Politics is Food is Politics

[Speck Tater]

Found this on a peak oil forum I visit: A slightly long, but very informative article on food = politics, and how to fix the global food problem.

http://www.insurgentamerican.net/2008/04/25/politics-is-food-is-politics

BY D. A. Clarke and Stan Goff

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the crash of the financial sector create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance.

As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable. This is how one cascade pours into another. The manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify.

<SNIP>

The airline industry has been very forthright about their problems. They are saying, “We were neither tooled nor organized for $120-a-barrel oil.”

Most of us get this, because we associate transport technology with fossil hydrocarbons. We drive cars; and we buy the gas to put in those cars. Planes run on No. 1 Jet Fuel; and if oil prices go up, so does the cost of jet fuel.

Most of us are less likely to associate oil prices with food prices. We buy food at the supermarket; so we don’t generally experience — directly — the association between fuel and food.

The connection, however, is every bit as central in the current food production regime as the link between aircraft engines and their fuel. Industrial monocropping for global distribution is “neither tooled nor organized for oil at $120-a-barrel.” It is not just the far-flung food transport network (much of it refrigerated and fuel-hungry) that creates the intimate dependency on oil; it is the whole scheme called industrial (or corporate, or “modern”) agriculture.

<SNIP>

The rest is at the link above