It’s Not Rocket Science: Land Productivity, Food Rights
We’re all familiar with the myth: we learned it in school. It goes something like this:
Once Upon a Time, in the 1960’s, a crew of brilliant whitefellas in lab coats Saved the World by revolutionising farming and eliminating world hunger. Their new, advanced mechanical/chemical farming methods — vast areas of monocrop, heavy tractors, giant combines, tonnes of artificial pesticides and fertilisers — and their new, improved, superior hybridised crops increased yields tenfold and more. Without industrial farming, billions would starve, even though other billions would be re-sentenced to the short lives of brutal, backbreaking toil from which they were rescued by industrial/mechanised farming. Therefore, anyone who advocates organic or “sustainable” farming practise is some kind of heartless elitist who wants billions to starve and the rest to live as dawn-to-dusk field slaves — for this is what will happen if we do not continue and expand the highly successful [and highly profitable, for everyone except farmers and eaters] model of industrial/corporate farming. There is no other way to feed ourselves. If there are “external costs” of the industrial farming system, we will just have to accept them.
That’s what I was taught in school — and probably you were too, if the subject of agriculture was even mentioned during your school years.
The real story — slowly emerging now into public discourse, in bits and pieces, in a mosaic of books, documentary films, research, nationalist and peasant movements, grassroots efforts — is a lot more ambiguous and complicated. Did agricultural productivity really rise as a result of industrial farming methods? Well, yes and no; it depends how you measure productivity. Was hunger really eliminated by the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960’s? Obviously not, since billions are going hungry worldwide today. How effective were the new artificial pesticides and fertilisers really? And what are the long-term consequences of their use? On what theories was this shift in agriculture based, and who benefited most, and what other agendas were on the table (or under it) at the time? And most urgently perhaps — as we measure the annual loss of topsoil, the reduced nutritional value of industrially-farmed food, and the many risks to food security posed by massively centralised and fossil-fuel-dependent food production — is there any other way to feed ourselves? If the answer is Yes, and any other approach to farming and food is capable of feeding us, then these two (or more) competing models of farming which should be examined and evaluated. But if the answer is No, then we are indeed the captives of an irrevocable choice made sometime in the 1930’s and 1940’s, with no way out.
So let us talk first of all about productivity: the productivity of land, that is, land producing food that we can eat.
First of all, when we consider climax ecosystems (maximally productive ecosystems, those which sustain the highest levels and diversity of life per hectare/acre), we find that they are never monocrops. There is no such thing as a monocrop in nature: all ecosystems are symbiotic, requiring the interactions of tens to tens of thousands of species to achieve maximum densities of life and nutritional exchange. A hectare of rigidly-enforced monocrop is “efficient” only in the sense that it can be harvested by machines (and the “efficiency” of machine harvesting is entirely dependent on the relative cost of machinery and fossil fuel); in terms of biomass produced, it is bound to be less productive than a climax ecosystem or a food plantation modelled on a climax ecosystem (the practise known as “permaculture”) employing a wide variety of species in symbiotic, complementary relationships. What’s the difference in productivity?
Forest gardens are inspired by nature. The reason natural woodland is so productive is because it grows on many layers, rather like having half a dozen fields stacked on top of each other.
A forest garden imitates each woodland layer, but uses more edible species. The garden floor is covered with fruit and vegetables, and above them, the shrub layer is equally abundant.
A bit higher up are the fruit trees, such as apples, pears, medlars (a fruit rather like the crab apple) and quinces.
And then there is the canopy where those trees that aren’t producing food are serving other essential functions such as recycling nutrients through their root system and leaf litter.
Some plants are selected primarily because they attract beneficial insects - hover flies, for example, which eat aphids - so no pesticides are needed.
Surely this requires endless attention and work?
‘Over a whole year, an average of one day a week,’ said Martin. ‘A lot of that is harvesting. In terms of maintenance, it’s about ten days a year.’ Compared to running a conventional farm, that is virtually nothing.
But how much food does it produce? ‘One designed for maximum yield could probably feed about ten people an acre,’ said Martin. That’s roughly double the number we can currently feed from an average acre of conventional arable farmland.
So we have a first approximation: diverse polyculture mimicking a climax ecosystem may be two times as productive as monocrop.
In Pasadena, California, the Dervaes family has been working towards food self-sufficiency on their standard (American suburban) 1/5 acre lot. Their food garden occupies 1/10th of an acre or about half the lot. On that .1 acre, they are cultivating over 350 species of plant, and their annual food yields are worth noting: (2008) 4,300 pounds of vegetable food, 900 chicken and 1000 duck eggs, 25 lbs of honey. Four people manage to get over 90 percent of their daily food from this 1/10th of one acre. That would suggest that over 30 people — if not actually 40 — might be able to eat from the productivity of one whole acre; far more optimistic than our British estimate.
But of course that’s in mild southern California, with its year-round growing season. Surely in more northerly climes — without Great Britain’s good fortune in being situated near a warm ocean current — manual garden-tending could not possibly out-produce fossil-assisted, mechanised farming? Dr Leonid Sharashkin examined closely the contribution of Russian smallholders and gardeners to the nation’s food supply.
In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all households in the country) owned gardening plots (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha) and were involved in growing crops for subsistence (Rosstat 2005b). By 2005, 53% (by value) of the country’s total agricultural output was coming from household plots (which in 2006 occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land), while the remaining 47% (by value — Rosstat 2006) came from the agricultural enterprises (often the former kolkhozes and sovkhozes) and individual farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands (Rosstat 2007b).
(recent research by Sharashkin, as reported by Dmitry Orlov)
Let us review those statistics for just a moment. In post-Soviet Russia (with a growing season of about 110 days in the area studied) smallholders — ordinary gardeners and market-gardeners — control only 3 percent of the agricultural land, yet they are producing over half the country’s total agricultural output (by value). Orlov highlights Dr Sharashkin’s results: smallholders are growing 90% of all the potatoes in Russia, 80% of all the vegetables, 50% of the meat and milk etc. In other words, very high proportions of certain products, including at least one calorie staple (potato). And they were doing so on about 3 percent of the available land. What does this say about the “efficiency” of the large industrial farms occupying the other 97 percent? Or about the potential of small-scale polyculture to feed large numbers of people?
And how can this be? How is it that these real-world results can co-exist with the repeated claims by monocrop/industrial farm experts that their methods are far more productive than “mere peasant farming”?
Vandana Shiva explains it carefully and clearly in her landmark paper “The War Against Farmers and the Land” [published in the highly-recommended anthology The Essential Agrarian Reader (ed. Norman Wirzba)]:
The polycultures of traditional agricultural systems have evolved because more yield can be harvested from a given area planted with diverse crops than from an equivalent area consisting of separate patches of monocultures. For example, in planting sorghum and pigeon pea mixtures, one hectare will produce the same yield as .94 hectares of sorghum monocultures and .68 hectares of pigeon pea monoculture combined. Thus one hectare of polyculture produces what 1.62 hectares of monoculture can produce. This is called the land equivalent ratio (LER).
Increased land-use efficiency and higher LER’s have been reported for polycultures of millet/groundnut (1.26); maize/bean (1.38); millet/sorghum (1.53); maize/pigeon pea (1.85); maize/cocoyan/sweet potato (2.08); cassava/maize/groundnut (2.51). The monocultures of the Green Revolution thus actually reduced food yields per acre when compared with mixtures of diverse crops. This falsifies the argument often made that chemically intensive agriculture and genetic engineering will save biodiversity by releasing land from food production. In fact, since monocultures require more land, biodiversity is destroyed twice over — once on the farm, and then on the additional acreage needed to produce the outputs a monoculture has displaced. Not only is the productivity measure distorted by ignoring resource inputs (focussing only on labour), it is also distorted by looking at a single and partial output rather than the total food output.
A myth promoted by the one-dimensional monoculture paradigm is that biodiversity reduces yields and productivity while monoculture increase yields and productivity. […] Planting only one crop on an entire field as a monoculture will of course increase its yield. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields of individual crops, but will have high total output of food.
The Mayan peasants in the Mexican state of Chiapas are characterised as unproductive because they produce only two tonnes of corn per acre. However, the overall food output is twenty tonnes per acre. In the terraced fields of the high Himalayas, women peasants grow Jhangora (barnyard millet), marsha (amaranth), tur (pigeon pea), urad (black gram), gahat (horse gram), soybean (glysine max), bhat (glysine soya), rayans (rice bean), swanta (cow pea), and kodo (finger millet) in mixtures and rotations. The total output, even in bad years, is six times more than industrially-farmed rice monocultures.
Shiva emphasises that the diversity of crops in traditional peasant food gardening is essential to their high productivity: as many as twenty different sweet potato varieties (out of over 5000 grown nationally) may be found in any garden in Papua New Guinea; in Java, the typical small farmer cultivates over 600 species in the home garden; in sub-Saharan Africa, women traditionally cultivate over 100 species in leftover spaces alongside cash crops; a single home garden in Thailand typically has over 230 species. In eastern Nigeria results similar to those from Russia are reported: home gardens occuping only 2 percent of a family’s land account for half of the total output of the farm.
Again and again, in widely varying climates, we see living proof that large-scale monoculture is hopelessly inefficient at producing food. It is efficient only at producing uniform commodities for export and/or industrial processing — as with the nearly-inedible varieties of corn now dominating much of North America’s farmland, which must be heavily processed before becoming at all palatable. (cf Michael Pollan’s excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the independent documentary film King Corn, inspired by Pollan’s work).
Not only does industrial monoculture produce less food per hectare, it produces its inefficient results at very high (and unaccounted-for) “external” costs. North American industrial farming has been estimated to consume 10 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of food produced; estimates of topsoil loss vary from 2 to 6 bushels for every bushel of industrial corn harvested. Water usage for industrial farming is similarly alarming: in North America, the ancient Oglalla Aquifer is being drained dry by the enormous water demands of huge acreages of unnatural monoculture. Meanwhile, runoff from artificially-fertilised fields is creating large “dead zones” in coastal waters, destroying fisheries; and pesticides are implicated not only in human health risks, but in the destruction of beneficial insect populations including essential pollinators. Clearly, the inefficiencies of industrial agriculture go far beyond how many bushels of corn or soy can be extracted from each hectare of land in each season; if non-renewable resources are being consumed, or other sources of food (such as oceans and rivers) are being damaged, then our food-producing capacities are being impaired by the way in which we are producing food — in which case we are on a downward escalator of diminishing returns and negative feedback, and there is no future in the present paradigm.
Returning to our original article from the UK:
Could permaculture feed Britain?
I asked Patrick Whitefield, Britain’s leading expert in permaculture.
‘Good question,’ he said. ‘A better question would be, “Can present methods go on feeding Britain?” In the long term, it is certain that present methods can’t because they are so entirely dependent on fossil-fuel energy. So we haven’t got any choice other than to find something different.’
The petrochemical industry, the owners of massively consolidated factory farm operations, the farm equipment sector, and the purveyors of patented hybrid and GMO seed, meanwhile, are telling us that we have no choice: we must go on playing by their rules. But the numbers from actual research in the field (literally) suggest that their absolute certainty is ill-founded as well as self-serving. Smallholder polyculture not only can feed the world — it may be the only farming method that will.
In seeking local food security, then, we may be quite confident that the encouragement of diverse smallholdings — backyard gardens, SPIN farms, family farms — practising polyculture rather than monoculture, is a sound, practical, and realistic strategy. It is not sentimental dreaming, nor the charming but useless hobby of a handful of food snobs; the myths we were taught in school are just that — myths. It is industrial monoculture that is unsound, impractical, inefficient, and unrealistic. We can — and sooner than we think, perhaps, we must be prepared to — feed the world with small-to-medium-scale organic/sustainable farming.
It is not the productivity of land that prevents us from eliminating hunger. It is not the lack of new, improved, ever more phantasmagorical high-tech toys and techniques. What prevents us from eliminating hunger is our failure to return to, and adhere to, a moral code that recognises healthy food as a human right. As F M Lappé notes in a recent article, such a moral code is nearly universal among the people we call “primitive”; early humans, in striking contrast to many other animals, seem to have an innate tendency to share food — even with others not directly related to themselves. Allowing people in our tribe, village, or city to starve is a violation of our primeval human nature. When we muster the political will to continue our ancient food-sharing behaviour in modern dress, the results are astonishing: astonishingly simple, astonishingly easy, astonishingly efficient.
In the early 90’s, Brazil’s fourth largest city made a serious commitment to the elimination of hunger among its citizens. As Lappé tells the story:
Belo [Horizonte], a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. […]The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort-began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. […] During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.
The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached 100 percent-to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price-about two-thirds of the market price-of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.
“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”
Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.
“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.
“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.
No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.
Residents of the Northern Hemisphere, dazed by decades of neoliberal propaganda about the inefficiencies of government, the futility of “welfare,” and so on, may understandably be convinced that this food-rights programme must have foundered somewhat over the 15 years since its bold inception; or we may be tempted to conclude that it must be weighing down the city’s finances unbearably by now.
The result of these and other related innovations?
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.
For a penny a day per person — a whopping $3.65 per year each — a world-class city took meaningful, measurably successful steps towards the redefinition of food as a human right, the elimination of hunger among its poorest people, the promotion and availability of fresh and healthy food for everyone, and the revitalisation and ongoing support of local, small-scale agriculture. Rather than escalating the destructive practises of gargantuan-scale industrial farming and then distributing its inferior, malnutritious products as charity or welfare, Belo Horizonte made a courageous attempt to create a food economy that would meet the standards suggested by Carlo Petrini of the Slow Food Movement: good, clean, and fair. (Here’s a video clip of Petrini explaining his standards and their implications.) As the Slow Food web site explains:
Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.
The city of Belo Horizonte, by boldly addressing food justice and food rights, has begun the process of guaranteeing every person acess to food that is good, clean, and fair. Their success vividly highlights the many failures — nutritional, social, agricultural — of our own industrial and wholly profit-oriented food system. It also suggests that our situation is far from hopeless. If we were to continue with business-as-usual, the future of food looks pretty dismal; but the documented productivity and sustainability of dense polyculture, plus the documented success of the food-as-a-civic-right policy implemented by Belo Horizonte, seem like very well-lit signage beckoning us to a safe exit from the ratcheting finger-trap of industrial agriculture.
Hunger is not inevitable. Factory farming is not inevitable. Low-quality, tasteless, contaminated food is not inevitable. Repeated “food scares” are not inevitable. Soaring public health costs are not inevitable. Another and better food system is eminently possible — now, not ten years from now or after some promised, imaginary “scientific breakthrough”. It is possible right now, today — in our own backyard(s).
What are we waiting for?
Stan:
Damn! I’m sending this to everyone I can think of.
Cheers, De.
PS: It’s at Huffpo, watch for comments there.
19 March 2009, 5:15 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Very Inspiring
19 March 2009, 6:59 am(Boer) Tom:
Some questions, somewhat off-topic: First, you (plural) had a link up a while ago entitled ‘food is politics is food’ or some such, in which you claimed that Mugabe was preventing garden plots and the like - could you provide a reference? It would be very helpful.
Second, again on Zim, do you have any data on the extent of small-cropping vs industrial farming, and if so, by ethnicity?
The notion that ‘blacks cannot farm,’ especially regarding Zim has much currency in the part of North America where I am (at least), yet Mugabe has not taken all the ‘white’ owned farms, but agriculture has already collapsed (the notion would be funny were it not tragic] entirely (think drought as well). I recall reading that something on the order of half of Zim’s food production was from (black) small farmers prior to the large land takeovers (and drought and currency collapse) starting.
19 March 2009, 2:50 pmSam:
Absolutely super post, extremely important. Thank you!
19 March 2009, 5:30 pmRichard:
Yes, this is a great, important piece. Much to consider, and follow up on. Thank you for writing it.
Here, by the way, is that “Politics is Food is Politics” essay:
19 March 2009, 8:53 pmhttp://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html
DeAnander:
Counterpunch got the title wrong (grrr) but yup, that’s the article.
Here is one account of Mugabe’s campaign against street markets and gardeners:
and here’s a related story on gardening to survive in Zimbabwe…
19 March 2009, 11:46 pmStan:
Maybe you should send this to Counterpunch, too. (:
20 March 2009, 5:40 amLinda:
I found this very enlightening and agree w/ most of it. However, it was a “neoconservative” not neoliberal agenda you speak of that (”dazed by decades of neoliberal propaganda about the inefficiencies of government, the futility of “welfare,” and so on”). Except in response to neo-cons, liberals have not generally been against government, etc. We have been fed a number of lies in the past 20 years, beginning w/ “welfare queens” etc from the Reagan administration and that has spread to tarring everyone w/ a similar brush. While neoliberalism has its faults, it was not the root of this movement.
20 March 2009, 11:11 amMichael Anderson:
Great post, De, and I sent it to my list, too…
Our modest raised beds last summer also yielded another benefit that can be measured in both tangible and emotional terms—our 2 1/2 year old grandson, who is being raised pretty much on industrial ag food at home, loved to “”graze” the Broccoli, Tomatoes, and Cucumbers. Children know…
Then, I woke up this morning and read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/dining/20garden.html?th&emc=th
Yeah, I know, castigate me for reading the NYT, and I (we) know that Obama owes his political & physical ass to Wall Street & General Dynamics, but I have to admit, if this is “perception management”, it’s certainly on target. This may make some people that really need it sit up and take notice—even if the WH staff does most of the work.
Let us dare to think there will be some positive unintended consequences from the belly of the beast.
An article from Zimbabwe…despite its bias, it outlines U.S. “Food Aid” to the country pretty plainly; it jives with the Haitian video about Rice and U.S. Ag policies elsewhere onsite here, and I can sure see avatars of U.S. “Food Modernization” here. AFRICOM at work…
http://www.thezimbabwemail.com/world/1764.html
20 March 2009, 4:04 pmStan:
Neoconservatism is but a last attempt to rescue neoliberalism. They have little to do with what we generally associate with the root terms, “conservative” and “liberal.” The original US neoliberal executive was Ronald Reagan. I might suggest David Harvey’s book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism as a primer.
As a long-term political trend, neoliberalism was an attempt to restore eroded class power to the US ruling class. It was precipitated by crises that have roots in Vietnam and before (post-WWII), and which came to a head under Nixon. It is failing now; and neoliberalism, in practice — not subprime mortgages, etc etc — is the basis of the systemic failure we are now witnessing… one that neither Obama nor anyone else can cure.
20 March 2009, 5:12 pmDeAnander:
@Stan thanks for answering the neolib question for me.
also, I don’t recall sending the food/politics article to Counterpunch
suspect you did that, and also suspect that w/o your byline on it they wouldn’t touch it. might be worth fwding the link though.
the quote that is making my head explode for the last few days though — and I can’t even remember where I read it, possibly a newspaper headline in the supermarket — is the one that said “experts estimate 50 percent of world’s wealth destroyed in recent recession.”
hello? are there two brain cells even within hailing distance of each other on the editorial staff? 50 percent of the world’s wealth was destroyed long, long before the present little contretemps among poker buddies, er, I mean, bankers. 95 percent of the N Hemi fisheries gone. 90+ percent of the forests gone. 90 percent of the topsoil gone. how much freshwater left in the Oglalla? how many species wiped out per week? now running rather short of bees and bats — pollinators and pest-eaters.
the world’s wealth is way more than 50 percent destroyed — and yet people keep believing, with a craziness that I find much scarier than any axe murderer, that numbers printed on little pieces of paper (or worse, numbers stored in databases in computer rooms in the basements of office buildings — office buildings often with no windows, which will become uninhabitable instantly if/when the power goes out) are more real than the robustness of soil, the availability of arable land, the diversity of cultivars, the essential nutrient exchanges that make our human life possible, perched dizzily as we are at the very far pointy end of a long and increasingly threadbare food chain.
50 percent of the world’s wealth was destroyed before I was even born (though not much before, I think) — another 40 percent seems to have been stripmined and casually tossed aside during my lifetime (and I am ashamed to admit how happily and mindlessly I contributed to this process and still, willynilly, do). recession, schmecession. the wealth of the world is in what is alive and thriving (and edible, to us or to others). it is a vastly impoverished world compared to what it was when I was born — richer in utterly useless, destructive things like cars and trophy homes, and immensely poorer in survivability: water, topsoil, forests, fish.
but this definition of “wealth” as the collective human fantasy called currency (cowrie shells, dollar bills, whatever) rather than as the real biotic viability that sustains our lives, is near the heart of the mental illness we call “civilisation”.
20 March 2009, 6:49 pm(Boer) Tom:
Thanks for all the links!
20 March 2009, 8:26 pmm.c.:
A great book about NeoConservatism/more about Leo Strauss’ism is by a Canadian academic, Shadia Drury. It’s long & quite dry but worth the read. “The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.” She even argues that Anne Norton’s book on the same topic is but a cover(Norton studied at the Univ. Chicago)
21 March 2009, 12:18 pmStan:
Been thinking quite a bit about money in this mix… what money is, and what happens when it becomes a medium of accumulation instead of merely exchange. There’s a connection trying to tickle its way into my consciousnes between money and an inextricable tendency for money as means-of-accumulation to generate the phenomenon of externalization. In consciousness, of course, but also in reality. Some years ago, I suggested on Crashlist that social entropy has more than a metaphorical relation to physical entropy; and that fossil hydrocarbon dependency/exploitation was materially related to social breakdown that begins at the margins ands works its way into the center. Hornborg’s machine fetishism answered a good part of that question for me; and his associated theses on money as both cultural-anthropological and ecological phenom have been nagging at me ever since. In fact, Mark Jones was the only one who took me seriously, and suggested Hornborg to me then.
The disembedding tendency of ever more abstract money (de-speciated, de-localized, and now electronically disembodied, with one global currency [dollar hegemony… now in peril as the Chinese hide their dollar assets and unload them on resource buys]) is something some of us have our heads around — the delocalization that allows “rain foressts to be traded for Coca-Cola ” But there is also a semiotic aspcet… the anti-qualifying (reduction to mere quantity)language of money creates a dynamic in practice of de-qualification that always — in every case, based on something about the very nature of using exchange equivalents — that forces us to “externalize,” that refocuses — by necessity under the circumstnaces created by accumulating exchange equivalents — us on a narrower field of concern and care.. and externalizaton is exactly the exclusion of something from concern (awareness) and care (acting sympathetically on that awareness).
I’ve been too busy to reflect as much as I’d like on this; and I don’t want to hijack a thread… but this feels important. I’ll appreciate any thoughts on this.
Cheers.
22 March 2009, 6:54 amNLK:
I think Deanander is right to stress “efficiency” as a value in direct opposition (beyond a certain threshold) to the biodiversity that makes climax ecosystems so rich and durable. This is the connection, I think, between industrial agriculture and the externalizing dynamic of money that Stan is talking about in the last post, because efficiency is the best means to the end of money accumulation. And increasing efficiency means increasing the division of labor (so the jack-of-all-trades is replaced by the hyperspecialist), which means increased consolidation (so small farmers are replaced by monocrop plantations), and increased spatial disarticulation (so local economies are replaced by a world market from which we import, and to which we export everything). From the perspective of real estate speculators, mixed land uses, such as farms mixed with small businesses mixed with homes and public squares, is less desirable than single-use zoning, such as tracts of suburban houses full of people driving miles to work, the mega-mall and back home daily. From the perspective of Wall-Mart shareholders, Mom & Pop shops selling the products of local farmers and artisans are rather inefficient compared to a corporation bigger than most nation-states orchestrating a global logistics network of digitally tracked shipping containers full of goods made by Asian ex-peasants.
Obviously, we can all think of an endless list of problems springing up from the logic of efficiency that accumulation. But I think the biggest one is moral: we are less and less connected to the people and local landbases that make our lives possible, whether that’s the Niger Delta or the Great Plains or our own backyard. There’s a great quote a friend sent me from an Iranian photojournalist, Reza Deghati, that sums this up perfectly:
“The West is like the Titanic: people there live in luxury, with good beds, concerts, swimming pools… But this ship sails in an ocean of fire and blood. An ocean where people live in abject poverty, in destroyed houses, under the bombs and under the boots of the soldiers sent by the Titanic.”
22 March 2009, 1:06 pmm.c.:
“A decent society will not go to war except for a just cause. But what it will do during war will depend to a certain extent on what the enemy-possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage one-forces it to do. There are no limits which can be defined in advance, there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals…. But societies are not only threatened from without. Considerations which might apply to foreign enemies may well apply to subversive elements within society.”
Leo Strauss: “Natural Right and History”; 1953(p. 160)
“The rule of a tyrant who, after having come to power by means of force and fraud, or having committed any number of crimes, listens to the suggestions of reasonable men,(hmmm, maybe he was having lunch with Milton Friedman at the Faculty Club discussing some country like Chile) is essentially more legitimate(Really!) than the rule of elected magistrates as such.”
Leo Strauss: “On Tyranny”; 1968(pp. 76-77)
22 March 2009, 3:31 pmStan:
Thanks NLK. I’m really trying to get at all this together, and in a way that can be easily communicated. Most important topic in the world in many ways right now. There is efficiency, as you say; and Braverman talked significantly and insightfully about capitalism, efficiency, and deskilling without saying much about money itself… but the number of things one book does not say, in every case, is infinite. Polanyi discussed disembedding (as you describe) and what he called distanciation. Luxemburg pointed out that accumulation requires externalization in the form of “primitive accumulation” (pillage outside the money-zone), though she never called it “externalizing,” since that term didn;t come into being until long after she was dead.
There is a connection too, I have the feeling, to something more semiotic and personal… more psychological. Something akin to the objectification that we bring up here in conversations about sex. Money has an effect on the person who holds it, or who seeks to hold it. Nothing new there. Rabbi Yeshua said all this quite some time ago, in the warning about serving Mammon, the story of the denari and paying taxes, the story about the tax collector, the lilies of the field remarks (stop worrying about money, the hardest one), et al.
If we let money come and go — which takes discipline — in a kind of Potlatch ethic, and pass it along to those who will immediatley use it to satisfy immediate and real needs, then its most pernicious effects on the individual are avoided. But that takes consciousness and intentionality.
In Jessica Benjamin’s obect-relations theory, she addresses psychoanalytically the constant struggle we face — intra-psychically — between subject-to-subject relations and subject-object relations. Money makes us more instrumental in all our relations (with humans and non-humans alike), because of its inhering counter-qualifying effect.
But your point (and De’s) about effciency is absolutley central. Without the psychic need or perceived requirement of accumulation, there is little need for efficiency except to stay ahead of natural processes (like seasons or weather or disease). Money is necessary for that beyond a particular distance (Polanyi again). In olden days, rapacious types simply plundered the various qualities, and subservience was payment of tribute. As larger scale operations were required for plunder — direct or indirect — that universal exchange equivalent was needed. When you need horses, and weapons, and soldiers, and the ability to appropriate time and space on a grander scale, money is the answer.
I know that if I need to be somewhere, and I have no money, I need to think of packing something to eat. If I have money, then I know I can get something to eat while I’m out. I can move along the grids with this one thing — money. This allows me to appropriate time and space… and I hope someone will think more on this, because it’s more than a figure of speech.
The Obama adminstration is busy printing the stuff right now — shitpiles of it beyond comprehension. And I may not know what I need to, but this certainly looks like a great way to transform the $US into a global junk bond, something to collect like outdated postage stamps, and something that a bushel basket will be required to carry around. Theoretically, we might say “good,” but practically this is life-and-death stuff that our children will have to live into.
This topic is not even under discussion in any serious way; and if you say we need to demonetize out lives, people will look at you like you just disembarked off the last plane in from Jupiter. So the demand to resuscitate money will become singular and very dangerous.
How do we understand money? How do we need to understand it? And how do we communicate that understanding once we have our arms around it?
This makes my head hurt.
22 March 2009, 4:11 pmHenry:
According to Aristotle, the idea that money is fruitful–generates interest–is both an error and unjust.
22 March 2009, 5:02 pm(Boer) Tom:
Money/price is also seen as a communications tool. As a matter of survival, especially with substantial monetary debts, one is compelled to “efficiency” (a strange usage, considering that efficiency is usually defined in terms of advantages per effort), either immediately or toward the end of the month, when the bank account is empty because one did not allow the price message to have immediate effect, and one is stuck on a rice diet.
This ‘efficiency’ regime imposes the ‘fad’ tempo-task* - if you do not follow the latest fad, you lose some of the scores (job skills, social standing, potential future income) which have a strong probabilistic input on your ability to eat, have a roof over your head etc. PCs 20 years ago were a fad that happened to have more force; TV less so. (*I’m using the term somewhat differently from how it has been defined here - one suffers a true material cost for delaying, or taking the wrong bet on a fad, or being to far ahead in one’s estimate of the fad - I might food right now, irrespective of whether I’ll need food two months from now.)
Enterprising corporations can create new and completely useless fads (i-phone), which then impose greater ‘efficiency’, until one reaches a system (perhaps defined as a dynamic state of a system with a simpler description or more open-ended, where each state transition is seen as a reproduction - at least, that is how I understand Marx) that is so efficient (or requires such efficiency from the general public) that it cannot reproduce.
A short term solution might still be local (non-general purpose) currencies, perhaps in line with the notion that a trade, especially of dissimilar goods, should not be a routine action, but the consequence of serious reflection as to long term advantages and harms - I recall bartering between Cuba and Venezuela - had the transactions been moneyed, they would not have been performed, even though the transactions were urgent. Try communicating that to an unsympathetic audience. And then there are time-banks - a different kind of monetization…
23 March 2009, 3:13 am(Boer) Tom:
Another comment: If efficiency is the advantage for effort or sacrifice, is it not more efficient to gain new skills, grow local food, allow the redevelopment of local (semi-)wild habitats, and experience community and friendship? (I agree with Raoul Hilberg on the question of friendship - it is insignificant as a social institution in North America, especially among adults.)
23 March 2009, 3:24 amDeAnander:
Lies, Damn Lies, and the Monsanto Web Site
Just a taste of the propaganda machine of corporate ag and its Enclosure Police.
well-put
23 March 2009, 12:17 pmm.c.:
In the interest of listening to more women & feminist voices, I’ve recently started reading some of Mary Beard’s writing. She’s a British academic, literary critic, and journalist and wrote what could be considered a contoversial article in an Oct. 2001 London Review of Books. The link is on here wikipedia page in the Notes. If the Ward Churchill’s of the world are any indication, higher education(?) in the U.S. at least, doesn’t have enough Mary Beards.
24 March 2009, 11:49 amSteve:
The whole corporate food system is corrupted.
Greg Walden showed photographs that came from the Plainview Peanut Corporation of Americas plant. They show bird feathers, dead mice, and fecal matter. Several Congressmen are currently investigating how PCA’s Plainview Plant got “superior” rating from a third party inspection firm called AIB in August of last year. (The American Institute of Baking)
“The question I think we want to know is how is it possible for a company that looks like this with pictures of rodents to receive an award like this where they’re called superior?” Waxman . . for what ever good that question will produce at this point.
24 March 2009, 4:38 pmSteve:
Who’s Buying Organic Foods Companies?
Have a look . . .
24 March 2009, 4:40 pmhttps://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustry.html
DeAnander:
Third WWorld Farmers Offer Helpful Tips to Cash-Strapped Britons
24 March 2009, 8:40 pmBruce F:
Thank you for this excellent piece, DeAnander.
There’s a fascinating, well at least to me, story about small milk producers trying to push back against giant agri-biz:
More at the link.
25 March 2009, 6:16 pmM. D.:
Full text of HR 875: http://delauro.house.gov/files/HR875_Full_Text.pdf
Rep DeLauro’s husband is Stan Greenberg. From Wiki:
Stanley Bernard Greenberg (born May 10, 1945) is a leading Democratic pollster and political strategist who has advised the campaigns of the Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, as well as hundreds of other candidates and organizations in the United States and around the world, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
A political scientist who received his Bachelor’s Degree from Miami University and his Ph.D. from Harvard, Greenberg spent a decade teaching at Yale University before becoming a political consultant. His 1985 study of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Michigan became a classic of progressive political strategy, and the basis for his continuing argument that Democrats must actively work to present themselves as populists advocating the expansion of opportunity for the middle class. As the pollster for Clinton in 1992, Greenberg was a major figure in the famed campaign “war room” (and hence the documentary film of the same name).
He is the founder and CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a polling and consulting firm, and co-founder, with James Carville and Bob Shrum, of Democracy Corps, a non-profit organization which produces left-leaning political strategy. He is married to current Rep. Rosa DeLauro, representative from the Third District from Connecticut.
Greenberg’s corporate clients include British Petroleum, British Airways, Monsanto and General Motors. [1]
27 March 2009, 10:32 pmHenry:
A Farm for the Future
Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/a-farm-for-the-future-must-see/
30 March 2009, 12:18 pmm.c.:
Probably wrong thread but:
1 April 2009, 8:09 pmSmall-l libertarian legal term of the week; {Exculpatory Evidence}
(the conviction rate in u.s. federal courts is ~90-93%.) When the feds hide a note from Ted Stevens to one of their star witnesses it makes me believe in the Bill of Rights More not Less.
DeAnander:
A humorous postscript: Chemical Industry Tries to Get Its Label on White House Kitchen Garden:
Ain’t that just sweet? Apparently it gets worse. “Crop protection technologies” are, of course, poisons.
From the comments, this trenchant observation on industrial monocropping:
I think this is very insightful, actually. And the failure to provide a stable livelihood is seen as a “good” by the management elite, as it creates that pool of precarity from which cheap labour can always be drawn on short notice… the original “win-win” for early Enclosers who forced the peasantry off the land and into food insecurity.
From yet another commenter:
I blush somewhat to admit that I’m having some similar feelings.
I find to my surprise (and pleasure) that we’ve been linked on this thread at TinyRevolution. Good to see the discussion spreading, and the myths of “conventional” agriculture being questioned in more venues.
6 April 2009, 6:51 pmStan:
Well, there are tomatoes in the cold frame (we might have frost tonight, so I have to cover the blueberries, the okra, and the apple blossoms this PM). Yesterday, I sheet mulched 100 sq ft with newspaper and wheat straw (bye, grass), and sowed another 100 sq ft in buckwheat (a super-food that attracts lots of pollinator-critters, and suppresses weeds). When the HOA asks, I’m telling them it’s wildflowers (it is, and they’re pretty). Italian kale, spinach, turnips, and radishes are all standing out of the ground now, very close to the ground, so I think they’ll survive the 29 degrees predicted for tonight. I went a bit nuts wiht radishes and expect around a trillion of them, “cherry belles” to be exact.
7 April 2009, 6:22 amDeAnander:
Just starting seeds here — still pretty cold at night, but we’re getting a spectacular couple of warm daytimes in a row. Buds popping on all the trees — excitement in the air. I’m working on perennials (mail ordering bare-root, shopping at local nursery, etc) — edible landscaping, fruiting shrubs, dwarf trees. I wish I could manage a nut tree, but the small ones like cobnuts require many companions to pollinate properly, and the big ones like chestnuts are too big for the yard. Oh well…
Working on the garden plan makes me realise once again how many skills have been lost during our great fossil/industrial binge. I have to think laboriously about companion plantings that my grannie and grampa probably knew by heart. I have more and more respect for the acculturated knowledge of centuries that the average peasant farmer walks around with — how easily that knowledge has been tossed away, a cultural vandalism as appalling as the burning of the Alexandria library. More so really, as this knowledge is essential to our survival, whereas the contents of the Alexandrian scrolls probably weren’t.
I get a little rush of anticipation whenever I think about the amount of lawn I’ll be replacing with food
7 April 2009, 11:40 amDeAnander:
BTW, Raj Patel blogs seriously about food and justice and is always worth a read.
7 April 2009, 11:45 amMichael D:
Wonderful post and discussion!
I heartily encourage interested readers to read (or watch) Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Michael Pollan, also available as podcast.
It brilliantly dissects the status quo, diagnoses the causes, and provides cogent policy answers. It was recorded shortly after the inauguration, and interestingly, in it he specifically suggests the Obamas put in a veggie garden, harkening back to Eleanour Roosevelt’s victory gardens.
Symbolic, in the best way possible, though till policy changes, merely so…
7 April 2009, 2:15 pmDeAnander:
Here’s the link to the Moyers/Pollan show.
8 April 2009, 1:24 amRhisiart Gwilym:
Magnificent short statement of some crucial, pivotal realities of this epoch-changing time! Respect and congratulations, De.
13 April 2009, 4:19 amHenry:
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari
April 12, 2009 — Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side. […]
Original ‘Independent’ article published in UK
13 April 2009, 2:04 pmStan:
FULL
13 April 2009, 4:29 pmGerry.Agnosia:
‘Ello all,
Even though I haven’t actually used the information found in the following book yet [due to my current living arrangements], I have read it from cover to cover and found it to be a very easy and comprehensive source on the subject of raising gardens for food production — especially for post-Peak Oil living.
http://www.amazon.com/Gardening-When-Counts-Growing-Mother/dp/086571553X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239736123&sr=8-1
And for my fellow North Carolinians looking for something more region specific…
http://www.amazon.com/North-Carolina-Fruit-Vegetable-Southern/dp/1930604599/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239736216&sr=1-7
and
http://www.amazon.com/Guide-North-Carolina-Vegetable-Gardening/dp/1591863953/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239736216&sr=1-2
I hope this helps someone start their dream homestead. G’luck.
14 April 2009, 2:12 pmStan:
Thank you!
14 April 2009, 6:12 pmHenry:
City Journal Home.
Peter W. Huber
Bound to Burn
Humanity will keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere, but good policy can help sink it back into the earth.
Spring 2009
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_carbon.html
Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.
But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.
[… post cut for length, see link above for complete article arguing that carbon restrictions are futile and sequestration is the only hope…]
If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.
27 April 2009, 8:52 pmTodd Millions:
Exellent over veiw-permaculture can be a trial.The reward after years of mis step and false leads(I hope).The worst thing on my attempts hasn’t being the 30 day no frost season ,or the storms-Its being out smarted by mice and ants.The deer,beaver and locust merely ice the cake.Strangely moose and elk have being most coopretive(saving the big wrecking raid for later no doubt).
Your comments on russian small plots-The offical figures for USSR in 1970’s were-70% of the food(not produce) came from the 2 hectare(5acre) river flood plots that any citizen could apply for.AND HAD TO BE PROVIDED WITH.
I have heard that with the intro of corprate farm Bush grade mba managed agri mafias,the figure is now over 80%.I’m not sure its that bad-yet.
Certianly in soviet times,after the georgian hill bandit(stalin),the mafia controled the meat supply primarly via transport-thus moscow and other city rats were well feed by the whole sides of pork and beef,slid into the sewers too keep the price up.
So its ironic that the best current model for city folk becoming wise,before they starve is-CUBA!
The warnings that the collective we ignore over and over on food matters has never failed to astound me,not that I haven’t helped poison myself I assure.I recall listening to Issac Asimov,on cbc radio in the 70’s,go into great detail about how gov tests of irradiated food being perfectly safe and should be a manditory food safety measure.Asimov explained very well and clearly that this was not the case,proven by both his own work in the 1950’s and by numerous other tests.
Today we still hear the same fatous assurences from the same people who told you glyphosate was inert and broke down,Bt mods are safe despite being insectisidal and pollen from patented crops can’t travel hundreds of miles.
Goggle up-irradiated food and cats.
Here we go again again good work De Todd Millions Y= ranch .
30 April 2009, 5:05 pmMichael Anderson:
Good video link from Robert Lustig on sugar—long (1 1/2 hours), but concise and detailed, related to everything we’ve talked about—industrial ag, money, systems, and Michael Pollan’s stuff on Corn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
This was done in July—-I wonder when he’ll lose his job at UCSF?
1 September 2009, 3:45 amStan:
Just watched this. Highly recommended… warning, biochem digression might cross your eyes, but he lays out a prima facie case on fructose, and a pretty good circumstantial case about the politics. This should be seen with King Corn and Super-Size Me. We don’t have food systems; we have a global feedlot.
Oh, and here is the link for the corn growers’ spin. Shamelss, shameless stuff.
1 September 2009, 11:40 amm.c.:
Is there a word for buddhist hallelujah??? Good News & Good Thinking. The American Dental Association(ADA) has an incentive for a sugary diet(think sugary cereals & candy + Easter & Holloween & Esp. HFCS)
Micheal, good observation that rural Oregon is pretty deep red. Eastern WA, many parts of northern & central CA all the way down to Bakersfield, not to mention Orange Co. & northern/eastern San Diego Co., get out of Reno/Tahoe & Vegas and you meet many Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot types. Get out of Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Vail, Albuquerque, Santa Fe….
1 September 2009, 12:09 pmxavexgoem:
speaking of Super-Size Me….Spurlock’s work on 30-days on FX (It can be viewed on Hulu) was amazingly inspirational.
Basic context acquired in 30 days. It was an amazing program.
1 September 2009, 12:15 pmJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
In Neoclassical Theory, there are six forms of “efficiency”. What the textbooks will never tell/show you is that they are, in practice, mutually contradictory:
1) Technical Efficiency: maximum output/input or minimum input/output;
2) Economic Efficiency: production of given $ value of outpu8t at lowest possible total cost;
3) 1 + 2 = 3 or Productive Efficiency: Cannot increase output of one trade-off commodity without necessarily decreasing output of another and vice versa;
4) Exchange Efficiency: P = MSC = MSB or pay TRUE costs of beneefits received and receive true benefits of costs paid; because of greed and imperatives for technical and economic efficiency, there is an imperative to socialize, underestimate, and under-assess costs so Price = marginal private cost without covering for costs of assessing and cleaning up negative externalities; plus people want benefits without costs so Price covers marginal private benefits without benefits of positive externalities assessed and covered. When Price = marginal private cost (MPC) plus the marginal cost of negative externalities (MCE) and when it covers marginal private benefit (MPB) plus marginal benefit of the positive externalities (MBE) then you have exchange efficiency; but efficiency forms 1-3 more often than not cause loss of exchange efficiency;
5) Consumer Efficiency: MUx/Px = MUy/Py = MUz/Pz or consumer cannot reallocate income (e.g. if MUx/Px > MuY/Py then decrease Y and lose marginal utility/price but increase X and gain more MU/P than lost and net increase total utility) in attempting to maximize MU/P and increase total utility;
6) Allocative Efficiency: Cannot make any person better off without making someone else worse off.
In reality, capitalism grossly understates, covers-up, socializes and externalizes, or defers, costs, while returns of accumulation are increasingly privatized, concentrated and centralized. In reality, in a fair fight, socialism outperforms capitalism even in capitalist constructs and definitions and metrics of “efficiency”.
http://wwwthesixthestate.blogspot.com/2007/11/revolutionnary-consciousness-as.html
5 October 2009, 5:25 pmJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
On the discussion on Neo-liberalism, if anyone is interested I presented a paper to the Academy of Marxism of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing on August 11, 2009 entitled Neoclassical Economics and Neo-liberalism as Neo-imperialism and it is at http://www.scribd.com/doc/19359629/LNeoclassical-Economics-and-Neoliberalism-as-NeoImperialism. My other papers that I presented in China are at my website.
As always Stan has my permission to use any of my stuff that he finds has merit any way and any where he wishes.
Jim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
6 October 2009, 5:51 pmmelissa andrews:
What a wonderful article! This is going to everyone I know!
21 August 2010, 3:33 am