ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

The planet is beset with a number of unprecedented crises that, as Dennis Meadows points out, are symptomatic of an underlying problem: exponential physical growth in a finite world.

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with  the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to grow local food systems, from the ground up.