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----- Original Message -----
From: Sam Pawlett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: marxism <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; crashlist
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 4:59 PM
Subject: [CrashList] Protein Imperialism
> [excerpt from a fascinating yet flawed book called The Wealth of Some
> Nations by Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell was an English Maoist of sorts who
> was a state guest of Pol Pot then subsequently murdered in still
> mysterious circumstances in 1977. He was one the first Marxists to
> connect energy supply and agriculture with imperialism. He had
> considerable prescience but not enough to realize that the Asian
> Commmunism he championed was really the opposite side of the capitalist
> coin --a system set up to bring about modernity by other means. The
> goal of the Khmer Rouge was not a sustainable egalitarian agarian nation
> but full scale industrialization. He also co-authored two valuable books
> on Cambodia and Indonesia. --Sam P.]
>
> "The second point to be kept in mind is that modern
> 'scientific'agriculture, despite its superficial efficiency and high
> level of productivity, is parasitic and ecologically unsound. It
> consumesmore energy units than it produces, once account is takenfor all
> inputs and concomitant services. As far as US agriculture is
> concerned,its apparent technological marvels and its real enough export
> performance ought not to blind us to the facts. The American farmer
> burns more calories in the production process that the ultimate product
> realises. It was fortunate for the States that, until the late 1960's,
> low-cost domestic oil balanced the cost factors in the agricultural
> energy equation to a great extent (i.e. the underlying imbalaced calorie
> exchanges were masked by very low oil prices and government maintenance
> of prices paid to farmers for food). This fortuitous circumstance is
> fast receding. Again, while the American agricultural sector exports
> gross low quality protein in the form of grain (deficient in some
> essential amino acids such as tryptophan and lysine), it imports
> high-quality proteins (fish meals, presscakes of oil seeds and the like)
> from poorer countries. This is what might be called 'protein
> imperialism' impoverishing the diets of those who can least afford to
> experience further nutritional deterioration, in order to titillate the
> obese with forced-fed birds and animals (reared in units run and heated
> by combustion of fossil fuel).
>
> "The overall pictureis roughly this. The poor underdeveloped countries
> as a whole annually send to the rich overdeveloped countries as a whole
> something like 3.5 million tones of high quality protein (fish, oil
> cakes, peas, beans, lentils,etc) while in return the overdeveloped
> countires ship to the underdeveloped about 2.5 million tons of gross
> mainly grain-based protein. Africa exports ground nuts, Peru fish;
> Mexico, Panama, Hong Kong and India (and Thailand--SP) shrimps; in each
> case at the expence of their own poor, who-- the exports retained and
> fairly distributed could take a giant stride toward nutritional
> adequacy. In conrast, Ehrlich and Ehrlich point out, Denmark imports
> huge quantites of oilseed cakes and grain to support livestock (for
> their
> milk, butter cheese, meat and eggs); annually, Denmark takes in 140 lbs
> of protein per head of her population, three times the Danish average
> protein consumption. Here er that the typical prodigality of
> overdevelopment. It has been calculated that the same amount of food
> that feeds 210 million Americans would feed 1.5 billion Asians on an
> average Chinese (that is, in Asian terms, a good adequate and nutricious
> diet). Animals must consume an average of ten pounds of plant protein
> to produce one pound of meat protein, while for cattle the ratio is as
> high as 21:1, which means that every pound of steak consumed in
> overdeveloped countries could (in theory) provide an amount of protein
> for twenty other people. American meat consumption of meat absorbs an
> amount of protein equivalent to 90% of the world's annual protein
> deficiency.
>
> "...this kind of energy-intensive,protein wasteful food production
> cannot and does not hold out hope of pointing the right way forward" The
> Wealth of Some Nations. p102-3. Zed Books. 1977.
>
> [excerpt from Robert Biel The New Imperialism. Zed.2000.--SP]
>
> "One way of showing what is going on is to compare the calorific content
> of the crops that are produced with the calories used up in the
> processes that produce them. For the most favorable of traditional
> crops, cassava, the output-input ratio is as high as 60:1. But
> industrial countries' agriculture includes huge energy inputs from
> fertiliser, fuel for machinery, processing, canning, transportation,
> refrigeration, cooking and so on and the figure is often negative. In
> the US food industry, the calorific output:input ratio in 1940 was only
> 1:5 (that is, inputs were five times as great as output) and by 1970 it
> had deteriorated further to 1:10. Returns are clearly diminishing. The
> case of fertiliser illustrates this well: increasinglylarge applications
> are needed for a decreasing improvement. Holland uses fertiliser at the
> extremely high rate of 300kg per hectare. Japan consumes more fertiliser
> that the wholeof Latin America. Resources such as phosphate or oil are
> drawn in at an inusbstantial cost (neither reflecting the full value of
> rents nor that of the labor used to extract them.) to make agriculture
> *seem* more efficient...Grain converted to meat loses 75-90% ofits
> calories and 65-90% of its proteins. According to FAO figures, for 1978,
> animal feed accounted for 36% of the total world consumption of cereals
> and for 61% of the world consumption of maize. The total cereal deficit
> of the Sahel countries during the famine of 1973 was 1million tons,
> which was only .25% of the amount of grain fed to animals in the
> industrial countries in the same year. A significant quantity of animal
> feed takes the form of high quality protein imported from the south.
>
> "So productivity in the conventional definition of producing more with
> less labor is increasing while efficiency in real terms in declining;
> there can be little doubts that the two phenomena are linked." p147
>
> Sam Pawlett
>
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