Why do they want to condemn billions, forever, to the peasant lifestyle?
The aim here strikes us as being wholly vile:
What makes this tragic, as Aslany points out, is that, just when we need it most, peasants offer a model of sustainability and stewardship of the natural world. They serve as a buffer holding at bay a rapacious capitalism that has none of their respect for nature. One Cambodian peasant, farming in the floodplain of the country’s massive Tonle Sap lake, tells Aslany: “Rice is our companion. We say human beings have nineteen souls, and rice has the same number.”
The peasant belief that the land is sacred is not some quaint relic, but a crucial way of ensuring that the pursuit of productivity doesn’t destroy the Earth. That much of the world’s cultivable land remains in the hands of peasants protects us against total corporate takeover and environmental breakdown. If we keep trying to enact the urban fairytale, it will destabilise food production, destroy the planet’s ecosystem and create an unprecedented wave of refugees. We must hope, for all our sakes, that peasants are not just part of our past, but part of our future.
Those billions still trying to scrape a living out of a half acre of runty corn or rice must remain there, forever. Because, well, because this book, The Guardian’s reviewer of it and for all we know The Guardian itself are clueless about said peasant lifestyle. These are the people who have to live on £2, £3 a day. No, that’s not the cash they get to spend. Peasantry is being able to consume that much in value each day. That includes housing, clothing, food, health care and the savings for the pension you’re not going to live to see as a result of not being asble to afford health care nor, often enough, food. And the value of that consumption is at UK supermarket prices too*. That’s what peasantry is, that historic and global absolute poverty.
As to the respect for nature of course it’s starving peasants looking to expand out to a whole acre of runty corn that destroys the wild lands and thus the places for wildlife. The pursuit of productivity is what allows us to use less land, less human labour, to still produce the food required to feed us all. We use that industrial, capitalist, farming so that only 1% of us have to live on the land and that 1% live vastly better too than the historic peasantry. The effect of that rapacious capitalism is that we have a greater bounty of food for us all to eat. As well as bounteous amounts of everything else too.
We do assume that this idea that the peasantry must be maintained is a result of simple gross ignorance by author, reviewer, and for all we know The Guardian itself. For it is to insist upon, demand, that billions live that £2 lifestyle, forever. It must be ignorance, perhaps stupidity - for no one would be that evil now, would they?
Tim Worstall
*OK, it’s US supermarket prices and it’s $3 to $5 a day but….