Provides the modern tale of global entrapment.

Let them eat cash:
Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?
By Frederick Kaufman

“In some cases, P4P would not purchase a farmer’s grain immediately but instead would encourage him to warehouse his product and receive a receipt. More mysterious than rice or millet, this slip of paper presented a number of intriguing possibilities. First of all, the receipt allowed the farmer to register with his countrywide exchange, a place in the capital city where all the grain from all the country’s farmers could be bought and sold. Henceforth, the rural farmer could follow fluctuating prices with the technology of his mobile phone. The once indigent peasant could become a commodity trader and peg his sale to any time of the year. In this way, he could forecast, model, and leverage more financing. No matter that commodity speculation and grain hoarding had helped trigger the world food crisis. No matter that the recent Agribusiness Accountability Initiative declared that massive and unregulated commodity-market speculation “has pushed the prices of wheat, maize, rice and other basic foods out of the reach of hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

“To assume that what the assistance that Bill Gates and Howard Buffet are extending to African farmers is doing is perpetuating hunger,” said Kikweke, “that is a big misconception.” The idea that Bill Gates and the World Food Program might actually be increasing famine had interrogated the very essence of the gift heading Kikwete’s way: …”

I think I got that concept from Satish Kumar, which I consider a very useful one: one should make a distinction between “human beings” and “human havings”. Do we allow ourselves to become “human havings”?

Apart from that, two quick comments: (a) “subsistence” is a tricky term, for very often, what we nowadays call “subsistence” is not, and (b) I don’t think there is something like “a society that does not use currency”. There are lots of currencies, used all the time, all over the place. As I wrote, even “barbecue invitations”, effectively, are a sort of currency.

Primitive peoples had some interesting issues to deal with when it came to recognising things of value they did and didn’t have. For example in peaceful farming communities the tradable goods were largely perishable food stuffs. So without any transport system a grower of something could only trade as much as he could carry to a potential buyer. In some situations the only thing one would receive for the goods offered was a similarly perishable product, and that product was consumed as essential food on the journey home. So the net result of the trade was zero, apart from a visit to ones mates over the main divide.

If we look below a society that doesn’t use currency we find the natural balance between man and soil we call subsistence. The idea of a ‘modern man’ accepting a life of ’subsistence’ is virtually incomprehensible to him, as he cannot imagine what else it is he would do with his time while he waits for his beans to grow. And this is perhaps the nub of our problem.

A ‘modern man or woman’ cannot conceive of a life where there is something beyond staying alive and getting more ’stuff’. Exemplified by the big boys toys mentality wherein ‘He who dies with the Bigest Toys, Wins’. We have no clue about where to find that ‘thing’ that will make us feel better. We live in the perpetual state of the addict where just one more shot will make us feel the way we want to feel; just one more!

It is hard to think back to a time where our natural inclination to acquire more stuff, to ‘make things better for our family’, has not driven us away from our natural state. A state where we did get our carbohydrate from trees and shrubs.

Somehow (and nature is making the selection now isn’t she) we have to learn to live in true balance with the soil, water and air of the planet; in a state of true subsistence as far as our bodies are concerned. We have to learn that the animals we live in which support our brains only need a few simple provisions to keep them alive for the day.

Then the hard bit is training the amazing minds these bodies carry around to abandon the desire for more earthly ’stuff’ and all the exploitation that entails, and instead to turn to the walk towards the intellectual and spiritual nirvana wherein lies true contentment; that ‘Peace that Transcends All Understanding’. It is only there will we find peace, enlightenment and that sense of wellbeing we so desperately seek.

three quick comments on bioregional self-sufficiency: First, it certainly would be a good idea if each region could provide all its essentials(!) within that region. But that does not mean that interregional trade would have to cease. Second, the crucial problem is that interregional trade once was a “backup system” to rely on should there be major regional trouble, such as a localized crop failure. We have pretty much made this safety net the primary system we now rely on. Maybe not a wise move. Third, much of the thinking that led us to the present structures comes from the “law of comparative advantage” (it’s interesting to note how an idea can be made more appealing by sticking the word “law” in front of it). We let the 3rd world produce our agricultural products, because they can do so at a lower cost – which comes from two effects.

a) transport is perversely cheap. If one does the maths, one finds that, these days, an office worker commuting six kilometers to work for a 7-hour day each weekday in doing so destroys an amount of a high-quality energy carrier whose equivalent work content would amount to more than three days of bone-breaking hard physical labour. By “destroys” I am refering to the more than 2/3 of each liter of presently consumed oil for which we do not even discover a new source at the present rate of exploration. It should be clear to every thinking person that such an economy is doomed to fail pretty soon. Synfuel? We don’t have the large-scale infrastructure in the first place, and if we had it, the massive CO2 emissions would give us a serious headache with ocean acidification and climate change, not to speak of all the dirty coal mining. Now, that in itself won’t finish off civilization. On average, one out of two Germans owns a car, while less than one out of 100 does in India. We certainly can get along with much less motorized mobility, we just have to do a few things in a different way. But “comparative advantage”
is more or less based on the idea that you can push things around at basically no relevant cost at all.

b) The price for agricultural products is artificially kept down. This essentially can be traced back to the thinking of early industrialization, where the declared goal was to have as few people as possible work in primary production to set free the workforce for industry. But, doing the maths quite naively here, if one farmer has to feed 10 people, while earning about the same money they do, people will spend 1/10 of their income on food. This then has a number of other interesting side effects: If the desire for industrialization leads to politically setting up the right environment to enable such ratios, then farming will become a very money-inefficient way of land use. Stick a factory, golf course, railway station, or amusement park on the land and it will generate more money. Note that, if your goal really were to increase food production, you would want to have more people on the land to take proper care of it. Two people taking care of two acres will be able to pay more attention to the land, hence produce more food in total than one person taking care of two acres. But if the second person quits farming and goes into industry where they can earn more money, this would then in sum contribute to “growth”. In chemistry, there is a similar concept, called a “disproportionation reaction”. Note that this phenomenon leads to another sociological effect that further marginalizes farmers: The implicit imperative for western civilization is to do everything in its power to get rich as fast as possible. Now, if someone makes major decisions in such a way that they contribute to us getting rich less fast than we could have, that is easily regarded by some as a sinister act of sabotage. And, as farming loses out against pretty much all other forms of land use money-generating-wise, farmers are often regarded as backwards, and actually an impediment to our society getting rich even faster.

A key point here is that such a scheme only can work if farmers have an ineffective representation, by the way.

The problem with dry air in winter is best solved with thick walls of massive wood or clay, that will store humidity through summer and autumn, and release this slowly during winter time. This is a central principle within “Baubiologie”. http://www.baubiologie.de + http://www.buildingbiology.net