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Strategic planning points for Biodiversecity

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

In business as in politics, your tactics derive from your strategy. Strategy & tactics derive from your program.  Program derives from your macro assessment. Macro assessment derives from your Critique or Analysis of the current situation, which arises from your basic worldview or philosophy. So it is with our need for strategic planning as we contemplate actually purchasing a chunk of land for sustainable urban agriculture here in Central Exposure, WI.

Here are a few strategic planning bullet points we expect to base our plans upon over the next couple few years.

1.  Macroeconomic crisis. There is no basis for optimism about the macroeconomic environment. I said this in January, 2007 at a public forum and look, it still seems to be true today. Our macro economic outlook is for a deflationary double-dip recession (3-D recession).

This means that supplying local organically grown food from a small-scale urban ag. operation is going to be very challenging.  The high end “foodie” market will continue to shrink, we believe. The low-income market is extremely cost conscious and this gives people marketing to this segment of the market very little pricing power. Everything must be done on a low-cost basis. Whether delivering organic food can be made affordable on a mass scale is an open question at this point.  Few people seem interested in this question.

2.  Peak oil problem. The global peak of oil production is probably already underway, or at best, within a half-decade. You can always follow the development of this on The Energy Bulletin yourself. Beyond the year 2015, just five years off, global oil production will be falling, and outside the OPEC countries, falling fairly fast.

Small local food producers should expect, as we do, the beginning of overt shortage of motor fuels around that time. We can’t predict what government will do in response, but given recent experience, we can expect that response to be a) too little, badly organized and b) too late, as shown for example in BP oil spill response. Small local food producers should expect themselves to be shoved aside by large corporate farms in their regions when it comes to the rationing of fuel supplies. Expect as we do a chaotic business environment.

3.  Man-made global climate change. Most of our season’s production this summer has been ruined by too much rainfall in too short a time, falling on ground not well suited to excess rainfall in a veggie crop production scheme.  We expect the man-made global warming to continue ramping up, leading to weather chaos which makes planning for crop production exceptionally tough.

We expect, as small-scale local food producers, to have to plan and spend excessively for both irrigation needs (for hot, dry summers brought by global warming’s regional effects) as well as drainage (for hot, wet summers brought by global warming’s regional effects).  The land we have looked at for purchase was viewed with an eye on both these problems. Investment will be needed in both areas we’re sure.

4.  Continued credit crisis.  We expect the credit crunch or crisis to continue.  Despite the massive bi-partisan bank bailouts endorsed by both G.W. Bush and Pres. Obama, banks are not lending out their cash, but instead are profiting from borrowing cheaply from the Fed and investing it in their proprietary trading schemes, bound to once again implode in the near future, exacerbating this crisis once again. We expect small-scale farmers and community needs including small-business job creation to be completely starved for credit going forward.

This means for us, we can never expect conventional bank loans nor small business loans via govt. as a source for capital. Everything will have to be paid out of current earnings.  As small-scale producers we expect not to be alone in facing this challenge.

5. Continued unbelievable levels of unemployment. Not only are the Baby Boomers facing their suddenly becoming irrelevant in the labor market, but the 20-Something generation faces systemic, structural, persistent unemployment unlike anything previous generations of Americans have faced.

This means again that the high-end foodie market for boutique-style food offerings from small local food producers will remain constrained and not a high-growth area. This may mean, for small food producers, a need to try offering food at affordable prices. Given the chronic cash shortage many people are facing, various forms of barter — barter for food, barter for services needed by the food producers, and so on — may become increasingly important.

6.  Class struggle intensifies.  Since 1974 we’ve been studying and teaching the perpetual class struggle in America. In times of economic crisis, such as we expect chronically over the next decade, this struggle does not ease nor diminish, but intensifies.

For small-scale food producers, this means you should expect concerted effort by large agribusiness to continue driving you completely off the scene, out of business, and for government to generally take the side of large agribusiness.  Small-scale producers who must depend on off-farm wage labor to support their farms should expect intensified workplace struggle, the driving down of your wages, the loss of pension benefits, loss of health-care benefits, and so on.

7. Crash and chaos scenarios increase in probability.  Given America’s recent experience with large-scale crises, and the ongoing #fail mode we have seen with situations such as Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spill, and other situations, we expect incidents such as these to increase. Since Central Wisconsin is not highly urbanized, large-scale incidents are not expected. However, chronic, ongoing crises such as hunger and chronic underemployment will remain in our forecast.

We will remain open to participating in various crisis-mitigation and mutual self-help type groups as time goes on. This participation will depend upon our assessment that participation is grass-roots democratic and not driven by or dominated by local ruling elite interests.

Posted in Ag, Biodiversity, Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, ecology, globalization | No Comments »

Principles of a working-class local food movement

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

1st principle of a working-class local food movement: Mutual aid, self-help. Working poor people are full citizens, not “clients”. Hunger is not a social work problem but a structural flaw of capitalism. Workers facing food shortages must NOT be managed by strange religious cults such as the (homophobic, ultra-conservative) Salvation Army. Working poor people must manage their own food relief organizations democratically.

Principle #2: We drop the dogma/mantra that “cheap food isn’t good; good food isn’t cheap.” That’s like saying to your prospective market, “if you’re cheap (and by necessity we need to be cheap), you’re not good.” The first rule of Community Organizing Club is, Don’t Insult Your Community.

#3 principle: The struggle for nutritive, quality non-toxic non-lethal food is a class struggle. The organic movement stops being a petit-bourgeois (”little ruling class”) movement. Black activists have long pointed out that the poorest communities are like labs to test how much toxic… exposure poor people can take before higher mortality ensues. So it is with food.

4th principle: Solidarity, 4a. As long as I’ve been involved with small-scale farmers, most have been workers off the farm too. The Man doesn’t want small farmers succeeding; so, you have to work off-farm. Your status as a worker doesn’t end when you drive in that long driveway. Are there any purely “rural” or purely “urban” worker issues? I doubt it.
Principle 4: Solidarity, 4b. So, wearing your off-farm Teacher Hat, consider bringing a Teacher Union sign in support of MalWart workers trying to organize. Or wearing your Steelworkers’ hat from the paper mill that supports your farm, go support those teachers trying to hold their jobs. The Man is the only one who benefits from the false urban-rural/farmer-vs.-worker divides.

Principle #5: Co-operation, not competition. If the only way to thrive is cannibalizing someone else’s customer base, that takes fierce competitiveness, undermining the “solidarity” principle mentioned above.  On the other hand, if you look the Rochdale co-op principles, these have stood the test of time. We think a working-class local food movement needs to be governed by these, not by the Univ. of Wisc.-Extension’s petit-bourgeois tiny ag-entrepreneur eating-his-neighbor’s lunch model. “Get big or get out,” still the model of ag schools and extension everywhere, must be rejected. Get appropriately-sized and stay in ag, by co-operating.

Principle #6: Job creation starts with ag. Your town likely has a “Community Development Agency” which is busy pursuing outmoded models of “creating jobs.” You need to remind them of the National Farmers’ Org. principle, all wealth starts from the earth: from farming, mining, logging, or fishing. Get your CDA to start a “value-added” producers’ co-op to start generating jobs & wealth.

Principle #7: Public institutions impacting agriculture belong to YOU, not the corporations. Institutions like public land-grant universities and University Extensions (or “co-op extension”) are still largely publicly-funded despite the stealth privatization going on as corporate money corrupts these systems. Form a watchdog group, call Bullshit on the corporate bullshit, get nasty if you see Monsanto and the genuine fascist corp. Bayer (remember Bayer/IG Farben of the Third Reich) start pushing their agendas in these public institutions.

Principle #8: Corporate foundation money belongs to YOU, the workers, NOT to the bourgeoisie (ruling class) who carefully dole it out to groups who will walk their corporate walk. I know this is a tough one for people to get their mind around, but corporations extract ALL of their wealth by exploiting it from the working class, as well as by selling products/services to workers wearing their “consumer” hats, usually at a great profit. This is the source of all foundation wealth. Don’t beg for it: demand it. It’s to feed people, not the bourgeois ego and craving for a legacy.

Principle #9: All agriculture is “urban agriculture.” Can you think of any aspect of agriculture that is NOT controlled by, governed by, steered by, very wealthy men in corporations and corporate/government, operating from urban centers? I can’t. Once you, the small “local” farmer, can identify your interests with a starving farmworker in a former rainforest village now turned to monoculture biomass energy production (e.g. Brasil), you’re well on your way to forging alliances that will return the power where it belongs: to workers.

#10 Grassroots democracy. Participate, don’t be a spectator. Anyone involved in small-scale organics, local food, urban agriculture, is up against a class of powerful people running powerful corporations who wish for the small-scale farmer to disappear, lose their assets, and become one of the working poor who keep these corporations going. It’s going to be a fight to regain democratic control over institutions long ago corrupted. It’s not going to be easy, it will be nasty at times, but really, what choice is there but to fight for grassroots democracy and local control over your world?

Bobby G

August 2010

Posted in Ag, Biodiversity, Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, globalization, subcultures | 3 Comments »

Reclaim the Land draft proposal (urban farm/community garden for Stevens Point WI)

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Reclaim the Land Draft Proposal
Prepared by Katie Kloth 2/20/2010

  • Plot Section: Lullaby; North of Centerpoint Mall, Main St.
  • (Potential) Plot Subsidiaries: Eagle Plumbing and Heating, Portage Street; Adjacent vacant house and lot south of Eagle Plumbing and Heating, 3rd St; Sorenson’s Green House, Main St.
  • Plot Owner: City of Stevens Point (WI)
  • Price of plot for sale (vacant lot excluding buildings only): No set price (as identified by Mike Morisee, Zoning Commission, City of Stevens Point (WI)
  • Means of Obtaining Plot/Plot Deed: Deeded over for $0.00 to “Focus Group Collection” (TBA), Down with Caps Kollective, and/or ownership to remain under city as “Humanitarian Project: Public Urban Farm Land (Project)
  • Proposal: The Lullaby plot’s intention for use upon obtaining the deed to the land would serve as a public space allotted for communal urban farming and composting. Access for all and freedom from user fees, the Lullaby plot is intended to accommodate at least 150 people with seasonal vegetables, ad year round compost, as well as serve as an educational center for local peoples of all ages; as a working CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, or similar entity, produce would first be offered to volunteers and ‘workers’, and ¼ of the land’s production would be allotted for dispersal amongst food banks, farmers markets, and other charitable causes and/or events/programs.
  • Structure to organize workers: Non-hierarchal
  • Approximate Growing Season (outdoors; excludes potential subsidiary of Sorenson’s Green Hose): Late April- early November
  • Seed and seedling source of origin: Local-organic farm donations/purchases, as well as “Seed Savers”.
  • Staff: There are potentials for paid full time staff; if owned by the city, funding allotted for primary caregivers (2)/farm hands to be negotiated through the proper city channels.
  • City Involvement: Partnership and Expansion from the City of Stevens Point’s “Neighborhood Gardens” Project.
  • Other Potentials: To work in cooperation or partnership with the university via Director of Dining Services Mark Hayes, and the Shared Governance Entity that governs dining, to provide a substantial amount of local and organic produce to the food system, depending on produce availability, existing and to-be-determined contracts/agreements, as well as an adequate budget for UWSP’s Dining Services is to be provided.

Posted in Biodiversity, Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability | No Comments »

“Resiliency”: How could Portage County prepare for the peak oil crisis?

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

There’s a new term out there, one that’s quickly entering common usage: “resilient communities” as one definition suggests, it has to do with a community’s ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in areas including energy…

Here in Portage County, what have local leaders at the County Board level been doing to make our county communities resilient with respect to energy? If you’re scratching your head, searching for something in your memory on this topic, you’re right. Not that much is being done to prepare for the coming decline in petroleum motor fuel product availability (gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, kerosene, jet fuel) which is part of the global peak of oil production problem. This problem is so far, not on the radar screen for the Board.

The problem of peak oil has not, in my memory, been publicly admitted by any of the County Board supervisors, nor by the current County Executive.

One hopes that candidate Patty Dreier, with her extensive connections into the sustainability movement in our region, will have some plan, some political programme, to deal with this problem.

One County Extension fact sheet notes this about County governments in Wisconsin:

“(Sec. 59.03(2) Wisconsin Statutes)…This home rule authority has allowed county government to gradually expand as a regional government in areas such as recycling, water quality management, transportation planning, and zoning review, but only in cases where a municipality or group of municipalities have requested the county to do so on their behalf through voluntary agreements.” (From this Extension fact sheet).

Note that there is one major area–planning for re-zoning–where our County Board and Executive could be preparing us for the disruption promised by the arrival of a) even higher price spikes in oil prices than we saw in 2008, along with b) frank shortages of many products. Peak oil will impact us far more than in the prices we pay for these refined products, once we reach the stage where there is no gasoline (or diesel or anything else) available at any price at your local filling station.

The County Board could be hard at work in completely overhauling the zoning codes in this county, by taking a leadership role in convincing municipalities–cities, villages, townships–that it is in their interests to abolish the old pattern of city centers and “bedroom towns.”

The “bedroom town” is going to have to quickly become a distant memory if we are to have any “resiliency.” This material was already well-covered in the film End of Suburbia. Portage County has its share of bedroom towns, many of which fit the definition of “food deserts.” A town like Rosholt fits several categories of desert: food desert, hardware & home improvement desert, drug/pharmacy desert, auto parts desert, etc. A family has to pile into the car (more likely, 2 or 3 cars) and head off to Point to get many of their needs met. How is this going to play out when petroleum depletion starts to hit home?

You can use your imagination. You can also use it to imagine a much different pattern, one that might work better in peak oil conditions. Higher-density housing patterns, housing co-operatives that perhaps share 20, 40, 80 or more acres useful in food production, for woodlots and wildlife habitat, but with housing sited densely on just a few of those acres, perhaps owned by many unrelated people, held in common. That would be one alternative, not currently in zoning Sharia law.

After putting the current zoning code through the shredder and using the shreddings for mulch or compost, next the zoning committees could take a look at the restrictions on ag land. Perhaps owners of smaller parcels could be allowed to pursue agriculture, from 5 acres on down to less than an acre. Perhaps family farmers could be allowed to site several family members’ houses on their property, without having to carve it up subdivision-style. Already-denser areas such as Merryland Drive between Rosholt and Polonia could be encouraged to develop in unincorporated municipality style, bustling with new start-up taxi and ride-share services, particularly those catering to seniors lacking mobility. If fuel is going to be scarce, we’ll have to learn to share.

In cities, villages and townships, the restriction against conducting a business from one’s home is a throwback to the heyday of the suburbs and the bedroom town, not at all adaptive to the coming era of declining fuel supplies. The zoning codes need to be rewritten so as to allow people to combine business pursuits with their living quarters, so as to provide stability and resilience in both the housing patterns, and the small-business sectors.

From the end of World War II, this bedroom town pattern has been okay with planners at local levels of government. It seemed to work well. Real estate salespeople and developers prospered. The landscape took on a kind of fairy tale look, with houses perched nicely atop kettle moraine landscapes, with gigantic lawns spread out before them. This was the era when employment was provided by giant corporations–many of which have completely pulled out of much of the United States and have relocated production entirely out of the country.

In the depths of the current recession, with 400,000+ people filing new unemployment claims each week, the outmoded dependency on large corporations to save our local economy stands out starkly. It is as if local governments were living in a fog of wishful thinking, magical thinking, eternal optimism based on “the way we were” back in the 1950s.

It is often said (way too often, in fact) that small business is the engine of economic growth, growth in the number of new livelihoods as people take risks and provide themselves their own job by starting up a new business. Yet zoning laws prohibit many people from starting up these businesses using their homefront as storefront. Perhaps the idea was that mixing business with bedroom town would lower the property values. The deflation of the housing bubble seems to have done much to lower property values, all on its own momentum.

In Stevens Point–and many other Portage County municipalities–you aren’t allowed to put a greenhouse in your yard, at your home. Anyone who might want to start a small-scale eco-agriculture business can’t do the startup from home.  The zoning ordinances may have been written to protect larger-scale businesses against the threat of small-timers getting a foothold and perhaps contending on the basis of better quality or service or lower cost. Or, it would seem that would be one motivation for such zoning restrictions.

But if growing local food on a serious scale is considered, such restrictions have got to go. Green Giant is not going to be spearheading the local foods movement, I hope our business/govt. leaders realize.

As we approach an era when motor fuel is going to be absurdly expensive, and oftentimes, downright unavailable at any price (even absurdly expensive), it would seem prudent for our local government officials to start to get a handle on this peak oil issue. I attend any number of “sustainability”-oriented talks, film showings, forums, informal meetings, and whatnot, yet I never see Stevens Point City Council members, nor County Board members, at these sorts of events.

I take that to mean that these leaders don’t regard sustainability as an issue even deserving of their thoughtful attention, nor for engaging with other citizens in meaningful discussion about them. Perhaps it is because there’s been no executive leader guiding the overall direction?

Except, of course, for Patty Dreier, candidate for County Executive. That’s one more reason I’ll urge you to vote for her for County Exec. in the April elections.

Bobby G

Stevens Point WI

Posted in Biodiversity, Co-operation, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, ecology, subcultures | 2 Comments »

How America went from a nation of producers to consumers, Part III: Cheap food, agriculture, and keeping the farmer down

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

(To read this in order, you have to scroll down the blog to get to the earlier parts. It reads from the bottom up, the way democracy also should read).

In Part II I briefly mentioned the relationship between US food-oriented corporations and foreign policy. It’s not a stretch to say that maintaining unfair trade, especially in food, was one of the major purposes to which the US military was mis-directed over the past century and a half. In 1954, the role of United Fruit Company in encouraging (directing?) the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Arbenz in Guatemala is very well documented.

Likewise, when the Castro brothers, along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and a small army finally overthrew Batista in Cuba in 1959, one of their first acts was nationalizing the lands of that same United Fruit Company. Once again, United Fruit went into action, encouraging (directing?) the US CIA to intervene, and a hastily-organized disastrous invasion of newly-liberated Cuba occurred at the Bay of Pigs–sometimes called the “Bay of Pigs Fiasco.”

(The CIA was very busy in 1954, also staging the overthrow of the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, a blunder that the USA is still paying for dearly in the form of the extremely distorted course of events in the Persian Gulf region. But that topic is covered under Part IV on national liberation and beginning of the end for neo-colonialism.)

I would argue that the role of cheap food is crucial in shifting the USA from a producer base to a consumer base, where we are now dependent upon a global economy for meeting the needs of our outsized spending habits. If the manufacturers of all sorts of consumer products wanted to move more of these products, food would have to become a much smaller part of each household’s budget, in order to allow that household more wiggle room in buying other products flooding the market.

Examples of these other products might be: the house they lived in, all its furniture, home electronics, fashion that had to be discarded each time “back-to-school” rolled around in August, automobiles, gasoline, vacation trips, second homes in vacation hot spots, later computers, monitors, Nintendos, cell phones, digital cameras, printers, disk drives, iPhones, mp3 players, PDAs, GPS devices, XBoxes, Wii games, electronic toys of all sorts, a boat to go fishing, an ATV when you’re not fishing, a snowmobile to play in the snow, trailers to haul all that, storage sheds to store it all, a second, third, fourth automobile for the spouse and two teens, plus all the credit cards needed to buy all that stuff, not to mention the insurance to cover it all.

So, food went from being approximately 19% of the typical US household budget, down to about 9% in around 2005, while these other products filled up the remaining 125% of the household budget.

Someone would have to pay for this easing of the burden of food on the household. Ah, the farmer.

First, as we mentioned, the farmers who were unlucky enough to live in those countries that grew things the USA coveted had to be dispossessed of their land, then re-hired as plantation workers to pick coffee, bananas, cocoa (and coca), pineapples, and ever more exotic fruits as the American palate got more and more exotic in its tastes. Thus, the “Banana Republic” was born. Countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, the Caribbean islands, Colombia, and on and on became home to some truly evil dictatorships, all to assure the flow of cheap luxury food to the USA.

In the USA, it was necessary to keep the farmer in check, but this was easily done through oligarchic control over the pricing of farm produce. A series of enormous food corporations came into being which managed the flow of foods and somehow miraculously ensured that farmers were getting sometimes a little more, sometimes a lot less, than their costs of production.

Occasional attempts by farmers to organize themselves into something analogous to labor unions in the factories, mines and mills were made. There was the Grange movement. There was the Farmers’ Union. There was National Farmers Organization. Efforts were made to restrict production–the sometimes violent milk strikes of Farmers’ Holiday Association and other groups in the 1930s and other efforts to push prices back up. All to no avail.

The fundamental problem always facing farmers was that they “owned” their land and operations (with guidance from their bankers), and hence, were always by nature in competition with the neighboring farmers. When a group of farmers is trying to hold out for higher prices, they can only hold until the first one caves in and accepts the lower price. Given the high debt load farmers have always faced, caving in doesn’t take long, and prices paid farmers are kept low. You don’t need to see a vast capitalist conspiracy in this arrangement; it’s just the way “Mr. Market” works.

The process of letting Mr. Market remove farmers from their land gained speed with the first Great Migration of rural blacks to the north, ca. 1910-1930. It progressed apace with the coming of the Dust Bowl in the great plains breakbasket states of Oklahoma and Texas, Colorado, parts of New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, and other places where food staples had been grown. This led to the first wave of environmental refuges inside the United States, headly mostly west toward California, where the formerly independent, self-reliant farmers were transformed into wage-laboring, largely homeless farmworkers working for large landowning food corporations. Then came the Second Great Migration of southern black rural folk going north to work in the factories, most never to return to the land, instead rearing a new generation of completely urbanized Baby Boom African-Americans.

In the 1950s, the rural brain drain continued slow but steady, as it did in the 1960s. And the 1970s. Don’t forget the ’80s. In the 1980s, here in Wisconsin, we faced a severe small farm crisis, and the Wisconsin Farm Unity Alliance arose to attempt to deal with the crisis. Too small to change the course of events, such a movement could still contribute to the ongoing national discussion about what to do with those farmers–everything except assuring them reliable parity pricing for their crops.

Two people who perhaps understood the importance of parity pricing for farm crops, from the “left” and “right” directions perhaps, were Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and Charles Walters, author of Unforgiven, and founder of the magazine Acres, USA. Parity pricing could be called simply “fair trade for farmers” as the basic idea was that farmers should receive a price for their products that would provide a parity, a level equal to that enjoyed by other prosperous classes in society. In the 1950s and 60s, that might have meant being on parity with the highest-paid trades union workers, the middle-class professionals or others earning a living able to sustain a family without fear of financial ruination.

In this current era, we are in uncharted waters. It is difficult to know with whom farmers might achieve parity, with the entire US middle class of professionals on the brink of financial ruination, with the labor unions decimated and powerless to improve worker wages, and with farmers themselves once again selling products at prices dangerously below the cost of their production.

At this point, the drive to push down real wages for workers in the USA has come round to backfire on finance capital. What seemed to have been an application of Naomi Klein’s concept of “shock doctrine” in the fall of 2008 now seems to have taken on a life outside the control of finance capital, domestically or globally. Events seem to be spiralling out of their control.

Once you have driven down the standard of living of your domestic market–US workers, farmers, and the middle classes–you find yourself with a shrinking market to sell all those outsourced goods to. Without continuing high levels of government direct payments, at this stage it seems that the economic downturn will continue on toward some unknown level of ruination. While I may have argued that finance capital had wanted to weaken the farm sector to the point where cheap food would not compete for household dollars with all the other junk from southeast Asia and China steaming its way toward the US ports, now the very productivity of US farmers seems in jeopardy, if massive farm bankruptcies follow this downtrend in the economy.

Likewise, with the specter of mass hunger in the USA, the very health and productivity of the next generations of workers needed to maintain at least some skeleton-crew level of staffing of the US domestic economy is in peril. Capital has gone too far, the shock doctrine has backfired, and we are all in uncharted waters here.

Next Part IV: Revolutions against neo-colonialism, run-away production, and the US worker becomes disposable.

Readings

Peter Chapman, Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, Canongate US, 2008.
John C. Culver, American Dreamer: A life of Henry A. Wallace, W.W. Norton, 2001.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Montly Review Press, 25th Ann. edition, 1997. Yes, this was the book given to Barack Obama by Hugo Chavez at their meeting in South America, 2009.
Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Thomas Kriger, The 1939 Dairy Farmers Union Milk Strike: The Story in Words and Pictures, Journal for Multi-Media History, 1998.
Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (New York, 1973), pp. 15-27.
Charles Walters, Unforgiven, Acres USA 2nd edition, 2002.

Posted in Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, MicroEcoFarming, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, globalization, subcultures | No Comments »

2009: The Year that Industrial Agriculture Collapsed

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

By Bobby G. 5 March 2013 first posted in Akashic Records 5 March 2009

Speaking now from our hindsight vantage-point in 2013, before I lay out several recent articles, all somewhat long, detailing the crisis in agriculture which loomed in that year, 2009, I’ll say this. Finally, we begin to see the rapid-fire timeline that led us to the much -prophesized “end date” common to the Mayan Long Count Calendar, some predictive prophecy from the Vedic people’s tradition, as well as the “Timewave Zero” which Terence and Dennis McKenna supposedly discovered independently using the I Ching. Separately, Vinge, Kurzweil et al. had predicted a sort of orgy of technological radical human evolution they liked to call the “Technological Singularity” — also oddly enough pegged to the Maya Calendar date of 12/21/2012.

This 2012 thing really captured a lot of people’s attention. And well it should. I tended to conflate James Howard Kunstler’s snarky commentary together with the 2012 hoopla, while poking fun at the “technological singularity” I took to calling the pivotal date 12/21/2012 the “Clusterf**k Singularity.” Here’s how it plays out in the next 45 months:

2008 was the year the global banking system collapsed.

2009 was the year in which Totalitarian Agriculture finally collapsed, revealing its utter inability to feed the enormous global population, and the complete unsustainability that is essential to its existence as a system of human invention. (Articles below)

2010 was the year in which the fossil fuel energy system collapsed, strangely enough combining the peak of global oil production (”peak oil”) together with Richard Duncan’s “Olduvai Cliff.” Let’s just say that bad things really happened that year. It’s not one any of us want to revisit.

2011 brought on, early in the year, the complete collapse of the EurAmericAsian “military-industrial complex.” Warfare as a solution to unsustainability completely collapsed and unraveled. It ran out of funding, food, and energy. The entity known as the “nation-state” began its long sunset and disappearance as a plague from human history. It turned out, you could not kill every last “Islamic extremist” and “Jihadist” and in fact, those folks are now saddled with tremendous administrative burdens in those autonomous zones where they have the bad luck to be in charge. I wish them luck.

Which brings us to what happened in 2012. Industrial civilization devolved in an astonishing blink of an eye, historically speaking. We now, from our unfortunate vantage point in 2013, are faced with a world that is astonishingly ugly, ruined, completely dysfunctional, yet somehow we find hope in the task of rebuilding all this demolished shit from the ground up. I only hope we can preserve most of the extant species now remaining…

For now, let’s return to 2009, the year in which Totalitarian Agriculture met its demise.

First up, Bob Waldrop from Oklahoma Food Co-op dismissed James Howard Kunstler’s comments about the cause of the ag. crisis, which follows at the end of this interminable blog entry of mine.

Posted by: “Robert Waldrop”

Tue Mar 3, 2009 9:29 pm (PST)

I think Kunstler has it wrong about the impact of
our present financial crisis on farm country at
least for this year.

I am not hearing of any problems around here
regarding financing “at the farm level”. A lot of
credit provided for planting loans in the
conventional ag bidness comes from government
programs or is guaranteed by government programs
and that pipeline is still open. Crop insurance
also appears to still available. Conventional ag
hasn’t experienced a “credit bubble” over the last
decade the way the rest of the economy has. Ag
has already been there, done that, and gone
through several “collapses” over the last 30
years, so rural lenders to farmers have trended
towards “more conservative” than the pump and dump
$800,000 house in an exurb bidness.

The problems I am hearing about are mostly weather
related (Oklahoma has had a very dry winter, and
the winter wheat crop is suffering, indeed, we
need rain “soon” to have much of a crop this year
at all, see also “California Central Valley
Drought), in the CAFO system (high prices for
inputs), and at the “giant transnational
aggregator” level (e.g. financing for
international ag trade, the big transational
corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, etc). I
continue to hear a lot of anecdotes about CAFOs
(confined animal feeding operations) shutting down
suddenly.

Weather permitting, I think crops will be planted
and harvested this year. There sure could be
problems though in the supply chain relative to
the economic crisis. We could have a situation
where there is a lot of food at the rural
“gathering” spots like grain elevators and potato
warehouses, but bottlenecks getting it from there
to cities. In that situation, everyone from FEMA
to the National Guard might be mobilized to
transport field run foods into the cities, but
grain and soybeans while nourishing would be a
challenge for many urban families. Get your
printable flyer on how to improvise a grain
grinder and prepare soybeans while the internet is
still up!
http://www.energyco nservationinfo. org/printflyers. htm .

Speaking of drought, I have been planting peas and
potatoes and I should have been watering my mulch
this winter because not a lot of decomposition has
occurred at the ground level. So I bought an
organic fertilizer made here in Oklahoma, to go
with my Azomite (mineral dust, also a new tactic
this year) and the winter’s ashes from our wood
burning stove.

To return to farm credit, all bets are off for
next year. This year’s money is already in the
farm credit pipeline. We will see if the system
is able to do the same next year.

Bob Waldrop, OKC

Below is an update about the southern plains winter wheat crop, from today’s Oklahoma Farm Report. The news isn’t good. The issue this year is weather, not finance.

Bob Waldrop, OKC
http://oklahomafarmreport.com/wire/news/00593_Allendale_Wheat2009_213211.php
Another Verse of ‘How Dry We Are’ Being Sung- This Time by Joe Victor of Allendale~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Allendale Inc is well aware of the fact two of the top four US winter wheat producing state’s crop condition ratings are far less than desirable. Both Texas and Oklahoma are facing very dry conditions, with little chance of rain hitting wheat fields in either state in the immediate future.

Weather conditions and forecast are less than optimistic for the Southern Plains as two week forecasted temps suggest swings of more than 25 degrees which may promote heaving while the present drought monitor suggest more than periodic rains will be required to dig out of harsh conditions. Principle key winter wheat producing states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Washington and Texas have a degree of abnormally dry to severe drought.

Joe Victor with Allendale has assembled a one pager on the ramifications for the wheat market fundamentals- and we have the pdf file linked on our website. Clickon the link below to take a look at this work.
http://oklahomafarmreport.com/wire/news/media/00006_Wheat_Conditions_p030309.pdf

Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production*****

By Eric deCarbonnel

 

After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world

To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.

Now, consider the same graphic with the countries experiencing droughts highlighted.

The countries that make up two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions. Whether you watch a video of the drought in China, Australia, Africa, South America, or the US, the scene will be the same: misery, ruined crop, and dying cattle.

China

The drought in Northern China, the worst in 50 years, is worsening, and summer harvest is now threatened. The area of affected crops has expanded to 161 million mu (was 141 million last week), and 4.37 million people and 2.1 million livestock are facing drinking water shortage. The scarcity of rain in some parts of the north and central provinces is the worst in recorded history.

The drought which started in November threatens over half the wheat crop in eight provinces – Hebei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu.

Henan
China’s largest crop producing province, Henan, has issued the highest-level drought warning. Henan has received an average rainfall of 10.5 millimeters since November 2008, almost 80 percent less than in the same period in the previous years. The Henan drought, which began in November, is the most severe since 1951.

Anhui
Anhui Province issued a red drought alert, with more than 60 percent of the crops north of the Huaihe River plagued by a major drought.

Shanxi
Shanxi Province was put on orange drought alert on Jan. 21, with one million people and 160,000 heads of livestock are facing water shortage.

Jiangsu
Jiangsu province has already lost over one fifth of the wheat crops affected by drought. Local agricultural departments are diverting water from nearby rivers in an emergency effort to save the rest.

Hebei
Over 100 million cubic meters of water has been channeled in from outside the province to fight Hebei’s drought.

Shaanxi
1.34 million acres of crops across the bone-dry Shanxi province are affected by the worsening drought.

Shandong
Since last November, Shandong province has experienced 73 percent less rain than the same period in previous years, with little rainfall forecast for the future.

Relief efforts are under way. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (about $12.69 billion) to drought-hit areas. Authorities have also resorted to cloud-seeding, and some areas received a sprinkling of rain after clouds were hit with 2,392 rockets and 409 cannon shells loaded with chemicals. However, there is a limit to what can be done in the face of such widespread water shortage.

As I have previously written, China is facing hyperinflation, and this record drought will make things worse. China produces 18% of the world’s grain each year.

Australia

Australia has been experiencing an unrelenting drought since 2004, and 41 percent of Australia’s agriculture continues to suffer from the worst drought in 117 years of record-keeping. The drought has been so severe that rivers stopped flowing, lakes turned toxic, and farmers abandoned their land in frustration:

A) The Murray River stopped flowing at its terminal point, and its mouth has closed up.
B) Australia’s lower lakes are evaporating, and they are now a meter (3.2 feet) below sea level. If these lakes evaporate any further, the soil and the mud system below the water is going to be exposed to the air. The mud will then acidify, releasing sulfuric acid and a whole range of heavy metals. After this occurs, those lower lake systems will essentially become a toxic swamp which will never be able to be recovered. The Australian government’s only options to prevent this are to allow salt water in, creating a dead sea, or to pray for rain.

For some reason, the debate over climate change is essentially over in Australia.

The United States

California
California is facing its worst drought in recorded history. The drought is predicted to be the most severe in modern times, worse than those in 1977 and 1991. Thousands of acres of row crops already have been fallowed, with more to follow. The snowpack in the Northern Sierra, home to some of the state’s most important reservoirs, proved to be just 49 percent of average. Water agencies throughout the state are scrambling to adopt conservation mandates.

Texas
The Texan drought is reaching historic proportion. Dry conditions near Austin and San Antonio have been exceeded only once before—the drought of 1917-18. 88 percent of Texas is experiencing abnormally dry conditions, and 18 percent of the state is in either extreme or exceptional drought conditions. The drought areas have been expanding almost every month. Conditions in Texas are so bad cattle are keeling over in parched pastures and dying. Lack of rainfall has left pastures barren, and cattle producers have resorted to feeding animals hay. Irreversible damage has been done to winter wheat crops in Texas. Both short and long-term forecasts don’t call for much rain at all, which means the Texas drought is set to get worse.

Augusta Region (Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina)
The Augusta region has been suffering from a worsening two year drought. Augusta’s rainfall deficit is already approaching 2 inches so far in 2009, with January being the driest since 1989.

Florida
Florida has been hard hit by winter drought, damaging crops, and half of state is in some level of a drought.

La Niña likely to make matters worse
Enough water a couple of degrees cooler than normal has accumulated in the eastern part of the Pacific to create a La Niña, a weather pattern expected to linger until at least the spring. La Niña generally means dry weather for Southern states, which is exactly what the US doesn’t need right now.


South America

Argentina
The worst drought in half a century has turned Argentina’s once-fertile soil to dust and pushed the country into a state of emergency. Cow carcasses litter the prairie fields, and sun-scorched soy plants wither under the South American summer sun. Argentina’s food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent, maybe more. The country’s wheat yield for 2009 will be 8.7 million metric tons, down from 16.3 million in 2008. Concern with domestic shortages (domestic wheat consumption being approximately 6.7 million metric ton), Argentina has granted no new export applications since mid January.

Brazil
Brazil has cut its outlook for the crops and will do so again after assessing damage to plants from desiccation in drought-stricken regions. Brazil is the world’s second-biggest exporter of soybeans and third-largest for corn.

Brazil’s numbers for corn harvesting:

Harvested in 2008: 58.7 million tons
January 8 forecast: 52.3 million tons
February 6 forecast: 50.3 metric tons (optimistic)
Harvested in 2009: ???

Paraguay
Severe drought affecting Paraguay’s economy has pushed the government to declare agricultural emergency. Crops that have direct impact on cattle food are ruined, and the soy plantations have been almost totally lost in some areas.

Uruguay
Uruguay declared an “agriculture emergency” last month, due to the worst drought in decades which is threatening crops, livestock and the provision of fresh produce.
The a worsening drought is pushing up food and beverage costs causing Uruguay’s consumer prices to rise at the fastest annual pace in more than four years in January.

Bolivia
There hasn’t been a drop of rain in Bolivia in nearly a year. Cattle dying, crops ruined, etc…

Chile
The severe drought affecting Chile has caused an agricultural emergency in 50 rural districts, and large sectors of the economy are concerned about possible electricity rationing in March. The countries woes stem from the “La Niña” climate phenomenon which has over half of Chile dangling by a thread: persistently cold water in the Pacific ocean along with high atmospheric pressure are preventing rain-bearing fronts from entering central and southern areas of the country. As a result, the water levels at hydroelectric dams and other reservoirs are at all-time lows.

Horn of Africa

Africa faces food shortages and famine. Food production across the Horn of Africa has suffered because of the lack of rainfall. Also, half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant, and the declining soil fertility across Africa is exacerbating drought related crop losses.

Kenya
Kenya is the worst hit nation in the region, having been without rainfall for 18 months. Kenya needs to import food to bridge a shortfall and keep 10 million of its people from starvation. Kenya’s drought suffering neighbors will be of little help.

Tanzania
A poor harvest due to drought has prompted Tanzania to stop issuing food export permits. Tanzania has also intensified security at the border posts to monitor and prevent the export of food. There are 240,000 people in need of immediate relief food in Tanzania.

Burundi
Crops in the north of Burundi have withered, leaving the tiny East African country facing a severe food shortage

Uganda
Severe drought in northeastern Uganda’s Karamoja region has the left the country on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The dry conditions and acute food shortages, which have left Karamoja near starvation, are unlikely to improve before October when the next harvest is due.

South Africa
South Africa faces a potential crop shortage after wheat farmers in the eastern part of the Free State grain belt said they were likely to produce their lowest crop in 30 years this year. South Africans are “extremely angry” that food prices continue to rise.

Other African nations suffering from drought in 2009 are: Malawi, Zambia, Swaziland, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tunisia, Angola, and Ethiopia.

Middle East and Central Asia

The Middle East and Central Asia are suffering from the worst droughts in recent history, and food grain production has dropped to some of the lowest levels in decades. Total wheat production in the wider drought-affected region is currently estimated to have declined by at least 22 percent in 2009. Owing to the drought’s severity and region-wide scope, irrigation supplies from reservoirs, rivers, and groundwater have been critically reduced. Major reservoirs in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all at low levels requiring restrictions on usage. Given the severity of crop losses in the region, a major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

Iraq
In Iraq during the winter grain growing period, there was essentially no measurable rainfall in many regions, and large swaths of rain-fed fields across northern Iraq simply went unplanted. These primarily rain-fed regions in northern Iraq are described as an agricultural disaster area this year, with wheat production falling 80-98 percent from normal levels. The USDA estimates total wheat production in Iraq in 2009 at 1.3 million tons, down 45 percent from last year.

Syria
Syria is experienced its worst drought in the past 18 years, and the USDA estimates total wheat production in Syria in 2009 at 2.0 million tons, down 50 percent from last year. Last summer, the taps ran dry in many neighborhoods of Damascus and residents of the capital city were forced to buy water on the black market. The severe lack of rain this winter has exacerbated the problem.

Afghanistan
Lack of rainfall has led Afghanistan to the worst drought conditions in the past 10 years. The USDA estimates 2008/09 wheat production in Afghanistan at 1.5 million tons, down 2.3 million or 60 percent from last year. Afghanistan normally produces 3.5-4.0 million tons of wheat annually.

Jordan
Jordan’s persistent drought has grown worse, with almost no rain falling on the kingdom this year. The Jordanian government has stopped pumping water to farms to preserve the water for drinking purposes.

Other Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations suffering from drought in 2009 are: The Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Israel, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Cyprus, and Iran.

Lack of credit will worsen food shortage

A lack of credit for farmers curbed their ability to buy seeds and fertilizers in 2008/2009 and will limit production around the world. The effects of droughts worldwide will also be amplified by the smaller amount of seeds and fertilizers used to grow crops.

Low commodity prices will worsen food shortage

The low prices at the end of 2008 discouraged the planting of new crops in 2009. In Kansas for example, farmers seeded nine million acres, the smallest planting for half a century. Wheat plantings this year are down about 4 million acres across the US and about 1.1 million acres in Canada. So even discounting drought related losses, the US, Canada, and other food producing nations are facing lower agricultural output in 2009.

Europe will not make up for the food shortfall

Europe, the only big agricultural region relatively unaffected by drought, is set for a big drop in food production. Due to the combination of a late plantings, poorer soil conditions, reduced inputs, and light rainfall, Europe’s agricultural output is likely to fall by 10 to 15 percent.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low

Low stocks of foodstuff make the world’s falling agriculture output particularly worrisome. The combined averaged of the ending stock levels of the major trading countries of Australia, Canada, United States, and the European Union have been declining steadily in the last few years:

2002-2005: 47.4 million tons
2007: 37.6 million tons
2008: 27.4 million tons

These inventory numbers are dangerously low, especially considering the horrifying possibility that China’s 60 million tons of grain reserves doesn’t actually exists.

Global food Catastrophe

The world is heading for a drop in agricultural production of 20 to 40 percent, depending on the severity and length of the current global droughts. Food producing nations are imposing food export restrictions. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries with food deficits, millions will starve.

The deflation debate should end now

The droughts plaguing the world’s biggest agricultural regions should end the debate about deflation in 2009. The demand for agricultural commodities is relatively immune to developments in the business cycles (at least compared to that of energy or base metals), and, with a 20 to 40 percent decline in world production, already rising food prices are headed significantly higher.

In fact, agricultural commodities NEED to head higher and soon, to prevent even greater food shortages and famine. The price of wheat, corn, soybeans, etc must rise to a level which encourages the planting of every available acre with the best possible fertilizers. Otherwise, if food prices stay at their current levels, production will continue to fall, sentencing millions more to starvation.

Competitive currency appreciation

Some observers are anticipating “competitive currency devaluations” in addition to deflation for 2009 (nations devalue their currencies to help their export sector). The coming global food shortage makes this highly unlikely. Depreciating their currency in the current environment will produce the unwanted consequence of boosting exports—of food. Even with export restrictions like those in China, currency depreciation would cause the outflow of significant quantities of grain via the black market.

Instead of “competitive currency devaluations”, spiking food prices will likely cause competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for just this type of emergency. Central banks around the world will lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currencies or by using them to purchase grain on the world market.

Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. A more valuable currency allows a nation to monopolize more global resources (ie: the overvalued dollar allows the US to consume 25% of the world’s oil despite having only 4% of the world’s population). If China were to selloff its US reserves, its enormous population would start sucking up the world’s food supply like the US has been doing with oil.

On the flip side, when a nation appreciates its currency and starts consuming more of the world’s resources, it leaves less for everyone else. So when china appreciates the yuan, food shortages worldwide will increase and prices everywhere else will jump upwards. As there is nothing that breeds social unrest like soaring food prices, nations around the world, from Russia, to the EU, to Saudi Arabia, to India, will sell off their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and reduce the cost of food imports. In response to this, China will sell even more of its reserves and so on. That is competitive currency appreciation.

When faced with competitive currency appreciation, you do NOT want to be the world’s reserve currency. The dollar is likely to do very poorly as central banks liquidate trillions in US holdings to buy food and appreciate their currencies

What Next?

 

James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfunk Nation, 2 March 2009.

Isn’t that a question, though….
The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit… end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.
There was a popular theory among Peak Oilers the last decade that the world would enter a “bumpy plateau” period when the global economy would get beaten down by peak oil, would then revive as “demand destruction” drove down oil prices, and would be beaten down again as oil prices shot up in response — with serial repetitions of the cycle, each beat-down taking economies lower — the only imaginable outcome being some sort of quiet homeostasis. This scenario did not play out as expected. It was predicated on a mistaken assumption that all systems would retain some kind of operational resilience while ratcheting down. Anyway, the banking system was mortally wounded in the first go-round and the behemoth is dying hard.
The last desperate act of the banking system in the face of Peak Oil’s no-more-growth equation was to engineer species of tradable securities that could produce wealth out of thin air rather than productive activity. This was the alphabet soup of algorithm-derived frauds with vague and confounding names such as credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), structured investment vehicles (SIVs), and, of course, the basic filler, mortgage backed securities. The banking system is now choking to death on these delicacies.
The trouble is that the EMT squad brought in to rescue the banking system — that is, governments — can’t remove these obstructions from the patient’s craw. They don’t want to drown in a mighty upchuck of the alphabet soup.
The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other’s failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.
If we’re really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales.
The net effect of the failures in banking is that a lot of people have less money than they expected they would have a year ago. This is bad enough, given our habits and practices of modern life. But what happens when farming collapses? The prospect for that is closer than most of us might realize. The way we produce our food has been organized at a scale that has ruinous consequences, not least its addiction to capital. Now that banking is in collapse, capital will be extremely scarce. Nobody in the cities reads farm news, or listens to farm reports on the radio. Guess what, though: we are entering the planting season. It will be interesting to learn how many farmers “out there” in the Cheez Doodle belt are not able to secure loans for this year’s crop.
My guess is that the disorder in agriculture will be pretty severe this year, especially since some of the world’s most productive places — California, northern China, Argentina, the Australian grain belt — are caught in extremes of drought on top of capital shortages. If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections.
This will, of course, require a re-allocation of lands suitable for growing food. Our real estate market mechanisms could conceivably enable this to happen, but not without a coherent consensus that it is imperative to do so. If agri-business as currently practiced doesn’t founder on capital shortages, it will surely collapse on disruptions in the oil markets. President Obama at least made a start in the right direction by proposing to eliminate further subsidies to farmers above the $250,000 level. But the situation is really more acute. Surely the US Department of Agriculture already knows about it, but the public may not be interested until the shelves in the Piggly-Wiggly are bare — and then, of course, they’ll go apeshit.
The recent huge drop in oil prices has left the public once again convinced that the world is drowning in oil — if only the scoundrelly oil companies were forced to deliver it at reasonable prices. The public has been consistently deluded about this for decades. What’s missing so far is for the president of the US to lay out the reality of the situation in a dedicated TV address. I know a lot of you think that Jimmy Carter already tried this and failed to make an impression (and ruined his presidency in the process). I guarantee you that Mr. Obama will have to do this sometime in the next few years whether he likes or not, and he’d be well-advised to get it done sooner rather than later. And by this I don’t mean just vague allusions to “energy independence” or “renewables” in speeches devoted to many other issues. I mean telling the public the plain truth that we’ll never offset oil depletion and the intelligent response is to do everything possible to transition to walkable towns and public transit, not to sustain the unsustainable.
The alternatives — i.e. what we’re trying now — is to further delude ourselves into thinking that we can run WalMart and the suburbs by some other means than oil. Despite all our investments in these things, we won’t be able to run them by other means, and the news about this had better get out before enormous disappointment turns into titanic rage. If Americans think they’ve been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called “American Dream” of suburban life turns out to be.
On this blizzardy Monday in the power centers of America, attention is fixed on the never-ending fiasco of AIG — a company whose main product turned out to be credit default swaps, and is now choking on them. Kibitzers on the sidelines of finance are forecasting a king-hell bear market suckers’ rally in the stock markets followed by a belly flop to Dow 4000 or lower. I myself called for Dow 4000 two years ago — and was obviously a bit off on my timing. All this is surely trouble enough. But while your attention is focused on Rick Santelli in the Chicago trader’s pit, or Larry Kudlow desperately seeking “mustard seeds” of new growth in financials, try to let one eye stray to the horizon where these other complex systems are working out their next moves. Farming. The oil markets. These are the coming theaters of alarm and distress.

Posted in Co-operation, Economics, Ecovillages, Peace, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, ecology, globalization | No Comments »

Why this will end badly…

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

The “this” I’m talking about is: all *this* deficit spending, a global contagion, to bail out this and that corporation, centered in the banking industry but now spreading to other sectors like manufacture.

Plus the newly-contemplated U.S. deficit spending to build up infrastructure–largely the kind of infrastructure to support the petroleum-fueled motor vehicle industry (roads, highway bridges etc.).

Plus, the newly-contemplated deficit spending to put money in consumer pockets (”stimulus” spending or tax rebates even to those who pay no Fed. income taxes, such as me).

Plus, the newly-contemplated deficit spending to put money in corporate and household coffers [while starving the federal treasury adding to deficits] through tax credits for renewable energy sources (not that these don’t need building).

The conventional wisdom consensus seems to be building–and i even heard this from Nouriel Roubini AKA “Doctor Doom” on the financial front–that we can’t worry about the aftermath of this flood of cheap money, because the alternative is further freeze-up of the global economy, a Great Depression II.

The other conventional wisdom, that of the more libertarian bent, is that all this deficit spending will lead to huge inflation, even hyper-inflation, as the flood of paper money engulfs the whole global economy. It’s not just the USA doing these bailouts, it extends throughout Europe, Central Asia, East Asia, Latin America, etc.

However, all the conventional wisdom seems to be breaking down under the torrent of novelty ingressing into realtime. The old models aren’t working and nobody has any new models that aren’t merely refurbished old models. For instance, in spite of all the money already flooding out of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, we don’t have inflation, but instead apparent deflation or a plunge in prices, quite perplexing to the libertarians’ camp. How come gold and silver aren’t racing to new high prices?

Sure, say the libertarians, but just wait–the laws of the market will assert themselves and before long, it’s shopping carts full of paper money a la Weimar Republic.

The new administration in D.C. says don’t worry, because all this stimulation will someday lead to more jobs and of course, more economic growth. And we must have growth at all costs, because we have to grow our way out of these deficits. There goes more wildlife habitat, more eco-systems, more greenhouse gasses if you “believe” in GHGs.

Here’s why this will end badly: grow how? I bet you the unspoken assumption of all these economic teams hard at work around the globe is that cheap energy is back, and has become the new norm, and all that “peak oil” meant was that oil *prices* were peaking just as the number of doomsaying peak oil *stories* in mass media were peaking, and the collapse in oil prices is permanent. Somehow, the oil supply problem was solved–or turned out to be an urban legend.

Actually, I heard Larry Kudlow, ever the capitalists’ cheerleader, say just that on CNBC this morning–cheap gasoline prices are now permanent. Problem: Solved!

Let’s hope so. Or, well, you can go ahead and hope so. But keep in mind, all prior recession recoveries, from the early 1900s on, were based on ever-cheapening abundant energy supply. That is the key to putting up productivity to ever-higher levels (squeezing more Gross Domestic Product from the same, or less, numbers of workers with ever-declining real wages). Now oil and gas exploration is coming to a halt everywhere, shut down by “deflation.”

But me, since I have not concluded that the data shows that the global peak of oil production was a rumor, an urban legend, based on faulty data, etc., I conclude that all this bailout-stimulus- cut-you- a-check stuff is going to end badly. Then, we’ll be living on money borrowed from all over the world, spending currency backed by the full faith and credit of our free trade partners, with a third-rate manufacturing base, and facing a horrendous fuels shortage in every category, unprepared as usual.

Yet, after it has ended badly, we are still going to need energy, food production, health care, means of obtaining credit and getting around from community to community. Maybe after the era of ending badly, we can somehow arrive at a means of doing these things co-operatively under community control, owned and operated by each community, county or state and under the firm control of the people doing the work and needing the services provided, where we save up our money and loan it to one another to enable commerce. Wouldn’t that be a novel new world order?

Meanwhile, enjoy those cheap fill-ups at the gas pumps.

Bobby G.

Posted in Economics, Ecovillages, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, globalization, subcultures | No Comments »

Stevens Point: The Big Build-Out Begins

Friday, May 9th, 2008

This week, The Big Build-Out was green-lighted in this small city. I see where Cathy Dugan was one of the few voices from the wilderness, along with Reid Rocheleau and another apartment owner, speaking against Stevens Point creating a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district for the big corporate welfare plan to aid AIG Corp. putting up its big building in the industrial park east of the freeway. I feel somewhat guilty for not going down there and adding my voice to the few last opponents of the coming Big Build-Out in Stevens Point.

It’s no wonder that activists burn out in this area. Being the lone voice or two speaking out against what you see as wrongheaded development, more of the same business-as-usual with a smiley green face put on it, being greeted with either derision or just stoney silence, has got to wear on people after a while. It looks like we’re bound to be a monopole, a one-party town (Dems) for the next decade or more, playing the economic development game “the way it’s played now” as the Development Director would say. (As far as I know, caving in to corporate demands and giving concessions is the way the economic development “game” has been played for decade after decade; nothing new there.)

We also know that monopoles don’t last long; eventually two poles again emerge, and struggle begins anew. So there may be hope, a decade or more hence, for another look at wrestling with the peak oil problem and a less energy-intensive way of life. Of course, by then, we should be about 120 months into the global decline of oil production, so we’ll be well behind most other small cities in catching up to the cacophony of events transpiring then.

What is the rationale for why this TIF is so fiscally responsible for Stevens Point? It’s the “spin-off development,” of course.

In days gone by, people used to complain about the kind of spin-off development that the Big Build-Out will spin off. It was disparagingly called “Urban Sprawl.”

Now that Stevens Point will become an “eco-municipality,” no one would dare call “urban sprawl” all that spin-off development of hastily-built shopping plazas, convenience stores, restaurants, music venues (to create a “night-time economy” out there in Downtown #2), more large big-box stores, and of course, hundreds of new apartment units.  They’ll be L.E.E.D. buildings!  And all of the myriad services this Build-Out will demand of the city and surrounding county townships and municipalities?  They’ll be paid for by escalating property assessments and rising property taxes.  Somehow, the housing bubble will remain un-deflated in our area!

I’m suggesting a new term we could coin for the Big Build-Out: “Eco-newsprawlapality.” What do you think, could it catch on? In this brave new construction zone, the peaking of global oil production is still decades away, not an imminent threat, and the prospect of a sprawling small city utterly dependent upon the automobile seems to bother no one, not even the greenest of green activists. Except perhaps the few folks with enough gumption such as Cathy Dugan and Council member Amy Heart displayed, to speak out when they smell something fishy in the works.

Bobby G.

Posted in Ecovillages, Peak Oil, Political Economy, Sustainability, ecology | No Comments »

Amy Heart takes the right stance

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

In a letter to the Stevens Point Plan Commission, (click that first phrase to link to the letter), I believe Amy Heart, District Five Alderperson for the City, takes the right stance on the incentives offered by Stevens Point to the huge transnational financial corporation AIG.

In fact Heart brings up problematic aspects of the Stevens Point-AIG deal that I failed to mention in my earlier blog post about it on this blog, dated Feb. 9th 2008. You may scroll to the bottom of the entries and click on “Previous Entries” if interested in my take on this situation.

Heart says “I as a citizen of Stevens Point have no interest in supporting the bottom line of the 10th most profitable corporation in America only to have bragging rights over my friends in Plover.”

That comment gets to the heart of the matter, no pun intended, when it comes to corporations using jobs and tax-base leverage on communities in order to get desired benefits from the community. The use of Tax-Increment Financing districts, TIFs, has been going on for decades and is now a deeply-ingrained part of the pattern of economic development in communities.

As I said in the earlier blog entry, this is all very “old-school” and represents no new thinking, no new model or “paradigm” being applied in our community. If the eco-municipality and sustainable community concept is going to really take root and thrive in the United States, at some point corporations are going to have to stop behaving as corporations of old, and start behaving as corporations of a new type, committed to the sustenance and viability of the community that hosts them.

One also has to question the old-schoolness of the thinking that this deal is some sort of done deal that’s all upside no downside. Here’s what Mayor Halverson of Stevens Point offers about this deal: “We will not be stretched at all with this deal,” Halverson said. “Even with the worst-case scenario, the city is still coming out ahead.”

The full story of the mayor’s confidence in the AIG deal is here, click this sentence for the link.

The mayor has been saying all along that property taxes paid by AIG for the land–but not the building–would be more than enough to cover the interest on the bond. No doubt, projections have been made by experts in city hall, all based on old-school thinking about the municipal bond market (interest rates are always nice and low, there is never any turmoil in such a stable market as muni bonds, etc.) to justify the go-ahead for selling muni bonds on the project.

The Stevens Point Journal uses the odd term “taking out a bond” when in fact what should be said is that the city will be selling these bonds in a deteriorating auction style market, hoping that there are enough bond investors to take up the full offering, and if not, that some big hedge fund or retirement fund or mutual fund somewhere will bail us out if buyers are scarce when the bonds hit the market.

Oddly enough, and quite ironically, the same day’s edition of the Stevens Point Journal has this story (click “this story”) dealing with a Wausau hospital facing a sudden wrenching change in the bond market hitting their bonds and leaving them facing sharply higher interest rates.

So, how much of a “slam dunk” or “done deal” is this “taking out a bond” going to be?

So many questions, so few real solid answers. But let’s give a thanks to Amy Heart for being courageous, honest and forthright in calling this deal into question.

Bobby G.

Posted in Economics, Ecovillages, Political Economy, Sustainability | No Comments »

Trouble with “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal”

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Joel Salatin is a great teacher on the topics of healing and rebuilding the soil, pastured animal raising, and organic farming generally. I enjoyed the book You Can Farm a great deal and found it full of useful insights–for example, that aspiring farmers ought not aspire to living a debt-laden fully suburban lifestyle like their neighbors down the road.

However, I have some issues with this essay “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal” by Salatin. (The essay title is a link; you can go read it and come back here and we can chat a bit on that topic.) This is important because I’ve been told that Salatin has also endorsed Republican Ron Paul for president. In fact a lot of people have fallen for the notion that Mr. Paul is a “libertarian” and if you’re libertarianly inclined, you should join the Republicans and vote for this guy. More on that later.

Whenever I read a sharp social critique such as Salatin’s, I look toward the end to see what sort of action steps he proposes that we ourselves, as individuals, in our own small sway, can take to right these wrongs. In the case of “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal (we’ll abbreviate it EIWTDII), here is the central action step you can take. This is your Gandhian chance to “be that change you want to see in the world:”

“Those of us who would aspire to opt out — both consumers and producers — must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot sustain itself. Cycles happen. Because things are this way today does not mean they will be this way next year. Hurrah for that.”

All right, then the EIWTDII action step is that we should opt out of Babylon. Since Salatin is a farmer, and has confronted all these global injustices of the corporate capitalist state, this is what he is advising you, the aspiring farmer, to do: opt out. However, since the system is overwhelmingly powerful, we consumers or producers are resigned to praying for cleverness to circumvent the system until it more or less crashes (can’t sustain itself).

This strategy has not worked well for medical marijuana growers even in a state like Cali where it is legal. Many of those folks trying to cleverly circumvent instead ended up subjects of the Prison-Industrial Complex. Let us pray for a better strategy than clever circumvention.

By the way, one of the accusations leveled at us “Peak Oil Doomsayers” like me is that we sit around waiting for the system to no longer be able to sustain itself, so we can leap up amid the wreckage and say “told ya so”; we’re short on action ideas to make things better, it is said. (Yet, many of us are busy working at things like the local food movement, changing local government, urging cities to change to “eco-municipalities” etc.)

One of the major complaints in EIWTDII is the zoning system which prevents Salatin from building the kind of house he’d like, or use of his farm for purposes which stretch the “agricultural” zoning designation. Yet zoning is a mostly local affair. Here in Wisconsin, the counties have the most to do with zoning. I have a hard time believing that a man of Salatin’s stature could not mount a campaign to change the composition of the County Zoning Board, or perhaps the entire County Board, toward people who share his beliefs. He can crisscross the country, but can’t crisscross the County?

You see, “opting out” is not an option in globalized corporate capitalism and its state. You do have to interact with this system. If you wish to change it, as Salatin certainly does, you will need to apply some people-power to that enterprise. There is a big problem with Libertarianism and where this movement purports to lead us: If we “opt out” what are we “opting into?” Good old-fashioned “laissez-faire capitalsm?” This seems to be the Holy Grail Quest handed down since Ayn Rand was in her heyday writing hectic books that managed to diss every known philosopher prior to, of course, her.

Ron Paul carries the false libertarianism to its logical conclusion: privatizing everything, eliminating worker protection such as OSHA, abolishing the EPA, letting the resource corporations take their best shot at stewarding our old-growth forests and wildlife areas, and so on. I think I’d rather have “broken government” than the no-government of Mr. Paul. [Of course, while meat packers would be free to dish out whatever foul spoilt meat they saw fit, he'd still have a military-industrial complex running his show; don't ask me how you'd get that monster off the tax-and-deficit rolls.]

Trouble is, there never was a golden heyday of “laissez-faire capitalism” in the USA, and trying to lead American small farmers down that dead-end road is a trip to Utopia, which literally means, “no-where.”

I’d much rather see us embark on a trip to “Eutopia,” meaning “good place.”

Locally, our “eco-municipality” movements in Wisconsin are an attempt to get government going in the right, eutopian, direction, not to “opt out” of it. Because it starts with a level of government easily accessible to small, grass-roots groups, it offers an action step that is not impossibly huge such as trying to change the US Government farm bill. Many of us in the local food movement and the peak oil preparedness movement (is there one?) are ourselves employees of government, whether they be UW-Extension workers or teaching staff at the University, or others associated with that “government” which Salatin wants us to have no part of.

I totally agree with Salatin that our modern agencies are as he describes: “these agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.” I think the way to cure this is by starting a movement of co-operation that is fully connected, Gaian (global and ecological), indigenous-enlightened, community-centric, multidisciplinary and uncompartmentalized, adapted to complexity, holistic, and completely non-linear and synchronicitous (recognizing of novelty) in its thought process.

More like, “everything I want to do requires grassroots re-design and rebuilding.”

Opting in,

b.g.

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