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    Ravenous: food riots are becoming food wars

    personal gardens not enough

    Started by: Thisisme Raves:22 Badge Winner! Emergensight

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    While it is great that some of us are beginning to grow our own food in our back yards to cut back on food expenses, we are not discussing the larger problem. What about mass food riots? Food wars? I remember the food scares for 2008, when Haiti rioted and people were eating mud cakes. Friends in Kenya were eating boiled plain rice as their one meal a day. As this becomes a global issue, personal gardens will not be enough. 2008 was just a slight blip on the horizon, we are about to face a major storm. How can we come together to keep the world from breaking into war? I know this might sound doomsday-ish, and hopefully it won\\\\\\\'t come to this. But I can very easily see major countries being torn by civil war and genocide as the rich protect their food source by keeping the minorities, immigrants, marginalized population from getting food.

    The truth of this really shook me, Theisisme. I for one have been so focused on how myself and my family and my surrounding communities can get by in our current circumstances, that I haven\\\'t stopped to face what others much more drastically affected by the worsening food crisis are going through. With the modern commerical news media such a debatable source of good information, are there any Superstruct members in hard-hit regions who can update us as to the current situation there? To ensure we can all surive, clearly those of us who are only suffering shortages and higher prices need to not only try and get by, but assist with the efforts to help those much worse off...

    Food supply is so strongly linked to social stability. Some of us try to grow extra in our yards to donate, and I\\\'m part of a gleaning group that goes around to neighborhood fruit and nut trees and collects the produce that might otherwise go wasted. But we could do more. We need to feed everyone in our communities, not just those who are most able to provide for themselves.

    Living in New York City isn\\\'t easy. Though my partner and I are lucky enough to live in an area where we can both cultivate our own food outdoors as well as hydroponically indoors, there\\\'s never enough to feed the two of us and our animals. And looters are always sneaking into our garden to take what they can find. We\\\'ve always paid premium prices on food -- especially meat and produce -- in the city, but it\\\'s been especially bad lately. I guess we\\\'re lucky because we can afford to pay top dollar for food products, but eventually it won\\\'t be a question of price -- it\\\'ll be a question of availability. Even if you can pay $1000 for a can of beans, if that can isn\\\'t on the shelf you can\\\'t buy it. Knowing that, we\\\'ve been stocking up non-perishables. What about the rest of the world?

    We\\\'ve been growing enormous amounts of wheat, corn and soy here in the Midwest, but so much of it is turned into fuel and/or exported that we\\\'ve been hard pressed to find enough to eat. There have been riots and takeovers of industrial farms. Can we be the world\\\'s breadbasket and still feed outselves?

    This example should just be seen as an added variable - population. How long have you stayed in a densely populated area? How do you relate to your community at large. While building a personal garden in an urban setting is possible, it would not be ideal because of the high density of population, many of whom will not choose to be as resourceful as you. As such these efforts are not as open as they may be in other areas. If you want to be more open you need to find a community which is going to be more supportive. As to this breaking into regional wars for food resources, the key is communication. Growing food like a relationship, isn\\\'t an overnight thing. It must be developed over time. In making the commitment within a community to grow ones own food,, openm communication with neighboring communities is necessary hopefully encouraging them to do the same. Ignorance is the enemy here. The value is NOT IN THE FOOD, but THE MEANS TO GROW IT. You cannot win those means in a war. But through open communication they can be shared. The immediacy of food needs are real, but one shouldn\\\'t let that immediacy reverse any progress that\\\'s made (raiding an organic farm for its food, could ruin years of work to get that farm up to its production level).

    We need to recognize communities of particants...collectives. Those groups can creative markets and move goods and excess labor.

    Starvation in our times has always been an economic problem, not a breakdown of resources. Even today, there is enough arable land to feed the whole population, sustainable, using permaculture methods. It\\\'s just that, like ARK said, it\\\'s not the food itself but the means to produce food people lack. People don\\\'t have the economic power to buy food at prices that compete with energy needs, and so farmers sell to ethanol produces instead of the hungry. If they had more money, it might work better. That\\\'s the situation we are in. We also lack the means to produce our food, but we have the money to buy it even at competition with energy. But if we really want to make sure everyone can eat, the answer isn\\\'t increasing buying power. It\\\'s equitably distributing arable land to people so they can provide for themselves. And that needs to happen here as well as there, even though we still have food buying power. What the food wars are going to lead to isn\\\'t people fighting over food, but fighting over arable land. It will be a war between cash-croppers who make fortunes on bio-fuels and other luxuries, and the hungry, denied masses that will seize that land so they can subsistence farm. Hey, that gives me an idea for a superstruct.

    I demand we stop at once with the childish and dangerous fantasies of families growing their own food and actually surviving. These scenario\\\'s are impossible to realize in 90% of modern rich cities and for modern urban people - and criminally inadequate in most of the third world. These ideas of bourgeois \\\"out of touch\\\" middle class idiots are very very dangerous.

    REALLY, Rudd? If you are thinking of conventional farming, sure. When you only grow one crop at a time, in rows, sure, you need a lot of land. But that\\\'s not how an individual farmer plants. You plant multiple crops in the same place, in high density. The Biodynamic method can provide enough food to feed one person for one year on as little as 4000 square feet of land. We feed a family of 5 out of our backyard and an adjacent empty lot. I\\\'m not going to try to stop anyone from finding large scale production advances, but this isn\\\'t as much about food production as it is about food security. How do we ensure that people have access to food? If you can answer that question, you\\\'ve solved the problem. And some things we know: That having the means to produce a good yourself protects your access to it, and that decentralized systems are more resistant to disaster than centralized ones.

    The key is to come at the problem on as many different levels as possible. The more people who are able to take some pressure off the system by growing their own the better (a significant percentage of the US vegetables were grown in small home plots during WWII). I agree it doesn\\\'t solve the problem, particularly of staples like corn and wheat (and especially in dense urban areas). For those problems we need to look to regional farms and local distribution networks. Look at Richmond, for example, they\\\'ve been moving towards food self-sufficiency for years, and I think they\\\'ll be there in a very short while. Does this approach work for a city like New York? Probably not, they\\\'ll need other solutions, but every time we solve the immediate problem for a person, a neighborhood or a city we take the pressure off the global networks. Maybe this food thing isn\\\'t a monolithic problem with a single solution, maybe we need a huge set of patchwork solutions. Every little bit helps.

    i agree, personal gardens are not enough. it solves the problem for single persons so berlin decides in 2014 to use parks, places and roofs for growing food in special plant pots. in the beginning it was very hard and thoose plant-pot-areas needs to be defend but the things changed when it became a kind of open-accsess to everyone and the peoble could organized in so called \\\"cooperations\\\".

    Well, glad it\\\'s still an option to garden for most of you. After we blew the bridges in central Az.,and became the Verde Enclave, we have been without outside supplies or power since the AvianFlu diaspora. While we have water, we have little arable land, and have to decide between fuel for generators, or food. We have split the difference, and have started making alcohol instead of biodeisel for all applications that we can. Don\\\'t even have enough left over to pump water, we are back to the anceint indian irrigation ditches in most parts of the valley. see the map http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=45.534341,-122.604268&spn=0.007245,0.019312&z=16&msid=117565148957344197743.000458c362e796fac2a3c

    I see how that plays out in the US, but the problem over here is different - there is always food. Question is what food. I remember many types of foods disappearing over time. But what left was factoryprocessed foods. Those are still available, and affordably so. Greasy stuff, used to be illegal for a few years, high on bad sugars, easy to produce from pure chemicals. You can survive a while from that shit, and it tastes so so. But if you eat that months on end you will go sick and die. I have seen it happen, people fat as hogs dying from nutritional deficiency, they stink like decaying matter weeks before they actually die. Most develop cancers.

    We started with chickens in a city, we found it delightful. But when chicken became scarce we found them coveted by many a neighbor. We had to put lights and protect the coop. Not relaxing! We moved out of the city, and brought our hens too!

    I'd like to start a plot for my family, but I'd rather not use bioengineered seed. I know this is a longshot, but can anyone recommend good sources of non-genetically-modified seed? I guess if we get hungry enough, it won't matter.

    @LeMel: This won't help if you're outside North America, but there are two seed companies in the US I recommend that still have strong quality control and no GMO: Territorial Seeds (http://www.territorialseed.com/) and Johnny's Selected Seeds (http://www.johnnyseeds.com/). Both specialize in different growing areas, but if you email they can tell you what will work where you are. You might also look for a local heirloom seed sharing group.

    wow. Thanks for all the amazing comments. I have to agree with Ruud. Though maybe not so deconstructively. This is an issue of money and resources. Land is not the biggest problem (at least not for the rest of the world, ie, the non middle class western perspective). I have spent many years in Kenya working on rural economic development. Many farmers have land, but not enough money to buy the seeds, the fertilizer, the labor to harvest. And forget about water. Global warming has made the natural rainfall so unreliable that sometimes (often) peoples crops completely fail, now they have no food and are in debt. If they can have more resources like money for labor and irrigation, this problem may be minimized. I believe all of sub-Saharan Africa suffers from this, along with large parts of the rest of the world. This is where to more advantaged countries come into play - global wars are bad for everyone, they will eventually effect everyone as food production is halted and we no longer get our coffee from Kenya (maybe not the best example, but you get the picture). We have to see feeding the global as our challenge, not just worrying about ourselves. Otherwise things will get much much worse.

    I agree Thisisme. But, also keep in mind for those that don't even have the funds to have that piece of land (personal gardens). Even though, it is only half the issue.

    The global food system is broken. It's been industrialized to the point where most people don't have control of their own land (as had been mentioned) and people in the first world are used to getting their food from the Global South (at a great expense of energy). Victory gardens are a fundamental part of fixing this issue. Urban gardening can feed cities (or at least greatly alleviate the dependence on imported food). San Francisco started munincipally supported gardens at the turn of the century and they have flourished since. These aren't personal gardens, these are community organized gardens that are able to provide a huge amount of food for the land they take up. Also, meat eating, at this point, should be a non-issue. It takes about 100 calories of produce/grain to create 1 calorie of meat and the nutrients provided by meat can be gained through a variety of common plants and beans that can be grown in almost any climate. We need to stop relying on the global food system to feed us and start relying on ourselves. This way, the land in the Global South can be retaken by the locals there, who can then begin to feed themselves. The problem is complex, but we have to start somewhere and decrying urban gardens as bourgeois really avoids the issue. Feeding ourselves in turn with taking back the means of food production are equally important. At the same time we provide for ourselves, we also need to address the problem of agri-business. We need to return the fields in the Global North to the farmers, stop using crop for fuel and, if need be, lower the price of seeds and grain to kick start local economies. Once farmers have seeds that aren't from Monsanto, etc. they will be able to sustain themselves. Water, of course, is the other big issue and Climate Change has made some regions unfit for farming. These regions, if they are completely barren and impossible to irrigate will need to be abandoned (as we're already seeing). But as they're abandoned, we need to make sure that people can resettle in other rural areas instead of migrating to the huge urban slums we're seeing in many cities (like Rio or Buenos Aires). Obviously the issue of food security is so complex that there's no single answer, but instead we're going to have to unravel this knot, piece by piece, implementing a different solution for each problem. These solutions might not appear to solve the whole problem in one action, but all of them are contributing to helping. That was a long winded way of saying that urban gardening is part of the answer. If you agree and want to help, I'd encourage you to join the Superstructure I created about it.

    Try visualising decentralized "victory gardens" (or poly-anna patches) in the following places - * http://phillyskyline.com/misc/wallpaper_071017c.jpg ------------------- * http://www.iknowlondon.com/images2/London/Hackney%20Wick/Hackney%20Wick%20flickr%20nicohogg.jpg ------- * http://www.globalenvision.org/files/638677510_e525638fff_b_0.jpg ------ * http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2007/TECH/science/09/25/overpopulation.overview/art.india.overpopulation.afp.gi.jpg ---- * http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/3417/79896664up7.jpg ---- * http://www.directwonen.nl/koop/ajax/Housing/getFotoAvailable.ashx?Foto=5269216.JPG ----- * http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0frz2T65slf8N/610x.jpg --- If you hedge your bets on Victory Gardens prepare to kill in defending them. For years to come. They will keep coming, until someone shows up with more guns, more drones. By bet is that people growing food are set up for a raw deal when someone shows up every month claiming a percentage in protection tax. Can be a cop, a soldier, a gangster or anyone else with the biggest gun. -------- http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/serfs.htm ..... Good luck.

    Irrigation can allow crops to be grown in areas with little rainfall for a number of years, BUT this is not, repeat NOT a permanent solution. In the long run, irrigation leads to salt buildup in soil, and this eventually makes it impossible to grow anything. This is why the area around Israel, once fertile and the cradle of civilization, is now a 'white desert'. This is beginning to occur in the drier regions American south, and if history is anything to go by, soon it may be impossible to grow anything there. I'm not saying that all dry areas should be abandoned. The process takes a long time, although with today's large-scale factory farming it can happen much faster. However, growing conventional crops (wheat, corn, etc) in arid regions is not sustainable in the long run. It might be a better idea to choose crops that are native to deserts and can cope with drought. The yield will be less in the short run, but in the long run it should be possible to continue farming the land indefinitely. I don't know if we are in a position now to put the future ahead of the present, but this is something we have to remember.

    @Ruud: In all of your pictured places I see all to elements for significant small scale food production: light, water and space. The philly shot with a little raking and some compost brought in would grow a boatload of food, and the London picture has a bunch of areas that could be given over to production, from rooftops to corridors alongside roads. There's always a way. And as to defending garden plots, I don't know how it is where you live, but we still treat each other with respect around here. Society hasn't completely broken down. Theft isn't as common as you might think. I'm sure there are areas of the world where a small garden must be constantly defended with deadly force, but that's not here, not now. WE're just taking a big chunk of the pressure off the global food system.

    When your family is facing starvation, it's the little things that count. Obviously having a society where people have a few sparse vegetables a day to eat is not what most of us would like to see. If families can survive by supplementing their diets with food grown from their own gardens, I support that. What's the alternative, really?

    For urban areas, one effective trick has been (no, it doesn't feed a city; it will help...) to restructure existing buildings and build new ones to use the surface areas for farming. Not just rooftop, but the outer walls need to become community gardens. This in turn helps with other urban problems--all the plantlife provides shade and evaporative cooling, so the interior spaces are cooler--saving energy on climate control. It's food isn't shipped long distance; more energy saved. It's not a monocrop because of the relatively small (and broken up) microclimes of vertical farms. That means that it doesn't really offer food input for a corporate system, but it helps feed people. It isn't easy to raid, because it's largely vertical and rooftop... and because it's immediately adjacent to living space and office space that's occupied and observed. It's workable in most any urban area. Keeping people fed there means that the diaspora need not be as extreme... and that the crisis for receiving areas need not be, either.

    The fact that food ever became scarce was a massive oversigh by the FAO. the general solution to the 'Almost Ideal Demand System' solved about 20 years before the crisis level we see in in 2019. It was an unknown economics graduate living in New Zealand. His attempts to communicate this to the FAO were completely ignored. fortunately he stumbled upon a future forcating simulation in 2008 and attempted publicise the idea again there in the hope that someone would listen to this and other ideas he had. so yeah people let me know if doing 11 dimentional calculus was worth it.

    Sometimes the dust should be allowed to settle, and guess what, we are still growing vegetables in our backyards. Common sense economics continue even after the revolutionary passes us by. If, as I do, live in a fertile region of the world, New Zealand, and we continue to practice the grow your own garden culture which has continued for decades, with the resurgence in the mid 2000's we will continue to create our surplus and have successfully reduced the internal demand placed on our export crops. Now that this is common practice in many parts of the world, the degree of sophistication and success of this methodology is adding to global food stocks as well as impacting on the bull market fr food derivatives, helping to aleviate the price rise of common food commodities.




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