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Musings Report 2019-41 10-12-19 What We've Lost
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Thank You, Contributors!
Thank you, Bill G. and Hugh M. for your extremely generous support of my work.
What We've Lost
A documentary on the decline of small farms in France highlights what we've lost in the decades-long rush to globalize and financialize everything on the planet-- what we call Neoliberalism, the ideology of turning everything into a global market controlled by The Tyranny of Price and cheap credit issued by central banks.
The documentary is After Winter, Spring (2012), filmed by an American who moved to a small village in the Dordogne region of France to recover something of her childhood on a small Pennsylvania farm.
The farmers--self-described as paysans in French, peasants in English, a translation I don't consider entirely accurate, for reasons too complex to go into here--describe the financial difficulties of earning enough from their farms to survive without outside jobs.
One young farmer who is taking over the family dairy from his aging parents encapsulates the economic reality of small farms: in the 1960s, they had 3 or 4 cows, now they have 100, but their net income is the same.
Corporate mega-farms can produce huge quantities of agricultural products of questionable quality because they have the scale, access to cheap credit and expertise to deal with the voluminous bureaucratic paperwork imposed by the EU and the French government. (One slip-up on a form and you're sunk if you're a one-person operation.)
Artisanal producers can't compete, and will never be able to compete in a global marketplace where there is always a cheaper source. (The status quo response is subsidies: up to half a small farmer's income comes from EU subsidies, which the EU is trying to cut.)
Financial survival requires one spouse have an outside job, or the farmers must operate farm tours, an onsite auberge (inn/restaurant) or equivalent higher-margin business, all of which increases the capital they must borrow to fund the expansion and the risk of bankruptcy should the venture fail to cover its costs.
The documentary echoes the themes of an earlier French documentary, Profils Paysans, (Profiles of Peasants) a three-part series of which only the third film, Modern Life, (2008) has English Subtitles.
The financial uncertainties and endless hard work are running up against generational realities: relatively few young people have the necessary passion for farming and the appetite for risk and hard work. Across the developed world, from Japan to China to the U.S. to France, there are few successors in line to take over small family farms.
The small family farm--and the knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals-- is dying away with the passing of our elderly farmers. The average age of farmers in many nations is well above 60. Many of the paysans (male and female) profiled in these documentaries are in their 80s.
So the land is sold for residential development (i.e. exurb sprawl, overwhelming infrastructure such as roads, water systems, etc. designed for much small populations) or abandoned.
These documentaries only partially capture the enormous distance that's widened between "modern life" and the human-Nature relationship required to make the land productive.
It's important to preserve wilderness, but we don't eat what grows or roams in wilderness. Wildlife can't survive solely on isolated park preserves, either; Corporate Big Ag monoculture fields offer little to no habitat for wildlife.
Corporate Big Ag doesn't maintain the polycultures needed to support insects, birds and other wildlife; small farms provide niches and habitats for all sorts of life that doesn't serve a direct financial interest of the owners.
The widening divide between the modern lifestyle--completely ignorant and dismissive of rural productive polyculture--and those who still hold knowledge of artisanal, small-scale, localized production of high quality food--appears already unbridgeable.
One elderly farmer described how his non-French neighbor complained about the cowbells on his few cattle. This resident's dogs could bark freely, but the cowbells were an annoyance beyond tolerance?
This is of a piece with the complete alienation of "modern life" from the production of food. The modern urban/exurb resident doesn't want to smell hay (hay fever!) or manure (oh my, all animal poop should vanish instantly or I can't bear it) or any other exposure to the realities of raising livestock, killing animals so we can eat them or any other reality of food. In sanitized "modern life," all of these processes should be done thousands of miles away, and the food shipped by air in nice plastic containers to our supermarkets.
One almost hopes that Corporate Big Ag disappears due to mono-crop plagues and people start going hungry to the point that they begin to take an interest in relearning all that's been cavalierly tossed away in favor of plastic packaging and endless hours slumped on sofas watching videos and "engaging" social media.
We've lost so much in the conquest of localized, small-scale polycultural farming by Neoliberal globalism and the resulting dominance of cheap-credit-fueled Corporate Big Ag.
We've lost the knowledge of even partial self-sufficiency; we've lost a diversified local economy that can feed itself; we've lost "food security," the resilience provided by food grown locally rather than being flown in from thousands of miles away; we've lost the cultural habits of helping neighbors bring in their harvest, of celebrating the shared work around a communal table; we've lost a Nature-based cultural identity; we've lost the cultural and economic capital of interwoven small farms; we've lost the habitats for wildlife that are unique to polyculture farming, and we've lost any meaningful connection to the land and Nature.
It's not just small farms that are being lost--it's the entire rural economy of villages and towns that are supported by farm income and products.
This is only a partial list of what's we've lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy: here's the Tyranny of Price that's integral to Neoliberalism: always buy the cheapest corporate product--price is all that matters, even if the quality is appalling. Just throw the low-quality items and food in the Landfill and buy new stuff.)
These documentaries tie directly into a monumental 1,180 page two-volume work by historian Fernand Braudel, his last work: The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment and The Identity of France: Volume Two: People and Production.
I realize relatively few other readers would tackle a 1,200 page series with the same relish I have, or feel the same regret that I've finished the books, for my understanding of France, the history of agriculture and capitalism and rural economies is immeasurably richer.
What we've lost is a localized, resilient, diverse rural economy with a wealth of cultural and practical skills and wisdom. We only have a few years to save this immense wealth from complete and irretrievable loss.
All of this is the subject of my new book, Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World (Read the first section for free (PDF). The entire point of this book is to explore all the forms of wealth that we've lost or squandered. This applies not just to rural life and the rural, localized economy, but to our urban life, our society, our culture and our economy. We may be able to recover some of what's been lost or squandered, but time is short.
Highlights of the Blog
America 2019: Even the Wealthy Are Poorer in Everything That Matters October 10, 2019
Will the Clintons Destroy the Democratic Party? October 9, 2019 (I'm surprised I have any readers left after posting this...)
Our Time/Labor Is Finite, But Money Is Infinite October 8, 2019
What's Holding Up the Market? October 7, 2019 (not much. The Powers That Be just shot their wad--trade deal and QE 4 are now done, there's nothing left in the quiver to goose markets higher.)
Democracy Is Now a Hindrance to the Imperial State October 4, 2019
Could Pricey Urban Meccas become Crime-Ridden Ghost Towns? October 1, 2019 -- (over-priced, crowded, dysfunctional and about to implode as recession culls millions of contingent jobs. Other than that, it's all wunnerful...)
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Recorded a podcast with Chris Martenson about my new book. Letting the world know a new independently published book is available is akin to shouting in a hurricane, and so in-depth interviews are especially valuable to independent authors.
From Left Field
Has Capitalism Become Our Religion? We talk with historian Eugene McCarraher about the myths and rituals of the market, the lost radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the rise of neoliberalism. -- Socialism is a religion, too...
Getting Real About Green Energy-- can alt. energy replace 30,000 supertankers of oil?
The global debt binge begins anew-- $246 trillion, 320% of global GDP
What Is the Impossible Burger and Is It Even Good For You? (via CNF) -- genetically engineered fake blood, count me out...
Understanding America's Cultural And Political Realignment -- overlooks that most voters now consider themselves independent--the parties are losing loyalists.
Attacks on Iraqi pipelines, oil installations, and oil personnel 2003-2008 -- an indicator of what can happen when an oil industry is targeted by small-scale attacks--and this was before drones....
Current Term Enrollment – Spring 2019 -- reading between the lines, college enrollments are in secular, systemic decline...the much-needed creative destruction of higher education is finally underway.
As sociologist Joseph Tainter explained, complexity is the result of previous solutions.
How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Money excuses everything....
The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab-- couldn't happen to a more hubris-soaked elite...
Berkeley cyclists cry foul over hefty fines for rolling through stop signs -- the justification is classic: to "improve the safety of bicycling," pass out $300 tickets to bicyclists who fail to come to a complete stop at empty intersections.... and we wonder why America is broken?
Don't Trust The Liquidity: Recession, And The Crisis, Are Coming -- read this before assuming the trade war is the main issue holding back global growth...
"The ethical dimension underpinning the whole system is this: what's moral is what's legal and what's legal is for sale." Simons Chase
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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