The problem with Superstruct and Increased Food Production.

OK, so Ruud has tossed the gauntlet, and I intend to pick it up. He came out saying that basically, we need mass government control and vast energy to survive the food crisis and other superthreats. It seems like this has been unpopular, because people have been ignoring it. Well, ignoring things we don’t like is part of what got us into this mess, so lets see if we can come up with something better.

Like any decently thought out argument, the problem lies not in how he reaches his conclusions, but in the assumptions he’s working from. Lets see if we can identify a few.

Population: Ruud argues that it’s impossible to feed 7.7 billion people on this planet. This is essentially the first half of the Malthusian argument: that the more people you have, the more food you need. It doesn’t really get to the second half, which is the more food you produce, the more people you get. A lot of people dismiss Malthusian arguments out of hand, or by saying “We’ll always come up with ways to feed more people.” I think Ruud may fall into this trap as well, because he seems to argue that we need to make more food. But the more food you produce, the more people you get. He also proposes population controls, of the top-down variety. I’m not going to argue with Ruud’s ideas about population control or Euthanasia, not because I agree with them, but because I think they are a sidetrack from the real issue.

Ruud states that most of the 3rd world lies outside of what you call “Decisive Humanity.” Well, they’d probably agree. Except that they do have a way of making their desires known on the world stage, and that is the very problem we’re talking about here: Birthrate. See, in a democracy, as the world nominally functions, demographics are everything. These groups got the shaft in colonial times because they were small tribes that got overpowered by empires. They learned their lesson, that bigger is better. Also, the more people you have, the more say you have. The War nerd put it best a long time ago, Birthrate is a weapon . It’s how the disenfranchised people of the world are making themselves, as you say, decisive. In a way, they are griefing the system that discludes them.

Political, social, and economic equality will do a lot to mitigate this. Birth rates are lower the higher one’s standard of living. Most of these demographics would stop breeding so much if they had other ways of making themselves important. The best way to lower population growth is to raise the standard of living and allow for greater participation politically.

Food Production: I get into some of the why increasing food production is pointless above, but I really want to hammer home the point here.
Firstly, Ruud says that there is no way to feed everyone in the world with current production. That may be true, that we don’t produce enough to feed everyone. But what definitely isn’t true is that we can’t produce that food. We DO have enough production capacity to feed everyone, it’s just that we use it for other things.

The USDA seems to think that food production is actually increasing faster than population is. For now, at least.

Estimation is that it takes somewhere between 3 and 20 acres to feed one person a year. That’s a huge range, but it depends heavily on diet. The 3 is from India, where diet is mostly vegetarian, while the 20 is for beef fed Americans. With the census above estimating that 13% of the world is arable, then we get roughly 4.8 Billion acres. This supports Ruud, except that, wait, much of that land is more productive than the baseline. And improved farming methods in some of those places produce loads more. Oh, and much of the area considered non-arable, is quite suitable for ranching, producing meat on land that can’t support grain. Oh, and then there is fishing, which makes use of the ocean instead of land. That last one might not be much use for long though, we’re definitely overfishing.

And a lot of that arable land is currently growing things other than food. Things like poppies, because apparently a quarter million acres of them were planted last year in afganistan alone . I couldn’t find figures on tobacco. Cotton takes up 76 million acres worldwide, apparently. I’m just pulling little bits of facts off the internet for this, but I’m trying to show that we’re not even close to using the full production capability of the world for feeding people.

Gardens actually produce More food per square foot than Farms do. Farms plant in rows, with large gaps, in monocrop situations that make it easy to harvest. Industrial farming is the most efficient in terms of labor, it takes less people to farm. But it’s not very efficient in terms of land or energy use. This is the type of farming that takes 20 acres to feed a person. According to John Jeavons, you can make a garden that feeds one person for a year, with a healthy, varied vegan diet, on around 4000 square feet. This requires a lot of interplanting, and cannot be mechanized, so you need a lot of human labor. But ironically, what we’re looking at is a decrease in the available amount of energy, and an increase in the population. The one type of energy we have in abundance is people power. And this increases the number of people that can be fed from one acre 30 times.

So it’s not that we lack the capability to feed everyone. Sure, the methods involved might be unsustainable, but that’s not the point yet. The point is that right now, if we wanted, we could feed everyone. Why don’t we?

Food production, as we noted above, competes with other crop products for space in our agriculture. Heck, even food plants like soy and corn are being diverted away from feeding people and into producing things like ethanol. These uses are more profitable to the farmer than growing food to sell to his neighbors. Once the 1st worlders are fed, they want other things, like cotton clothes, smokes, gas for their cars and opium for the weekend. They’ll pay lots of money for these things. It’s simple for the farmer: an acre of poppies nets a fortune, an acre of tomatoes doesn’t. It’s more profitable to sell corn to the ethanol distillers than the tortilla makers. The “decisive” people in the first world pay a lot for cash crops. That’s what makes them decisive, they have the money.

Now at some point, if you don’t produce food, the supply diminishes, while the demand remains constant. Then the price of food goes up, until it is profitable to grow it again, etc. etc. The free market eventually reaches a price equilibrium. But that price equilibrium prices out vast swaths of the population of earth. The reason people starve, then, is not a supply issue, but an issue of purchasing power. If the starving had enough money to influence the market, you can bet your retirement fund that new ways of producing enough food to feed them would become prevalent.

Farming sucks:
This seems to be another point Ruud makes, which I think is a huge stretch. He is really saying that HE would not want to be a farmer. That’s valid. But to assume that others share that stance isn’t valid. I can tell you one thing subsistence farming sucks less than, for certain, and that’s starving.

But if he wants to talk about how boring, how monotonous farm work is, I’d like to direct his attention to work on the assembly line. If he wants to talk about soul-deadening, I’d like to direct his attention to working a meaningless job shuffling paper from one cubicle to the next. Or working fast food, or working retail selling people things they don’t need for so little you can’t afford to shop where you work even with the employee discount. If he wants to talk about a job you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, then lets talk about working in a call center.

Farming is energy intensive, but that energy can come from a lot of places. Right now, about the only energy we have in abundance is human labor. I said earlier that modern farming wasn’t land use efficient, and that by using people to plant and harvest instead of machines we could get up to 30 times more per acre. If food production was the issue, that would about solve it, no? Discounting the idea of using more people in food production because you don’t want to pick food for a living is kind of shortsighted.

More energy needed: It’s obvious that farming currently uses a lot of energy. But using a new type of energy to meet that need is only one way to fix this, and perhaps not the best way. What might be a better choice is methods of creating food that are less energy intensive. Yes, whatever energy is needed should be produced in a sustainable fashion. But that’s a lot easier if we need less of it.

Throwing more energy at the problem isn’t going to make thing better, for exactly the reason making more food won’t help. It’s not the problem. Hell, with ethanol, farming has been more of the solution to the energy crisis than the other way around. And agriculture still has to compete with other uses of energy, just like it has to compete with other uses of land, which means that it will drive food prices and people will get priced out of food again.

The Conclusion:

Rudd gives us three options, which I will paraphrase. One is that a strong government forces changes in society and creates a large scale sustainable agriculture that feeds the people who matter. The second is a return to a medieval lifestyle amidst the ruins of our industrial age. The last is total collapse. I’ll probably horrify him and others by stating that among those options, I prefer the second, not the first. But it hardly matters, because the base assumption he makes that the problem is one of supply. It isn’t. It’s a matter of purchasing power and about being “decisive.” First worlder’s aren’t growing victory gardens because they are starving, they’re growing them because they are starving, they are growing them because at the current price of fresh produce, it’s cheaper to grow tomatoes than buy them. Third worlders aren’t starving because there isn’t enough food production, but because we can pay more for the corn as ethanol than they can for corn as food.

The drive to localize food, to make each person a gardener, then, is not a question of producing more food. It’s a political decision. The large scale farmer can note that it’s more profitable to grow opium than food. But the small scale farmer will always feed his family. As Marxist as this sounds, It’s all about making sure the individual and the community have access to the means of production for food. And Water. And the means to manage their waste. Everything it takes for survival, everyone should have local access to what they need, which they have political control over. This is the real reason to go local, not for economic reasons, not for environmental reasons, but for reason of power over what you depend on. Because if someone else controls the food production, they may decide not to feed you.

So here’s my option 4. Every person on earth has access to the tools, the land, and the knowledge required to produce their own food. People in cities still work at normal jobs all day, and buy their staples from a grocery store. Many supplement with food grown on rooftops or balconies, or buy or barter with those who do so, but the majority of their food still comes from farms outside the city, farms that are large scale, but use more human labor than industrial farming, less energy, less waste, more sustainable practices in soil control especially, companion planting and a variety of other techniques to be more productive closer to the city on less land. Between the big farms, in abandoned suburbs and wherever else they want, others work small plots of land to feed themselves, either because they want to or because they had no other option. Many of them have other part time jobs, some have spouses who work full time while they stay home. These small scale homesteads use different techniques than even the sustainable farms, techniques designed not for ease of business but for ease of labor and efficient use of land. It may not be idyllic for some, but it beats having no food. No one is coerced. No one has their survival trumped by someone else’s buying power. And no one goes hungry.