permaculture

["Steve Read" <steveread@free.fr>]

Small scale, "farmers shadow" is well documented as being a more efficient 
scale for growing. Private property or not. In China education is compulsory 
and not totally free, so "peasants" need augmented income to pay for this. 
The future well may show that small scale private owned (which isn't really 
the case in China, the land doesn't "belong" to the families) is also more 
easily over-exploited to pay extraneous charges or to fulfill marketing led 
dreams of modernity. Small scale collective responsability as with the 
ancient "commons" system worked well enough and also had feedback loops to 
restrain over-exploitation. Until that is, as in the case of my great, great, 
grandfather, the common land he used was enclosed by act of parliament to an 
aristocrat, and my ancestor, with family were forced to leave, he 
subsequently died a few years later in a mining accident. Enclosure went hand 
in hand with creating exploitable workers for the early industrial revolution.

On another note the great areas of deep loam of central europe, used as 
collective farms by the USSR are now attracting many farmers from western 
Europe, esp Brits, with their huge tractors and machines and their 
extensive/chem-intensive agriculture, their contribution  to world food is 
unlikely to be negligible, until even these deep rich loams are detroyed.

Feeding the world has, most probably, a local and small-scale solution, apart 
from that we have to see what sort of patterning we wish to place and leave 
on this planet for our children (if one decides to have any), private 
property and market ethics, debt and banking, or commonland and common 
responsibility. 


SteveR