Onderstaande citaten komen uit het boek Small Farm Future van Chris Smaje.
Geschreven in het engels, key messages zijn highlighted in het groen.
”The better future I write about here is a small farm future. I’m not completely optimistic that it’s the future we or our descendants will see, but for the numerous reasons set out in the book I think it’s our best shot for creating future societies that are tolerably sustainable in ecological terms and fulfilling in nutritional and psychosocial ones. Now is a key moment in global politics where we might start delivering that future, but also where more troubling outcomes threaten. Here I try to herald the former by sketching what a small farm future might look like, and how we might get there.”
”It’s the importance of this local self-provisioning that turns a farm future into a small farm future. I’m not suggesting there’s no place in the future for any larger farms, or that large-scale farmers are always the bad guys. In itself, small isn’t necessarily beautiful and I won’t be proposing any cutoff points by acreage to define the small farm in this book. But I’ll be emphasising some broad differentiating features that will be justified in greater detail as the discussion unfolds: small farms play a key role in creating local autonomies from global flows of capital; they involve a degree of self-provisioning at the individual, household or local level; they employ labour-intensive techniques applied more often by family or household labourers than salaried workers; they adjust their activities to sustain the ecological base in their locality that underpins their productivity; and they tend to operate in a de-commodifying (but not necessarily un-commodified) way compared to large farms.”
”‘Local’ or ‘locality’ looms large in many of those features, perhaps merely displacing the need to define the ‘small’ into a need to define the ‘local’. Again, on this point I refuse hard and fast delineations. The local isn’t a matter of prior definition but emerges out of how autonomies and self-provisioning are achieved in practice. One thing I can say for sure, though, is that the small farm future I’m describing isn’t the same as a green consumerism future, where shoppers with lives much like the ones most people lead in rich countries today buy their food in stores like the ones they shop in today, except that the food is more local, more sustainable, more organic or whatever – and where, like today, people spend time fruitlessly arguing about whether local really is more sustainable. Instead it’ll be a future where you or your descendants are trying to figure out how to furnish your needs from your locality, probably by furnishing many of them for yourself, because you have few other choices.”
“The small farm isn’t a panacea, but what a politics geared around it can offer – what, perhaps, at least some of the visitors who come to our farm can glimpse in outline – is the possibility of personal autonomy, spiritual fulfilment, community connectedness, purposeful work and ecological conviviality. Relatively few farmers past or present have enjoyed these fine things. Throughout the world, there are long and complex histories by which people have been both yoked unwillingly to the land and divested unwillingly from it in ways that are misrepresented when we talk of agricultural ‘improvement’ or progressive ‘freedom’ from agricultural toil. The improvements haven’t been an improvement for everyone, the freedom hasn’t been equally shared, the progress has landed us in a whole raft of other problems that we must now try to overcome. And none of it was preordained.”
”For a Small Farm Future That’s why it’s urgent at this point in history to think afresh about a small farm future. Taking each of the three words in reverse order, we need to think about the future, because it’s clear that present ways of doing politics, economics and agriculture in much of the world are reaching the end of the line. Wise authors avoid speculating on future events because time usually makes their words look foolish, but such dignity isn’t a luxury our generation can afford. We need to start imagining another world into being right now.”
“Tendencies towards malnutrition through both undernourishment and obesity, the former mostly affecting poor people in poor countries, and the latter mostly affecting poor people in wealthier countries, though food deprivation is a growing issue in these countries, too. Beyond the obvious undernourishment caused by insufficient energy intake, there’s also the hidden hunger of vitamin and trace mineral deficiencies and the long-term nutritional effects of childhood diseases caused by contaminated water.”
”An underlying problem is that global agriculture has become focused around a handful of crops that are dense in simple carbohydrates or oils and cheap to produce and transport. If this is mainly what’s on offer to consumers, it’s easy for them to get sick, either by eating too little or too much of them, with limited access to vital micronutrients either way.”
“It probably won’t surprise the reader by now if I suggest that there is a food supply chain better able to generalise such a diet and that it’s a small-scale, locally oriented one. Coincidentally or not, the kind of small-scale, low-emissions farming I advocate delivers almost by default the kind of diet that experts seem to broadly agree promotes good health: small quantities of meat and dairy products from well-raised livestock, a diverse range of unprocessed vegetables, nuts and fruits, and a limited quantity of simple carbohydrates and refined fats and oils. The health and nutritional crisis is a crisis of that ‘missing’ system. To understand why it’s missing we need to turn to a different crisis.”
“M → C → Mʹ
where Mʹ > (is greater than) M. Again, this needn’t be especially ‘capitalist’. For millennia, merchants have sought profits in this way through the fragmentation of markets, enabling them to buy cheap and sell dear.”
“It’s about using money to create extra money. One of the ways businesses do this is by creating political alliances to forge monopolies, making it easier for them to leverage Mʹ from their investments. This is why when you go to a Wednesday market in the average British ‘market’ town nowadays it’s a fairly bedraggled affair, compared to large out-of-town stores – ‘super’-markets – selling produce that mostly comes from wherever in the world it’s cheapest to grow it, sold by staff in mostly low-paid jobs often topped up by government welfare benefits.”
“It’s generally reckoned that economic growth of 3% per annum or more is necessary for a ‘healthy’ capitalist economy. During the 1960s, global economic growth averaged 5.5% per annum, whereas over the last decade it’s averaged 2.5% (with only two of the world’s ten largest economies achieving average growth in excess of 1.8%). But, exponential growth being what it is, the slowed growth over the last decade still added over US$19 trillion to the world economy at constant 2010 US dollars, whereas the fast growth of the 1960s added only US$7 trillion. Projecting just 2.5% annual growth forwards to 2050 suggests the global economy will have to add nearly US$40 trillion over the decade of the 2040s, meaning the new economic output it has to add in that decade will be about the size of the entire global economy in 1993 (and in view of Crisis #2, it’ll have to do that while reducing carbon emissions pretty much to zero).”
“Small-scale agriculture was what people did in the past, but we’ve now progressed beyond it. It’s hard to shake off this view because when we think about history through the lens of modernity we tend to use spatial metaphors with binary moral overtones. We move forwards, upwards or onwards, we lift people up out of poverty, we support progressive ideas and we don’t look back – but when we do, we see backward societies where a lot of people farmed.”
“An obvious problem here is that, as we saw earlier, the idea that humanity is entering a future of limitless clean energy and material abundance isn’t well founded. So it’s possible that people may have to embrace the old human essences of being biological, labouring, suffering creatures after all, which isn’t an unenticing vision for everyone.”
“It’s not even as if we denigrate hard physical work. Consider our celebration of mountaineers, explorers, sportspeople, and gym members.”
”The difference, I think, is that these are people working hard physically in ways that make them stand out as exceptional individuals, or at least that dramatise an individual life project – thoroughly modernist pursuits. Small-scale farmers, on the other hand, merely work physically in order to create their daily livelihoods. I’ve noticed this even at alternative farming conferences, where much emphasis is placed on being innovative – in other words, celebrating one’s individual exceptionalism. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for innovation, so long as it’s clear why we’re innovating, who’s benefiting and what the wider consequences are. But we seem loath to accept that working moderately hard to create a modest local livelihood using standard, well-established farming methods and spending the rest of our time creating ourselves through simple low-carbon activities like walking in the woods, visiting friends, reading a book, playing the guitar or making love constitutes a worthwhile form of modern life.”
”I’d argue that, ironically, we’ll be making true progress – we’ll be truly modern – when we let go of older modernist traditions that insist our lives must get more moneyed, automated, commodified, materialised, mediated, individually crafted and so on. It’s not that there’s nothing worth celebrating or defending in the traditions of modernity, but doing so requires a nuanced and creative response to changing times that acknowledges modernity’s downsides. The heavy-handed nostalgia for a perfected vision of past modern achievements as the lodestar of human progress offered by figures like Steven Pinker is stuck in the past. It’s time to move forwards to a small farm future.”
“As I charted the ten crises in Chapter 1, I intentionally sequenced them from physical and technological issues – our human numbers, the climate, energy availability, soils, water and so on – to deeper cultural, political and economic forces driving them. These deeper forces mean it’s unlikely current problems can be solved by only technical means. In fact, it’s possible that they can’t be solved at all, since they correspond to what are sometimes called ‘wicked’ or ‘super-wicked’ problems with these kinds of characteristics: