Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on December 13, 2013 | 4 Comments
Hankering after a seasonal story, but tired of the saccharine nonsense doled out by the mainstream media at this time of year? Look no further, for Small Farm Future’s very own Chris Smaje has brought you ‘Global Hunger: Three Christmas Ghost Stories’ – now available for free on Wiley-Blackwell’s Statistics Views website. It beats the Muppet Christmas Carol any day!
The article is something of a meditation on the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, which was prompted by my recent debates around this with Clem and Tom here on this blog, and also to some extent with Graham Strouts on his Skepteco blog…though ‘debate’ is perhaps rather too generous a word to apply to the stentorian Mr Strouts and his cult of the techno-fix. In any case, while no one surely should espouse the full Malthusian package uncritically today, it struck me that the good reverend’s name has largely become a cipher nowadays for a variety of positions that ‘progressives’ want to attack, and that it’s worth drawing out the basis of those various positions a little more clearly. Hence, my three Christmas stories concerning the ghost of Malthus past, present and future in relation to the scandal of global hunger, which seems worth thinking about in this season of excess for the privileged few.
I won’t rehash my ghost stories here, but just to give a couple of lead ins – Malthus is widely derided for his excessive pessimism in imagining a bloated future human population wracked by famine. Still, there are almost as many people alive today suffering from undernourishment as existed worldwide when Malthus was writing 200 years ago. The reason these people are suffering is not fundamentally because of a limited human capacity to increase food production, as Malthus supposed (though here the ghost of Malthus future hovers…), but because of an apparently limited human capacity to create equitable economies. To my mind, this calls into question the techno-fix agenda of much global food and farming policy, which focuses too much on finding new technologies to increase yields and too little on finding economic instruments to share yields. As I report in the article, in some respects humanity’s ability to remedy chronic hunger does seem to be improving slightly, whereas in other respects poverty is becoming more deeply entrenched through the dependent incorporation of small farmers into the global economy – a point made nicely by Lorenzo Cotula in his excellent new book on African land grabs that I’m currently reading.
This brings me back to the ideology of ‘progress’ peddled by the likes of Strouts, and by higher profile eco-panglossians like Stewart Brand. I keep promising that I’ll stop posting on this topic, and hopefully I soon will, but in the new year I’m going to post a couple more times on ideologies of history, progress and community scale – partly to continue and hopefully conclude the interesting unfinished discussions I was having with Clem and Tom on these issues, and partly because a proper critique of the ideology of ‘progress’ seems to me absolutely critical for any realistic aspirations concerning social justice and agricultural sustainability.
A ‘critique of the ideology of progress’ does not involve the view that things used to be great in the past and are now getting worse and worse, or that poor peasant farmers are authentic people who ought to be happy with their lot and mustn’t be corrupted by modern technology. This rendering of green agrarian thinking spews forth from the eco-panglossians, but it only serves to indicate the limits of their intellectual grasp, and the distorting power of their ideologies (though, to be fair, certain writings in the green movement do give them ammunition – as is so often the case, one extremism breeds its opposite). Somehow, green agrarianism or agroecological thinking needs to get people to grasp a more sophisticated script – namely, that the ramification of global capital doesn’t bring much benefit to most people, and the ramification of new technologies doesn’t much answer the problems of our times…and that this is not the same as saying that social and technological change is always a bad thing.
Now this really shouldn’t be a very intellectually demanding line of argument, but it seems too much for the eco-panglossians to cope with – and perhaps not only them, for in truth the eco-panglossians are merely vanguard ideologues for a more widespread fetishisation of ‘progress’ and technology in contemporary society. Writing of the medieval lawyer Sir John Fortescue, the historian J.G.A. Pocock made the wonderfully arch comment that Fortescue was “the kind of amateur of philosophy who helps us understand the ideas of an age by coarsening them”. The eco-panglossians are Sir John Fortescues of the present, and I guess one reason I keep coming back to them is because their coarse ideologies of ‘progress’ help me better understand the ideological inertia in wider society that must be overturned if we’re to achieve any kind of equitable and sustainable society. When a piece about possible future resource shortages is interpreted as a lament to a lost peasant past that says a lot about the strange distortive hold that ideologies of progress have on contemporary views of sustainability and social justice. Anyway, I’ll come back to this in the new year. For if it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted ideology in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it – I am ready for the fight. Dammit, now who was it that said that again…I can’t quite remember…
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If we are talking about the central Malthusian problem that populations explode whereas the growth of food production doesn’t then there has been progress in the last hundred years and I’m not talking about science. 100 years ago governments were unable to control population growth and now they have that ability either by “nudging” their population in a social democratic way like Denmark or in an authoritarian manner like China. By the way we (in the UK) are only growing in population because of immigration. If your problem is preventing starvation and war because there is not enough land to feed everyone then the options above will work.
I’ve said all this before and I’m saying it again because I don’t think Malthus or progress is the problem.
Of course that doesn’t fix other problems like the soil blowing away because of our use of inorganic fertilisers or governments allowing food prices (or winter fuel) to be cripplingly expensive. But I feel you are aren’t right about there being no progress – social and liberal democratic governments are springing up all over the shop. Simple ideas in government like it’s wrong to allow your population to starve are pretty new on the political scene. If the political landscape of today was transplanted to the time of the Irish potato famine then I am confident that the outcome would have been very different.
I note with interest that Bill Mollison (permaculture guru) had promoted a method of making nitrogen fertiliser using sand and titanium as a catalyst. I got a U in chemistry (The only time I ever saw a teacher cry was when our class got its results – sorry Mr Stock) but I have a rational (mostly) mentality. It doesn’t sound very retro romantic reactionary, that, titanium as a catalyst. Is land reform really the answer to ecological problems or are there other more conventional means?
Thanks for responding, Tom…I’m not sure whether you’ve read my Malthus article, which tries to put things into a somewhat different context to the familiar population/starvation equation. In any case yes we’ve debated this before and I’ll be coming back to it again so there’s little more I want to say right now about the question of ‘progress’ – except to reiterate once again that a critique of the ideology of progress really mustn’t be equated with the notion that nothing ever changes for the better. The latter is not something that I’ve ever said, nor believe. Nevertheless, I’m less sanguine than you about governments both in terms of their ability to control social outcomes (I’m not persuaded that government population policies have been effective, generally speaking) or in terms of their benevolence (about one in seven people in the world suffer chronic undernourishment, and this could be ended virtually overnight if a few powerful governments and the organisations beholden to them were minded to do so). Indeed, inequalities in many places including the UK appear to be widening. On land reform and ecology, I’d suggest firstly that ecological problems are always partly social problems and that a big mistake which is repeatedly made in development and agrarian policy is treating ecological problems as if they’re purely technical problems with no social component. And secondly that there’s nothing especially unconventional about proposing land reform as a solution to hunger and various ecological problems, but it’s a solution generally not favoured by governments because it challenges existing power relations. As to titanium and sand…well, I got an ‘A’ for my A-level chemistry, which probably doesn’t qualify me to comment a whole lot more than you, though I struggle to see where the nitrogen is going to come from. But in my judgment, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Haber-Bosch nitrogen synthesis (barring its heavy energy use) or with the various organic fertiliser methods – what’s crucial is the how, when, where and why of application. And that takes us back to the social character of agroecosystems.
Here’s a comment emailed to me by Clem Weidenbenner on the Malthus piece, with my comment below:
Did read your Malthus article. Imagine Mr. Dickens is not offended, and is perhaps even smiling. I may even go so far as to chide you a touch about not giving Charles an even stronger credit by citing one or more of his other antagonists and their ghoulish behaviors. But then that would have fattened an otherwise Spartan piece full of really juicy bits.
I made a copy of your article and will be sharing it with a few folks who don’t ordinarily pass this way. The Wiley-Blackwell folks should be proud.
From comments I’ve made here at other times I should be branded most closely to the ghost of Malthus past. And I’ve no objection now. Where I will take a poke at an observation made by the ghost of M present – he/she says: ” – after all, you can only invent major productivity improvements like synthetic fertilizer once.” [BTW, the blog software doesn’t want me to spell fertilizer like you did in the piece – sorry]. So my poke is 1st to agree… yes, a specific improvement will only be invented once… BUT, can one confidently rule that there is some finite number of potential improvements that can be made and once made the end is nigh? I will allow there are likely few remaining inventions with such incredible impact(s) – all manner of low hanging fruit metaphors to be played here. Still, a judicious handful of good technical improvements are likely still in front of us – a cause for some optimism. Even a glass-half-full is by definition missing something isn’t it?
And I really like the direction you take to suggest some future solution lies as much in finding social solutions as in technical fixes. But as much as I personally have invested in searching out more technical fixes, I hope you might forgive me if I stay in that vein and continue to mine it. My assistance on social causes would likely fall short. So a cheerleading role may have to serve.
BTW, I thought your citing of Ford Denison’s book appropriate. Well done.
Clem, you’re right – basically one can’t predict anything! So it could be that new step changes in productivity are around the corner – but I’m not aware of any particular reason to suppose that they will be. Some of the techno-fixers/anti-Malthusians/’eco-pragmatists’ or what have you seem to have an almost spiritual belief in the inevitability of technical solutions, and they misread history in supposing that there’s been a smooth ascent from want to plenty. Of course it’s also true that new solutions do sometimes show up just when people are starting to scratch their heads – as with oil answering the problem of ‘peak coal’ in the 19th century. In my humble opinion, though, most technical solutions tend to throw up further problems, and they can seldom tackle key problems of social justice alone – as in our discussions with Ford Denison over at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/darwinianagriculture/2013/12/how-much-willcould-genetic-engineering-help.html. So ultimately I’m glad we agree that solutions must be social as well as technical. Unfortunately, we social scientists don’t have such a good track record at solving social problems as our natural sciences colleagues do in their fields, though perhaps that’s because humans are just so damn ornery. One of the arguments in my Genesis & Callicott article was that it’s impossible for us NOT to try to solve our problems with technology and I for one have absolutely no problem with the idea of technological improvements – however, there are many different ways to understand the term, and failure stalks those who don’t combine technological improvement with sociological analysis. I’m not sure how much more technical innovation we need to solve current problems, but we sure need some more social innovations!