On 7/9/07, Dave Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> But my point about scale is not the cities themselves, but the >> surrounding area. The larger the city, the larger the required >> food infrastructure to support it. The larger that infrastructure, >> the more vast the distance between the housing to manage the land.
> Is that necessarily true? If you assume industrial farming, certainly, > but not if you assume an existing fundamentally agrarian rural society > composed of lots of small family farms. You need a way of aggregating > the production and a transportation infrastructure, but that doesn't > imply widespread ownership of personal automobiles.
The economics point to industrialization. Switzerland is attempting to maintain its small family farm rural society (both socially as a matter of self-image, and capitalistically as an investment that produces high returns in the tourism sector), and from what I see from the outside, industrial agribusiness (especially in the eastern EU) has a free ride on their externalities, making it very difficult for the small farmer to compete. One small mitigating factor here is that the swiss consumer is not especially price-sensitive.
I claim there's a difference between "more efficient" and "required." Chris said "The larger the city, the larger the required food infrastructure to support it. The larger that infrastructure, the more vast the distance between the housing to manage the land." Industrial farming may be inevitable, but is it required? I think not, given counter examples of countries with megalopolises, and no vast distances between housing to manage the land and no widespread ownership of private automobiles by rural agrarians. India and China spring immediately to mind. -- Charles
