Hi Michael
Once again it appears as though the corporate interests are doing what
they have always done once their foot is in the door. They persuade by
whatever means (at the national level), cajole and encourage at the
grassroots level and once in position will undercut the prices of the
smaller "stakeholders" at the market end and slowly take over those
smaller holdings due to the crushing debt of machinery, fertilizer,
pesticides and (then for Monsanto) GMO patented seeds. It is the same
game of "world dominance". The only care being how to move the "pawns"
to do the corporate bidding. For those who truly care about the
community, there must be a solidarity among the general population to
stand against the corporate incursions otherwise there will likely be
mass unemployment (with no alternative such as farming ones' small plot
of land to eke out a living) which will encourage the large
manufacturing concerns to set up shop where they can pay a less than
subsistence wage for maximized profits.
And the beat goes on.
D.
On 14/09/2012 1:39 AM, michael gurstein wrote:
Hi Mike,
Not sure if the comment about Burkina Faso was directed this way but
anyway...
I wasn't looking specifically at subsistence agriculture (or commercial
agriculture) but my strong impression would be that yes, Burkina is largely
subsistence farming with a fair degree of local resilience but very much
subject to exogenous factors like climate change (there has been ruinous
flooding in many parts of west and central Africa in the last few months.
What I have been looking at is a (fairly) new approach to overall
agri-sector planning/development which I think is quite heartening and bodes
reasonably well for the future. The approach is a fairly simple and obvious
one but quite startling in the context in which it is being introduced
(throughout sub-Saharan Africa... The process known as CAADP www.caadp.org
is one that deliberately (and through requirement) includes the range of
stakeholders involved in agricultural development at the national level and
most specifically the grassroots (small holders/subsistence) farmers mostly
through representative organizations. The process is heartening in that it
introduces a reality component into the overall planning (and not
incidentally into donor funding/support) and a degree of
integration/duplication avoidance that is slowly but it seems surely having
an effect through increasing investment in local infrastructure, better
deployment of agr inputs (fertilizer etc.) and better adapting policies to
local etc. requirements (import/export tariffs/taxes etc.).
One issue that lurks in the background is that of commercialization which is
an underlying goal for most of the stakeholders but has very considerable
risks for the small holders--it remains to be seen how this will be resolved
in various places and whether the overall process can survive the associated
tensions and conflicts.
M
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 11:42 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: Central bank money machines fail to spur global
economy
Lawry wrote:
[John Warfield's "A Science of Generic Design"] came out at a time
when a dozen first-rate books appeared linking design to societal
change. Many of the them were based on cybernetics, systems analysis,
and the still-faltering but ever fascinating fields of chaos and
complexity. Names (sp?) like: Abrahamson, von Forrester, Miller,
Aikens, Kaufmann, Bateson, Beer, Fuller, etc. etc.
Another paper relevant to "complex systems":
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
with commentarty here:
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-
global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2
and here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price
-of-food/
I don't see much in the PDF reflecting application of complexity theory,
general systems theory or the like, though. From the PDF:
We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests
become likely. These observations suggest that protests may
reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments,
but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable
populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be
persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the
food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing
prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point
to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in
2012-2013.
This looks like a fairly straightforward model based on plotting from past
data. The problem with "complex" systems is that thresholds, inflection
points, trends etc. roughly predictable from past data can be egregiously
misleading. Complex systems exhibit (something like) thresholds that are
intrinsically unpredictable, un-identifiable, because of the nature of
complex systems [1] and such thresholds are represent sudden transitions to
whole new regions of the phase space representing the system.
Interesting paper, though. Their predictions seem clear enough and well
supported by events. The real-politik jousters for global dominance of
energy resources and finance should be paying attention to it. "Looking for
work" may come down to looking for a gun (or some rocks or just a pointy
stick) if you and everybody for 50 miles around you is weak with hunger.
BTW, I think Burkina Faso was absent from the list of countries, given in
that PDF, where food riots had occurred. Is that country perhaps still
largely feeding itself with local and subsistence farming rather than with
imports from global agribiz?
- Mike
[1] Viz. a very large number of elements or variables with an
exponentially larger number of connections between them.
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