your garden for you if you live within their zone, and
> there's
> > even a pooled-backyard CSA.
>
> I've been gardening about ten years, from the time I first lived in a
> rent house with a yard attached and gardening became feasible.   IMO
> the learning curve is fairly rapid, for anyone who is reasonably
> interested in learning, and capable of learning from his own
> experience, from one year to the next.  I started out based on
> memories of childhood gardening (in a small southern city, with
> parents who grew up in the rural south and considered a garden an
> expected part of life, relying heavily on chemical fertilizers and
> pesticides), and a handful of books on organic gardening.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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