Agrarianism and Star Trek and the EU Common Agricultural Policy
@siderea pointed me to this epic-length tweet thread from Sarah Taber on twitter, about agrarian romanticism in Star Trek here, thank you threadreader
Here is where I admit to having only a passing knowledge of Star Trek, so I can't judge that side of things, but I do think the future agricultural policy questions are interesting.
I mostly agree with most of what she says, like "why is there still monoculture corn in Iowa?" and "How can the Picards get away with inefficient irrigation on a vinyard?" and "how, exactly, are you organizing land ownership and management because this seems less tech-utopia-future-y and more neo-feudalist weird shit?"
So one way you could try to make land ownership egalitarian is to say that the government owns the land and gives it to people to manage for "cultural reasons." This, as Dr. Taber points out, is currently done with "empty" land in the west, and that's how we get Clive Bundy and other people staging armed takeovers of BLM land because someone suggested they should have to pay to graze cattle on government property. So it's...not actually a great idea, and even if it was, why would you be "culturally preserving" corn monoculture?
What's interesting to me is that actually, the European Union & constituent countries do actually provide huge subsidies to their farmers on cultural justifications. As I understand it, the logic is: "we want to have a landscape that's a patchwork of small farms, so we will now try to make sure that's something farmers can do and still make a living."
This also causes problems, like the fact that powdered milk from Europe is sold internationally at below cost of production and makes it nearly impossible for e.g. Mali to have its own dairy industry at all. And I don't really know enough about the details of the various subsidy programs to judge their consequences for social justice or equity and stuff. But for the most part, it has allowed western Europe to keep having landscapes of small farms, with a relatively high diversity of crops when compared to the US.
So far as I've been able to find out, it has literally never, anywhere in the world, been possible to have a secure, not-super-poor standard of living, just from the income earned from a few hectares of staple crops. Not without some kind of subsidy, either from the government or from family members who work off the farm and bring in other money (and health insurance, in the US). And yet people need to eat food. Farmers can't all grow expensive fruits and vegetables that can actually be profitable, someone needs to grow the maize, wheat, rice, etc--the staple grains that in most food cultures make up the bulk of the calories. And those people should be able to live comfortably too. But also we want everyone to be able to buy bread, so we need the prices on those staples to stay low. It's a dilemma.
I'm not sure I have a point here, and I definitely don't have a solution, but the economics of agriculture are complicated and confusing and I don't think anyone really understands them. I definitely don't.
(Also just in general while I'm here: Dr. Taber has a lot of good points, but her experience and her viewpoint skews towards horticultural crops: fruits and vegetables, mostly. So when she talks about farmers and farmworkers, her analysis doesn't always hold for the kind of large-scale field crop operations with low labor demands that produce most of the US's corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.)