https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/review-of-anne-applebaums-red-famine-stalins-war-o
This is a fascinating critique of Anne Applebaum's book Red Famine on the Holdomor in Ukraine. I am not taking a "side" here - but one criticism of Applebaum's claim struck me as curious:
Applebaum claims that the government’s procurements to alleviate that shortage “comprehensively destroyed the peasants incentives to produce more grain” (87). Yet later she writes that the 1930 harvest was much larger than the 1929 harvest (161). How could that have happened if peasants’ incentives were “comprehensively destroyed”?
Because crops are planted the season before they are harvested!! That's the same reason the lack of fertilizer now will only be felt next Fall when the harvest is to take place. Some farmers in the U.S. are choosing not to farm since the cost of fertilizer is prohibitive or the fertilizer is just not available. That same crisis is now happening worldwide....
Stalin’s references to mechanized agriculture but dismisses them as a “Soviet cult of science” (87-89), not considering that Soviet leaders and planners were trying to emulate American farming, which was even more mechanized and scientifically based. She does not consider that repeated crop failures, which she mentioned, could have persuaded Soviet leaders that Soviet peasant farming needed to be modernized.12 Rather, she attributes the decision to collectivize agriculture to the 1928 Central Committee plenums that allegedly concluded that peasants had to be “squeezed” and “sacrificed” for industry (90-91). Yet modernizing agriculture was a central issue in those plenums. She never mentions that in 1929, the Soviets established VASKhNiL, the central agricultural research academy, under the leadership of the great biologist Nikolai Vavilov, who did not seek to “squeeze” the peasants.
Well adopting US "combine" technology has also "squeezed" the farmers in the U.S. also - hence the 1980s "Farm crisis" never ended. The median income of farmers in the U.S. is often negative income or just barely a couple thousand dollars! Most farmers are forced to have an "off-farm" job and those are harder to come by these days. So the farm crisis is worse than ever.
WION news just reported how the soybean farm expansion in Brazil has relied on destroying the rainforest - to the extent of some 40% of soybean farms directly destroying equatorial rainforest. This problem was driven by Cargill installing ILLEGAL soybean storage elevators in the rainforest as I reported back in 2006...And so a US private corporation owned by 14 billionaires - the largest private corporation in the world - directly undermines US farmers when Cargill buys up Brazilian soybeans to export to China and Europe as animal feed....
Meanwhile some 25% of the world's freshwater and oxygen is from the Amazonian rainforest that is turning into a carbon emission source due to abrupt global warming and deforestation to grow soybeans! oops... The point being that modernizing farming worldwide is accelerating the ecological crisis....
A good book on this is "Marx Against the Peasants" - as former MIT history professor David F. Noble points out in his Religion of Technology book - Marxism believed in the "edenic respites" of technology (to quote Marx). But ecology has other things in mind.
Professor Michael E. Hudson's critique of modern economics, AI:
". and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018) by economist Michael Hudson examines the history of debt forgiveness from Mesopotamia through the Roman Empire. Hudson argues that ancient societies regularly cancelled debts to prevent economic collapse and debt bondage, a tradition he argues is essential for modern economic health
emphasizes that ecology is a nonlinear S-curve while finance is exponential growth and the true message of Jesus was sin as debt - to reestablish the Good News of debt forgiveness...
Yet she admits that in 1931 there were “bouts of drought,” which is an understatement; even Stalin publicly stated that drought “considerably” reduced the 1931 harvest.14 Russia and Ukraine had a long history of droughts and famines, which she admits (283); how can she know that no one, even peasants, saw the drought as a cause of shortages? In discussing the regime’s decision in spring 1932 to stop the procurements and provide food and seed for the villages to produce a new harvest, she asserts that officials “knew” that “food aid to Ukraine was a tacit admission of Stalin’s failure,” but also “knew” that “catastrophe would follow” if Ukraine did not get aid (173).
Food Aid has been used by the U.S. to create Imperial dependence and it sounds like the same technique was used to try to undermine the Ukrainian peasants. For example Cargill dumped grain into somalia at 1/6th the local food price - I had a published University op-ed exposing this. Cargill has offices in 80 countries and all these offices trade through Switzerland in derivatives as speculative gambling of "futures" - so Cargill made billions from the 2008 global crash.
Obviously if there is a drought but there is also an industrialization process of increasing urban city populations then there is going to be a bad distribution of food to feed the cities at the expense of the suffering rural areas. The cities are relying on an "infinite growth" economies whereas traditional peasants realize that farm crops will have bad years.
Now we realize that the droughts and flooding and extreme weather will increase exponentially as the Ruddiman Hypothesis has been proven correct - the invention of farming triggered abrupt global warming globally.
The review of Applebaum's book in the end blames the peasants for withholding and thus profiteering from growing food - but growing food again is a gamble against the cycles of Nature - the soil loses fertility, the weather can be extreme. Any profits by farmers have to be invested back into planting trees to maintain soil fertility or doing intensive rotational grazing - meaning more land is needed to maintain soil fertility. Farming requires that profits have to be recycled back into Nature - unless we try to rely on synthetic input farming whereby the soil is no longer fertile but dependent on external inputs that just run off into the ocean.
Now even the ocean is being killed off and that's the source of 75% of the world's oxygen - oops. 90% of global warming heat has been absorbed by the oceans and those some 50 gigatons of heat will be releasing back into the atmosphere now as the ocean circulation is shut down.
Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf, is causing what the IEA has called the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.
A fifth of the world’s oil and LNG is normally shipped through this region, with 90% of those supplies going to destinations in Asia. Without these supplies, fuel prices have surged.
Governments around the world have taken emergency actions in response to this new energy crisis, shielding their citizens from price spikes, conserving energy where possible and considering longer-term energy policies.
Even with a two-week ceasefire announced, the energy crisis is expected to continue, given the extensive damage to infrastructure and continuing uncertainties.
Asian crunch
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