Biofuel vs Food

The vast majority of the worlds grain crops are grown to feed meat animals, adding biofuel crops to the mix will indeed decrease available arable land for food crops further. However, unlike a change to biofuels, decreasing meat eating takes a much bigger commitment and some enlightenment from the first world consumer.

The pragmatist in me says that people are stupid and lazy and not willing to change unless forced to or it is so easy they don't notice the change (like the change from putting your rubbish in one bin to putting it in two - ostensibly 'recycling'), or giving up smoking because it has become practially publically banned. so chagning to biofuels would be a relatively socially simple undertaking if the technology we available 'off-the-shelf'.

The idealist in me says that people are basically good and given the facts, would take those lifestyle changes they are capable of it is good for the community and socially acceptable to do so. Being vegetarian becomes more socially acceptable every day, especially since the trend is reinforced by health warnings on meat eating and the other environemtnal damages it causes - deforestation, land conpaction, water wastage, effluent pollution, cruelty of factory farming etc.

In addition, India at least, already has declining local food production where land is bieng taken over by corporations to grow cash crops like palm oil. Subsistence local food production is the most efficient way to feed people - any move to globalise a crop grown for whatever reason (meat, fuel, palm oil, sugar, chocolate, coffee etc), is bound to lead to inequities at a local scale. In addition, industrialised agriculture is rather inaccessible means of production for the poor given the expensive inputs (infrastructure, fuel, machinery, genetically modified crop seeds, pesticides and herbicides, storage faciltiies etc) hence one big company has the advantage over unorgansied smaller groups of farmers.

As Communard points out, the only fair and equitable food production system needs be locally organised in a horizontal manner: farmers do already form co-ops to combine their power against multinationals, but communites need to do so too - community gardens are a start.

Bio-fuels are still carbon based, so when we burn them we produce carbon emissions, which still add to the greenhouse effect. But it's mitigated because growing the crops also absorbs that carbon. Just gotta get that 'balance', yea.

Capitalist society will need to go 'green' to survive. But just because the consumables aren't 'dirty' won't mean they aren't exploitative. Corporate colonialism will still see the resources of poorer countries exploited. The difference will be that the types of resources will change (including water, land, but still labour). European based organic chocolate & coffee companies have already been exposed using indentured labour in Africa.

But I have no faith in a 'collapse' bringing about the best in people. Without an active, organised and focused anarchist movement to fill that 'power void', it's back to various forms of warlords.

To speculate, in Australia they are most likely to come from the organised crime sector, the biggest being the police force, rationalised as defending 'law and security'.

I have to confess to feeling similarly, looking forward to a catalystic energy crisis that will change on mass the focus of the first world. I would sometimes longingly imagine a world of discomforting questions that would make people 'wake up' from the warm comfortable slumber we enjoy in the first world. But then I wondered if there is secretly alot of people doing the same, waiting for the crisis and the inevitable ingenuity and community mindedness that springs up in quest for viable survival. Pipedreamish and rose tintedly remembering the blitz or the great depressions solidarity and solutions. Good old 'Mateship'. And I wondered how all of those people might respond if viable alternatives are presented and engineered before a crisis point is reached. What if there was already infrastructure for answering and facilitating those difficult questions? Really alternative alternatives that are non threatening to a persons perhaps capatalistically founded values, and that they can embrace now, without requiring them to undergo a fundamental shift in their cultural norms that have shaped the current imbalance?

There is going to be a crisis, and the values that shape and drive the crisis need to be changed, but if all people can actually see as alternatives is biofuel and corporations delivering the solutions then they can not be expected to all of a sudden drop their former trust in these promises and expectations to embrace an uncertain revolutionary conflict.