Poet, essayist, novelist and "local-ist" Wendell Berry kicked off the final panel of the Slow Food Nation "Food for Thought" series on Saturday by reading a short statement describing the current food crisis.
For too long, humans have been spared, mainly by the cheapness of the fossil fuels, from the universal necessity of local adaptation.
It is ultimately an inescapable biological imperative that human land use economies should correspond as closely as possible to the ecological mosaic. To this, we no longer have even the illusion of a second choice.
The increasing cost of energy and the vulnerability of long distance transportation in an age of violence show the importance of local food and forest communities and the reasonable extent of local economic self-sufficiency everywhere.
Berry appeared alongside five other heroes of Slow Food -- Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini -- for a panel moderated by Corby Kummer.
Check back over the next few days for video interviews and blog posts about SFN '08.
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Comments
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Jonas Posted 10:51 am
31 Aug 2008
See, the slow food people are totally out of touch with the rest of the world.
Please travel to any developing country, and hear and read what people there think about this so-called "food crisis".
An example:
Brazil's farms see quiet revolution
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told farmers that concerns about food prices and shortages around the world offered them an exceptional opportunity
"We have more Chinese people eating, we have more Indians eating, we have more Africans eating and we have a lot more Brazilians eating."
"All this, which is treated by the press as if it were a crisis and is sold to the world as if it were a crisis," he said."
"Without any arrogance or self-importance, we Brazilians need to confront what for others is a crisis, as an extraordinary opportunity to truly transform ourselves into the granary of the world, as many people have long predicted."
[...]
For Professor Marcos Fava Neves of the University of Sao Paulo, the president is right to think on a grand scale, based on the country's recent achievements.
"What we have seen in the last 10 years is a quiet revolution happening in our country, mostly in agribusiness production," he says.
"We came from being an irrelevant international market participant to be one of the world's major food and biofuel suppliers today.
"So if you look at what happened to our agriculture in terms of beef exports, poultry exports - again we were irrelevant, and now we have the position of largest exporter in the world in major food crops."
[...]
Rising demand
It is not only in Brazil that Prof Neves sees potential.
"Next up is Africa. I think for Africa, this could be a redemption, in terms of inclusion of people in production systems and making Africa produce food and biofuels for the world."
BBC
The same optimism and thinking big, can be found all across the developing world. It's their time. They're fully in the logic of modernisation.
The so-called "food crisis" is in fact nothing more than the result of an immense social and economic progress in developing countries.
This continuing progress and this massive growth of global middle classes, is going to push big farming ever more.
The crisis is a crisis of too much wealth being created everywhere, so much that only big agribusiness seems to be capable of satisfying its needs.
The "crisis" is not a crisis of the nature of farming, but of the nature of demand for cheap food.
Big farming.
China has invested $7 billion in Congo's agriculture and infrastructures, just a few months ago. 3000 kilometers of roads, merely to get food, forestry products and minerals out, from Congo to China.
This is all just the beginning.
I can't help but to think that in this context slow food just seems so out of touch with reality. It seems very 'localist' indeed, that is, very Euro-American. An agenda created by a nano-community inside a micro-community of people whose role on the world stage is in freefall.
Our only hope for the successful implementation of a global slow food agenda, is in the rapid creation of wealthy middle classes in the developing world. And it seems Brazil is ready to service their needs.
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Devotay Posted 11:09 am
31 Aug 2008
On the contrary, Slow Food is very well aware of what is going on in all parts of the world, as its presence in 154 countries testifies (see also: http://www.terramadre2008.org and http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com).
And while Lula may paradoxically think that his country being the largest soy producer in the world is a good thing, or that we can solve the crisis created by huge global conglomerates by creating more huge global conglomerates, or as Raj Patel says of biofuels, "the preposterous proposition that we should grow food in order to set it on fire," the fact is that the global food system is doomed to revert to a localized system.
The only question is do we do it the easy way or the hard way? Now the easy way is by no means easy, but the hard way is desperately, dust-bowl hard.
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Jonas Posted 11:52 am
31 Aug 2008
Raj Patel should know that burning biofuels in an ICE is more efficient than burning food in a stomach. But that's another matter.
The point is that I'm all for slow food, but only inasmuch as it can achieve basic social goals for the poor in developing countries.
Sadly, there's no scientific evidence that it can. Agribusiness has proven that it is capable of feeding quite a lot of people (like Lula says: the current 'food crisis' is a crisis of wealth - there's too much wealth being created by agribusiness, which is succeeding in feeding ever more people.)
So for these reasons, and until slow food actually demonstrates that it can achieve the same social results, I'm entirely with Lula - a classic social progressive.
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Wolverine Posted 4:02 am
01 Sep 2008
Jonas's comments are a perfect example of the anthropocentric attitude: forget the entire planet except humans and just do what's desirable for them in the short term. While my main problem with that attitude is its lack of morality, it is also not ecologically viable and will eventually cause a collapse of these immoral human systems.
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randino Posted 6:18 am
01 Sep 2008
Neither capitalism or socialism cared a wit about the environment. In fact the environment did not exist in their calculations. The old so called socialist countries met and exceeded the destruction visited upon the environment by the capitalists. The current crop of socialists are just as deaf, dumb and blind as their predescessors when it comes to the environment. In fact they are - once again - the greatest cheerleaders capitalism has.
Looking upon agribusiness and extractive industries and the rise of global middle class that is just as insatiable in its consumptive appetites as Americans, as a positive thing takes classic left political economics and turns it into a mad hallucination. Mad because it is not sustainable. In short it promises a ride in a party wagon that is headed over a cliff. Years ago, Eduardo Galeano, a leftist writer who is still sane, condemned this drive "to be like" the Americans.
I spent most of my life as a hard core socialist. But if Lula's priorities represent socialism and the left, please tell me where I can send my resignation letter. Might as well just elect plutocrats. At least we know where they are coming from and how to fight them. With friends like these, as they say, who needs enemies. We need to completely reconfigure the political map. The current one is out of date and is a prescription for global suicide. Then we might be able to distinguish between the sane and the mad and act accordingly. That's what I am looking for.
Randy Cunningham
Cleveland, OH
Randy Cunningham
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:04 am
01 Sep 2008
There are avid environmentalists among both business people and socialist activists. There are global warming deniers in both camps.
It is true that the US Right Wing political machine is virulently anti-environmentalist. However many traditional conservatives are not.
It's also true that the line of hardcore leftist parties in last century was anti-environmentalism. I remember big arguments about it in the early 70s.
However, things are more complicated now. For example, the July-August issue of Monthly Review, one of the best of the Marxist publications, was devoted to environmentalism and peak oil. One of MR's editors, John Bellamy Foster, has written extensively on Marx and ecology (here and here for example).
In fact, Carlo Petini, founder of the Slow Food movement, was an activist with a leftist party. This background perhaps is responsible for Slow Food's underlying commitment to social change.
At this point, I don't think it is necessary to choose sides. There are interesting ideas to be had throughout the political spectrum.
More links.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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randino Posted 11:34 am
01 Sep 2008
Randy Cunningham
Cleveland, OH
Randy Cunningham
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