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  • From: "jamie" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
  • Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 18:46:31 +0200

Hello everyone, 'Oil into Food': We have turned oil into food but is there
only food because of oil?

Industrial agriculture produces huge amounts of food but this is from simply
enormous amounts of land. Food is locked up, food is a political tool of
control, but only while we are convinced that food is technologically
produced, fuelled by oil.

We forget so easily that it is not humans that grows plants but nature,
because we believe otherwise we hand over our freedom. Shouldn't PC attempt
to hand back this freedom through teaching, rather than espousing tired
theories of the 'iron law of poverty' (Malthus)?

Curiously, in the only energy based comparison of different agricultures
I've seen (for rice cultivation in Fukuoka's The Natural Way of Agriculture
P42), farming naturally (using hand tools) is 50-100 times more energy
efficient than modern mechanized agriculture. The end of oil is the end of
oil but it is not the end of food.

How much land is given over to the production of food we do not need to
survive, I'm thinking especially of meat and dairy products and here, in
southern France, the monoculture of the vine?

We have decisions to make, but it is not to do with whether we decide
billions die now or at some later date. Such talk is deeply regrettable.

PC is part of a world in the making, iron laws of whatever type soon rust,
just as mountains erode into the seas and deserts become fertile again.

Jamie
Souscayrous






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