All Power to the Peasant

Frances Moore Lappé visited the city that ended hunger. She writes in moving detail about the mechanisms they used, and you should go read all about it, but the attitude they've adjusted to is a thing of beauty:

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”

CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

In pursuit of that ideal, they've empowered their small, local farmers to do for the city what the industrialized food distribution system had yet to do, or yet to seem to want to do: feed nearly everyone fresh, healthy food for less money than they were paying before.

We have examples in the US of people taking this same attitude, like Milwaukee's Will Allen who founded the Growing Power cooperative. They've taken urban land and buildings to turn into highly productive sources of local food, jobs, and community involvement. The overall food yield of Allen's urban and nearby farming network has garnered international attention.

And small farms can be highly productive all over the world. Belo Horizonte and Milwaukee aren't freak occurences, but readily reproducible models. Though, as George Monbiot points out, there's a strong, institutional prejudice against the little guy in farming. Emphasis mine:

... But the prejudice against small farmers is unchallengeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have sought to seize peasants' land, and have a powerful vested interest in demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country whose small farmers are 20 times more productive than its large ones, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a result of small landholdings, "farm output ... remains low". The OECD states: "Stopping land fragmentation ... and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity." Neither body provides any supporting evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well. ...

So who's up for peasantry? I haven't worked out so well as a rootless laborer, myself, but would still have to tackle the landlessness problem. Hmmm ...

(Photo credit: Bruno Girin on Flickr.)