Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Dorothea Lange Sons of Negro tenant farmer, Granville County, North Carolina July 1939
This is the second installment of Nicole’s series on food security.
Nicole Foss: In part one of this series, we looked at finance as a major causal factor in the development of food insecurity. The boom and bust cycles that result from over-financialization are, however, only one aspect of a food crisis already present for many, and looming for many more in the years to come. Finance can, and does, generate artificial scarcity, initially through the manipulation of land and commodities for profit and, and latterly by over-reaching itself and crashing the human operating system, with tremendous negative impact on the supply of all goods and services. Food is one of the vital factors that will be substantially affected in a financial crash where connecting producers and consumers will be extremely difficult due to lack of money in circulation.
The inherent instability of our human operating systems is only one of a large number of limiting factors for food production and distribution. The very real scarcity coming as a result of limiting factors grounded in the physical world is far more serious in the longer term. While we can make changes capable of addressing both human and physical limits, we are highly unlikely to do so in a timeframe, or on a scale, that would prevent us from experiencing the consequences of of over-shooting our natural carrying capacity. Nevertheless, whatever we can achieve in the time available will be an improvement.
This series is not meant to be a comprehensive assessment of each limiting factor in relation to food supply, but an overview of vulnerability in its many forms, clarifying the imperative for re-engineering our food systems. Given the extent of the over-stretch of the current model, the possibility of rapid collapse in response to very predictable system shocks is uncomfortably high. We are at risk of cascading system failure. We cannot expect facilitation of this transition to come from the top down, however – far from it. The larger scale centralized human construct, highly over-stretched and inflexible, can only be expected to look after itself and defend the status quo at the expense of decentralization initiatives. Meaningful change will have to come from the bottom up, one local initiative at a time.
There is a considerable urgency to making this transition to a human-scale food system. While many are generally aware that our current means of producing and distributing food is unsustainable, few seem to realize that what cannot continue will not continue, that the limits are already being reached, and that the effects will most certainly be felt in our lifetimes, even in what are now wealthy countries. This is not an issue where we can continue business as usual and expect the impact to be felt only by distant populations or by subsequent generations. It will be one where we must take personal responsibility for change, both for our own benefit and that of society in general.
We are facing non-negotiable physical limits in terms of water and climate, which are the subject of this instalment, but also energy, soil fertility and carrying capacity, the subjects for the next part of the series. Our human systems for trade and agricultural regulation are frequently exacerbating the scope of the problems we face and will be covered subsequently. Ultimately we are going to have to face the root of the problem, which lies in the inherently expansionist nature of agriculture itself, as practiced not just in the industrial age, but from the dawn of the neolithic period. We will need to develop polycultural food production systems along permaculture lines if we are to avoid the worst consequences of over-reach. We will need to learn to live within limits.
