Low Tide Workload

Exploring a port/fishing city yesterday, we arrived while tide was out - and witnessed this strenuous procedure of villagers, people coming into the city from outlying islands to sell their wares, as well as fisherman with their morning catch - walking barefoot and hauling heavy loads through the thick mud, to get from their boats to the shore or visa versa.

I like the starkness of it and the reflection of the people and carts in the wet sand as well as the movement from the boats towards us.

Robert Watcher said:

Exploring a port/fishing city yesterday, we arrived while tide was out - and witnessed this strenuous procedure of villagers, people coming into the city from outlying islands to sell their wares, as well as fisherman with their morning catch - walking barefoot and hauling heavy loads through the thick mud, to get from their boats to the shore or visa versa.

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Robert,

Look at it another way. These folk work hard but the bring in food for others and end up, being able to buy my gasoline for their boats and providing, (albeit just sufficiently), for their families.

Imagine if one landed 100 folk from Toronto, at random, in this spot, they would be hard-pressed to survive!

Who will feed us?

Peasants are the main or sole
food providers to more than
70% of the world’s people, and
peasants produce this food with
less (often much less) than 25%
of the resources – including
land, water, fossil fuels – used
to get all of the world’s food to
the table

The Industrial Food Chain uses
at least 75% of the world’s
agricultural resources and is a
major source of GHG emissions,
but provides food to less than
30% of the world’s people.

For every $1 consumers pay to
Chain retailers, society pays
another $2 for the Chain’s
health and environmental
damages. The total bill for the
Chain’s direct and indirect cost
is 5 times governments’ annual
military expenditure.

The bottom line: at least 3.9
billion people are either hungry
or malnourished because the
Industrial Food Chain is too
distorted, vastly too expensive,
and – after 70 years of trying –
just can’t scale up to feed the
world.

http://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus

Asher and James - I respect your insights. Thanks


——

The harsh judgement against big agri food production is beyond my knowledge to adequately critique.

However, I strongly suspect that yields per acre and efficiency in Israel with crops that are matched to the soil and the water is drip fed and carefully controlled. I doubt that any peasant farming could match that efficiency.

I areas with brute force farming with company owned pest control chemical resistant variants, they are in s vicious cycle of fertilizer and weed killer dependency and I have no idea what the resource use economics are.

I am open to learning but the statement you have referenced seems, at first glance, a rather extreme!


Asher