[A GOOD example of the chaus of capitalist…]
Socialist Organiser1982 1982-10-07Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 12 →
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A GOOD example of the chaus of capitalist food production is the Common Market's policy of subsidising grain and dairy production.
At one level, this redistributes money from the working class to rich farmers (at least in Britain) while various mountains and lakes accumulate. It also encourages unhealthy levels of meat and dairy consumption.
At another level it encourages dangerous agricultural practices while helping to destroy what little wild life still exists in Britain, as farmers are encouraged to utiltilise hitherto marginal land to grow crops.
Looking just at grain production, these are the results: 1. Continuous cereal growing is encouraged instead of crop rotation, which helped keep down weeds and diseases and kept the fertility from falling). This necessitates high inputs of artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. 2. 'Pushing' crops by early sowing and high use of fertilisers makes them more prone to disease and competition from weeds just like people under stress are less healthy). 3. Pre-emptive strikes with weed-, pest-, and funguskillers to protect valuable crops produces just the right conditions for the development of resistant strains of weed, insect or fungi.
4. At the same time the use of more genetically uniform varieties of cereal plant (so that growth patterns are more predictable) makes it less likely that the crop plant can develop its own resistance to disease organisms.
In the interest of clearing the land so that machinery can roll freely across it, the landscape is made monotonous while priceless and an unfavourable com-