How do we respond to the emerging food crisis?
If anything calls for governments, institutions and the people to enact the permaculture principle of creatively using and responding to change, surely it is the warnings of a global food shortage now coming from multiple sources.
What is behind the warnings?
Globally, agricultural commodity prices are 25 percent higher than a year ago, bringing higher prices to imported foods.
A range of factors are influencing this. They include delays in the supply chain that affect food supply due to the impact of the pandemic, as well as extreme weather events such as the flooding in China affecting Shandong, China’s biggest vegetable growing region, and grain-producing Henan province.
Global supply chain delays are affecting many sectors of the global economy, including the production and delivery of microprocessors that has created a flow-on effect in the production and supply of electronic equipment and automobiles, among other goods.
What is China doing?
Attention in early November 2021 fell on China when the Ministry of Commerce called on citizens to stockpile essential supplies and food. The result was panic buying. At the same time the government reinvigorated an existing campaign to reduce food waste.
With no explanation of the advice offered, speculation rose as it usually does when people are faced with government failure to communicate effectively and with government secrecy. Is the government anticipating a winter food shortage or preparing to prolong and extend lockdowns already in force to reduce the spread of the pandemic? By November 2021 infections had spread from the northwest to the northeast of the country as a new wave of the Covid virus spread. China follows a Covid eradication policy.
The other theory doing the rounds is that the government is preparing the country for a soon-to-happen invasion of Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party, which constitutes the government in the one-party state, has publicly said that is their intention if Taiwan moves towards independence or fails to rejoin China. As provocation over the past month, China sent a record number of fighter, bomber and other military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defence zone (but not into Taiwanese territory). Even were armed conflict with the USA to be avoided if China attacks, which is doubtful and which could include Australia, a likely embargo by nations across the globe to isolate and punish China be would bring further shortages of imported foods. The question being asked is whether the government is preparing people for shortages coming from an embargo?
The feeling of uncertainty is growing
The world has lurched towards greater political and economic instability since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, with a number of large-scale influences contributing to a global feeling of uncetainty:
- the rise of China as a political and military power, its seizure of reefs and islands in the South China Sea, its border conflict with India where a military build-up by both sides is now underway, and its threat to invade and seize Taiwan
- the disruption of the Trump years
- the polarisation of public opinion in the US and the civil turmoil that is part of it, including the attempted insurrection of January 6 this year
- Britain’s Brexit disruption now bringing its own goods transportation crisis and other disruptions
- massive refugee flows stemming from the rolling wars in the Middle East and from factors elsewhere
- the rise of autocratic governments around the world
- the global impact of the pandemic and the spread of disinformation that has polarised public opinion and sown social distrust.
These have added to a sense of public insecurity attributable to slower-emerging disruptions due to global heating and recent extreme weather events, as well as the Australian bushfires of 2019-2020, the drought in California and the Californian bushfires of 2021.
This world of uncertainty is the situation permaculture as a social movement now finds itself in. How it responds will influence its value as a solution not only to food supply in a crisis or to food security generally, and to the production of other needs, but to stimulating a grassroots response that at least partially meets peoples’ basic needs of food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, education and cooperation.
How do we respond?
Let’s make use of the permaculture principle of creative response and adaptation.
Do we, as a nation state, move towards autarky, towards economic independence and self-sufficiency based on producing goods and services to satisfy our peoples’ needs by using the country’s natural resources? Over the past decade the notion of national food self-reliance has gathered strength. Satisfy local demand fully, the idea goes, and only then export what is surplus. For permaculture folk that would more or less enact what Bill Mollison, the co-inventor of the permaculture design system, said. It would apply permaculture’s third ethic of ‘share what’s spare’, of distributing surplus resources although they would flow into the global food commodity market rather than be given as foreign assistance to food-insecure people.
What stands in the way of doing this? The neoliberal political economy, is what. Neoliberalism commodifies everything it can, turning even mundane goods and services into markets. Food is no exception. It goes where it earns the most income.
Complicating the matter is the reality that farmers could not maintain their present level of production without exporting much of what they produce. Exports are around 70 percent of production according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (find export commodities and data here). The Australian market is too small to absorb total farm productivity.
It is not only food. With so much of our manufacturing and service industry off-shored by the promoters of neoliberal economic theory, Australia would have to strive hard to remake us the manufacturing nation we once were.
Autarky as adaptation would bring a profound restructure and shrinkage of the national economy and profoundly reshape Australian society. It remains an option were the global economy to lurch into complete collapse, but that would be by necessity, not choice.
Systems theory postulates that a substantial change in one part of a system results in change elsewhere in the system as it seeks a new equilibrium in a changed state. Substantial and lasting global collapse resulting in autarky would see likely Australia stabilising at a state of being substantially different to what we have now.
And what of permaculture?
How does permaculture step out of the garden gate into the world of food realpolitic?
Permaculture does not directly address big issues like food insecurity and global geopolitics. It could have something useful to say, however holding it back is the general reticence of permaculture practitioners to engage with politics and the design system’s focus on the local and small scale despite the ways in which larger scale trends would impact those local, small scale initiatives.
It is probable that practitioners would say their focus on home gardening and small scale market gardening, although few there are gardening at the commercial scale, is their way of addressing global food shortages and other food-related issues. That, though would offer only an individualist approach to household food security or, at best, a local although limited response. I’m not arguing against this approach. One of the reasons I joined others in starting the national organisation, Community Gardens Australia, was to foster the training of a corps of people who could go out and assist the scaling-up of urban food production were a crisis to restict the food supply. One reason I was among the four who started the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance was to engage with food issues beyond the usual ambit of permaculture.
Despite the value in this approach of acting locally I see the solution for permaculture people is more about allying with food security and food sovereignty organisations to exert political influence, because those are the entities that political and economic decision-makers pay attention to.
Why did I start this blog?
These are the two ideas behind Permaculture, the blog:
- the first is to bring a permaculture perspective to the bigger social, political and economic issues
- the second is to look inside the social movement around permaculture and the ideas within it because the movement cannot move towards greater effectiveness if it does not know itself.
Systems have boundaries, including the permaculture design system. Permaculture is made up of smaller scale local actions, however the political economy and its institutions as well as the bigger issues of the day and the larger scale trends affecting the people, the places, the countries where we live and the world itself influence what permaculture people can do and set the social and political boundaries to what the design system can accomplish.
Rather than bounce ideas back and forth within the permaculture bubble, permaculture is more effective when it offers viable ideas and solutions to these big-picture trends. To do this successfully, permaculture needs to base its ideas on critical, rational thinking, on what we learn through science and on the preponderance of evidence. As permaculture co-inventor, Bill Mollison, said, permaculture is based on ideas “verifiable by every person from their own experience, or making their own experiments. We permaculture teachers seek to empower any person by practical model-making and applied work, or data based on verifiable investigations.”
Here are links to permaculture stories enacting the motivation behind Permaculture, the blog…
