Four Problems
1. Climate. The vast majority of the world’s nations have become and are becoming heavily dependent on agricultural imports, particularly imports from North America and Brazil. Presently food reserves are low. The slightest climatic hiccup could mean starvation for millions, even billions. Predictions of global warming do not bode well for food security.
2. Seeds. A U.S. biotech giant is threatening to control food production through biotech patenting and GM seed production. Thus far this has benefited few people besides the biotech giant’s operators and its bribees. Indeed, third world farmers have been driven to suicide by the giant. Moreover, GM production has actually further reduced agricultural diversity and created a global dependency on an increasingly narrow genetic spectrum of plant and animal stock, thereby worsening the risk that millions could starve if just one new disease ruins a harvest. Additionally, the long term health risks of GM food remain impossible to determine until a long term passes.
3. Energy. Modern agriculture’s dependency on petroleum fuels and petroleum-based fertilizers spells trouble for a world whose population continues to grow and whose oil production has apparently already peaked.
4. Soil. While much arable land could still be forced into food production, humankind already uses a vast majority of the world’s arable land, and uses an even greater percentage of global photosynthesis for its purposes. Thanks to industrial agricultural techniques, deserts are spreading, and artificial fertilizer rather than soil is keeping productivity artificially and unsustainably high.
How the Permaculture Solution Solves Many Problems
Permaculture has already proven itself capable of reclaiming or greening deserts without recourse to technology. What’s needed is large-scale applications of the permaculture alternative to modern agriculture. This could bring agricultural productivity precisely to countries most dependent on agricultural imports, i.e. desert and semi-desert countries. While establishing a large-scale permaculture project could involve machinery, once established a permaculture-based food production project requires no machinery or chemical fertilizers. Of course, if the project exists to produce organic food for urban centers, some form of mechanized transport seems necessary. However, by turning deserts into fossil-fuel free gardens containing a far greater intensity of photosynthetic activity than found in industrial agriculture, permaculture projects also reduce the greenhouse effect, as photosynthesis requires and absorbs atmospheric carbon. Additionally, permaculture would either prevent or moderate the other dangers described above.
Qs and As Regarding Large-Scale Permaculture Projects
Because permaculture requires far more workers than industrial agriculture requires, the question of labor arises. But the world has plenty of unemployed people living in dreadful slums and on dying farms; large scale permaculture projects could offer a permanent and humane living standard. Plus, little training is needed to create a competent permaculture farmer.
Desert countries have no cheap sources of modern construction materials to provide housing for permaculture farmers. Earth-based building materials like cob and adobe provide the most sensible solutions and could provide safe and affordable shelters even on a large scale.
Electricity need not be supplied, as earth-based housing is cooling- and heating-wise in warm climates and the permaculture farmer has no intrinsic need for electricity, and the same might be said for us all.
Water need not be supplied, as permaculture projects can easily dispose of human waste without it, using human waste to enrich the soil and boost production. Rainwater can be stored in basins and body water is partly acquired through diets based entirely on fresh fruits and produce.
Once established, in order to ensure that a permaculture plantation (if I may use a word with an ugly history) is not a huge subsistence project, but produces enough food to feed its urban masters, the permaculture worker population and morale must be otpimized. For this end I recommend…
