The problem is that growing a portion of one's food oneself is of limited effectiveness as a hedge against fluctuations in the food market, simply because in the long term it's essentially impossible to consistently produce enough food to support oneself unless one becomes a full-time farmer.
There's a vast difference between being able to produce 20-30% of one's own food and 100% or more, in that in one situation you're faced with the choice of dealing with the food market as is or starving to death, and with the other you're not. Presuming you're not going to be a farmer full-time (and more on this later), you have to deal with the money economy for the majority of your food.
Given that, you could spend time and energy growing your own food, but then what's the opportunity cost of your hedge? Could you develop a more effective hedge by spending the time you would spend growing your own food on things that will make you more money, which will give you the financial cushion to absorb the impact of fluctuations in food prices? You could get a second job (which is effectively what you're doing when you grow your own food anyway), or start a small business, or pursue further education, all of which are going to probably going to give you more for what you put in. In any realistic scenario, you're going to be better off with more cash than you would be with off-the-grid assets.
Sure, none of that will help you if the whole money economy collapses, but the odds of that realistically happening are slim to none, and you'd be pretty much fucked anyway in that case no matter what you did now, so is that really a wise eventuality to plan your life around? It's like building a bunker during the Cold War - realistically, how long would you survive the aftermath of a nuclear war anyway?
There are any number of other problems with the anarcho-collective agrarianism that H vs L is advocating. The biggest of them is that no subsistence agriculture economy is capable of maintaining, much less producing in the first place, the sort of sophisticated green-tech infrastructure H vs L is envisioning, simply because if everyone's a full-time (or nearly full-time) farmer, you don't have anyone available to design, construct, maintain, and hopefully improve such a system. You need to have people with specialized knowledge and expertise, which means devoting a significant investment of time and resources to training and supporting each one, neither of which are available in any abundance in a subsistence economy. You need to be producing a consistent surplus which is then traded in a more-or-less reliable, standardized way over a long period of time - which is to say, you need a money economy. Modern agricultural production allows a tiny number of people to produce vast amounts of surplus food, enough to support a non-agricultural population which then has the luxury of things like mass literacy, a health care infrastructure, etc. There's really no way to turn back the clock on agricultural production without losing everything we've gained with it - like low infant mortality, education, serious containment of infectious diseases, etc.
Within two generations, anyone growing up in a society based on barter and subsistence agriculture would be looking at life expectancy in the mid-40s, would be burying half their children before the age of five, would be expecting their community to be devestated by disease and/or famine at least 2 or 3 times in their short lifetimes, would probably have their community raided by bandits at least once per lifetime, and would be ruled by the unbeatable ruling coalition of The Guy With the Big Stick and The Guy Who Can Read.
Other problems include the fact that we are coming up on 7 billion people worldwide. There is not enough arable land in the world to give 7 billion people individual plots of land, and who would force the mass migrations necessary even if there were? Additionally, locally-produced food has a higher carbon impact than food shipped from further away, in some cases a number of times higher. Plus, you lose nutritional diversity and the levels of redundancy that protect the population in any given area from famine based on local conditions. Under these conditions, local food (and organic food, and non-GM food) are luxury products designed to make already privileged people in the global north feel better about themselves, not actual solutions.
Modern civilization is not perfect. It's not always just, it's not always fair, and it produces no small amount of misery, but it is almost infinitely better than anything we've had before, because we have a money economy which allows for specialization, which in turn creates huge quality-of-life improvements for everyone. It's completely delusional to think that we can all just go back to the farm and trade bread for repairs to our solar water heater and that will just make everything OK.
If you want to close the inequality gap between the global north and the global south, work on economic development in the global south. If you want to decrease the environmental impact of modern civilization, invest in green technology and support green urban design. |
