Sunday 1 March 2009

less is more

Here is a quote from Dr. Leonid Sharashkin, taken from a post on the cluborlov blog about Russian local food growing:

In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all households in the country) owned gardening plots (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha) and were involved in growing crops for subsistence. By 2005, 53% (by value) of the country’s total agricultural output was coming from household plots (which in 2006 occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land), while the remaining 47% came from the agricultural enterprises and individual farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands.

So, Russian agri-business uses 97% of the land, to produce 47% of the food, while individuals squeeze out 53% of the food from 3% of the land! Even allowing for the known gross inefficiencies and failures of Russian agri-business, this is a staggering and encouraging statistic, indicating the potential on our doorsteps, currently in the shape of pointless and largely unused ornamental garden space. The Russians are showing us how "little people" can do an incomparably better job than the "professionals".

Why has this happened in Russia? Because they have already suffered and survived political and economic meltdown, and without growing their own food most people would have starved to death.

In the west the writing is very clear on the wall: financial meltdown and impending economic and political meltdown. Very simply, if we don't start growing our own food, we too will starve. The Russians had decades of early warning as their economy slowly failed - they had time to adapt and organize themselves into a high degree of self-sufficiency, before the complete meltdown came. Here, now, in the west, the meltdown is bigger, nastier, and coming much more quickly.

So we had better get those gardening gloves on, and get planting.

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