Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Soiled capitalism

It may have escaped some peoples attention (but not SOYMB's) that Sunday was World Day to Combat Desertification. Fertile soil is among the world’s most significant non-renewable and finite resources. It is a key element, which sustains life on the Earth and provides us with water, food, fodder and fuels.

The fight against desertification is a fight to save land productivity and soil fertility in the arid, semi-arid or drylands, as they are simply called. It is a fight to prevent the creation of man-made deserts. Combatting desertification is about ensuring there is food on the table, access to clean and safe water and energy to use today, and everyday. While deserts expand and shrink naturally over geologic time periods, the desertification of today is not “natural.” It’s driven by human action, such as over-cultivation, deforestation, and poor livestock management.

Dry-lands account for 44 per cent of all cultivated systems and 50 per cent of the livestock.

Each year due to desertification and drought, 12 million hectares of land - the area equal to half the size of UK - are lost. This is an area, where 20 million tons of grain could have been gown. Globally, about 75 billion tonnes of fertile soil is lost forever each year. Land degradation exceeds its restoration. The 2011 report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations claims that 25 per cent of the land is highly degraded while only 10 per cent is improving. Overall, about 1.5 billion people live off degrading land, of whom 74 per cent are the poor.

By 2030, global food needs will grow by 50 per cent, water by 30 per cent and energy demand by 45 per cent, claiming more productive land.
By 2035, global food production could fall by 12 per cent due to land degradation alone. This would increase world food prices by up to 30 per cent. Otherwise, about 120 million hectares (an area equal to the size of South Africa) of new land must be cleared to meet the expected increase in food demand. Currently, 70 to 80 per cent of deforestation is due to cropland expansion.

More than two billion hectares of land worldwide are suitable for rehabilitation through agro-forestry and landscape restoration. Of that, 1.5 billion hectares is suitable for mosaic restoration, including through agroforestry and small-holder agriculture. This focus would alleviate poverty and restore degraded land for millions of families. If we do not rehabilitate the degraded lands and stop the march of the deserts, there will be huge global shortages of food, water and fuels and unprecedented mass migrations. It’s been estimated that half of today’s armed conflicts can be partly attributed to environmental strains associated with dryland degradation.

Many would be surprised by the emphasis Karl Marx placed on soil fertility. In Capital, Marx identifies the loss of soil fertility as being directly related to the capitalist system;

“All progress in capitalist agriculture, is not only a process in robbing the labourer but robbing the soil. All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the last sources of that fertility.The more a country develops its foundations of modern industry, the more the rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production therefore develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.”

The narrow-sightedness of capitalist production is a product of the system itself. As the very existence of individual units of capital is founded on the logic of ensuring profits and markets, the environment is just another input. The health of the ecosystem cannot be registered as a genuine priority. The capitalist system does not take into account the true costs of environmental degradation, resource depletion, etc. and views nature as a commodity that is here for humans to exploit. Marx explained that the expansion of capitalist industrialised operations increased the scale of exploitation and environmental degradation, subjecting nature to the rapacious logic of capital:

    "Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also weakens the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."


Marx also wrote, "In London they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense"

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