It's amazing how good I feel today.
Seriously. Because one of the big clouds has been lifted.
What happens if it all goes wrong?
What if estimates of Middle East oil reserves turn out to have been
fabricated out of whole cloth for the last thirty years? (A real
possibility, much like the way the same Soviet ICBMs became more and
more accurate with each budget appropriation cycle in the US during
the late 70s and early 80s.) What happens if global climate change
doesn't follow the nice timetable laid out by the IPCC, but instead
beats us like Buddy Rich doing a solo? If food miles turns out to
actually be a real problem? If industrial food collapses like a house
of cards? What if the nightmare scenarios actually come to pass?
Well, after reading an article
in The Journal of Peasant Studies,
I feel a bit more relaxed when I think about the nightmare scenarios.
Because Cuba has already been there, done that, and can see light on
the other side.
Cuba,
post-revolution, invested in extensive agrarian reform, but a
combination of circumstances (the US blockade, and joining the
international socialist division of labour for two), led Cuba to
strengthen their sugar-producing sector; a sector that dominated 30%
of the available farmland and generated 75% of export revenues by
1989. At the same time, Cuba was importing some 57% of its food.
Cuba
embraced the Green Revolution wholeheartedly, with the most tractors
per person and per unit of area, importing 48% of its fertilizers
(which doesn't tell the whole story: of the fertilizer produced
domestically, there was a 94% import coefficient), and importing 82%
of its pesticides. Cuba was a poster child for Green revolution
industrial agriculture. With the second-highest average grain yields
of Latin America, Cuba achieved a high level of food
security for its population. But
what they discovered they did not have was food
sovereignty. The 1980s brought
increasing pest problems and the yields of some key crops began to
decline due to soil degradation and pests (this is actually typical
of Green Revolution lead areas around the world; long-term yield
levelling or decline seem to be part of the model).
