Agriculturaly Supported Communities - An Idea for Real Change

The "Land is Ours" is a slogan with many different meanings. For some it is a claim to the right to an affordable small holding, for others it is a challenge to the rich (who can in all honestly claim "the land is ours"), but for few does it mean what it should mean: that the land of this place is for, and is the responsibility of,  the people of this place. Perhaps the reason that notions of egality struggle to find place in the land rights debate is that the process of developing political awareness in a world that is so convoluted in its dishonesty is like peeling an onion. Not only does it make you cry, there is always a point of deeper understanding beneath another false assumption.

In our age one of the great lies of the western world is that pensions can provide most people with twenty years of relative comfort in old age, one generation after the next. This point does not apply to the basic state pension paid for by current contributions from workers, but to the idea that most people can and should pay into a savings scheme and so gain a right to bigger cut of the world's productivity. Few reflect that the billions paid into pensions are the same billions that bought privatised utilities, the same billions that financed Private Finance Initiatives, the same billions that bought securitized mortgages, invested in hedge funds and private equity companies and the same billions that have been systematically defrauded by the finance industry to pay for massive bonuses. Governments and the finance industry have known for years that pension funds were a problem. Over and again governments have looked for ways of passing tax money and inflated returns to pension funds. They could have financed hospitals and schools and trains much more cheaply with direct investment, but by borrowing from the pension funds they were able to ensure that tax payers money would flow into these funds for years to come. They sanctioned high rail fares and utility bills for the same reason. The sad truth is that there are very few investment opportunities that can realistically be so wonderful that they can fulfil the promises made to investors. Pensions are more like a tax paid to the finance industry.

All this constitutes a great miss-selling of investments. It has been the process through which disposable income has been channelled away from giving people a real choice about their future. On the one hand it has taken the money they might have deployed more usefully and on the other it has created an urgent need for big business and governments to create investment opportunities that at least appear to be viable. Ultimately though the promises of the pension funds can only be fulfilled by exploiting low paid workers, both at home and around the world and by exploiting the environment and natural resources. It makes a complete nonsense of any idea of sustainability and social and economic fairness.

Looking back in history, the transition from the exploitation and unjust power distribution of the feudal system and imperialism did require benign state intervention. When the large majority of people are oppressed  by poverty there is only limited scope for self help without government support, but that does not mean that there is much positive about replacing subservience to capitalist exploitation with dependence on the state. When, however, people are easily persuaded to relinquish that part of their income not needed for basic survival to a combination of frivolous consumption, excessive tax and false promise investments they become complicit in their own enslavement. The high returns on investment needed to sustain this deceit require that nations like the UK maintain large aggressive military systems as an explicit threat in international relations. They require establishing a network of secret, unregulated tax havens to serve as a system of financial piracy, channelling wealth from developing countries to the City of London. Maintaining the stable power hierarchy is more the aim of policy than the enrichment of the few, although the two are hardly in conflict. This objective is served by high tax on middle income workers and the channelling of some of this money to agricultural subsidies that ensure that land prices are high and that most of the land is held by a wealthy and powerful minority who identify strongly with both state and corporate interests.

This reality invites a very practical revolution. People should stop paying into their pension funds and start to invest in making their own lives more sustainable, more ethical and more secure. This requires a self-help land reform revolution at the end of which we could say with honesty "the Land is Ours".

Even in an age where individualism appears to have triumphed as the corporate world's unit of consumer vulnerability, the household remains in reality the basic unit of society and it is action at a household level that is required. Food, water, energy and to some extent clothes and entertainment are purchased and consumed by households, as too, by definition, are houses themselves. It is therefore households that take action to be greener, to buy fair trade, grow their own vegetables, prepare food and so on. There are though quite serious practical, cultural and financial limits on how far most households, particularly those with school age children, can change the way they source the things they need and how they live so as to live more cheaply and with less negative impacts. As anyone who has tried to live in a small town or village without a car will know, it is easy to feel that you are an anti-social lift bludger who selfishly deprives their children of access to their friends and more distant out of school activities. Not buying from supermarkets can be an expensive luxury. Turning your front garden into an allotment can test the understanding of neighbours. Even getting house insulation up to standard can be a squeeze on tight family budgets, let alone fitting solar thermal panels on the roof. When these factors flow together it can be easier to just accept the guilt, do the recycling (even when you know that some items don't really get recycled or re-used) and to console ourselves that others are not changing their lives either. However, if hundreds of households in the same area were to embark on a journey of change together then things might really start to change.

At the heart of the household is food. Taking food under household control is the key issue that unlocks the rest. Delegating food to corporate interests is perhaps the single most dis-empowering thing that people do and taking food back is the way to get the power to make other empowering changes. Food requires land and labour and these are the resources that households with working adults are usually lacking, but rather than using savings to address this most people give their savings for corporate investment. They need a sensible, practical and viable way to direct their savings to where the money can give them the benefit of the land and labour they don't have without losing responsibility and control over the food supplies they depend on. Thy also need ways of saving money on other areas of household expenditure so that they can afford the additional costs that good, local food usually incurs.

This can not be done alone. Households need to work together. This can be very difficult, because inter personal relationships are rarely easy and many have learnt the hard way not to mix friends and money, however this is largely because when time, money and effort are involved there is a need for the right structures to help us manage. This points to a need for working on a large scale.

Working on quite a large scale is also required for other practical reasons. If someone is earning a living growing vegetables, keeping poultry, or dairy or growing cereals, how much do they need to produce to be viable even if they are getting a retail price? The answer to this is obviously variable. Growing vegetables for one hundred households can support one family of growers, but to grow cereals or maintain a dairy would not be viable without a market of nearer five hundred households, even if the work were divided between a number of farmers, due to the cost of capital equipment. It would therefore not be unrealistic to think in terms of five hundred households needing to work together to purchase the land that they would need to meet most of their household food needs. The amount of land involved would need to be about an acre per household or five hundred acres.

Large farms under a single management are however not a good idea. People don't like working as farm labourers as much as they like to be responsible for their own farms. A five hundred acre farm producing a wide diversity of seasonal products and with on-farm processing would require a large amount of skilled and knowledgeable labour. It would not be realistic to ask those involved to commit themselves to this work, but that they had the freedom and security that goes with running your own holding. To produce the food required would involve the work of upwards of twenty people, including such processing as the making of dairy products, jams, juices, beer, cider wine and bread. A farm managed for this purpose would therefore best be divided into at least ten smaller holdings.

Making a living from small farms is notoriously difficult. Three particular problems are common: the farms are under-capitalised and so difficult to manage, they struggle to secure markets for their produce at a fair price and they lack economy of scale. In addition the work and location can be very solitary making it that much harder if things are not going well. There is a large amount of regulation, particularly for livestock and this brings both expense and a pressure to conform to what often is pointless, irrelevant interference. A strong cluster of holdings with access to a secure committed market and the necessary capital investment could avoid these problems or at least be better able to cope.

Imagine then that five hundred household in or around a rural town were to embark on a revolutionary adventure. Following meetings and parties to build a shared vision, they commit themselves to a promise: Each household commits to either invest £10,000 or to make monthly payments so as to repay a loan of this amount off over ten years. This raises £5 Million. This money is then used to purchase the five hundred acre farm. The local council responds to the community commitment and vision by granting all the necessary planning permissions, enabling the construction of a new eco-hamlet with the newly recruited tenant farmers being involved and contributing their own investment into the project. The tenants and the householders develop a contract that involves the householders agreeing to purchase produce at a fair price, the tenants contracting to supply and the householders agreeing a peppercorn rent and making available very low cost loans for the farmers to develop their enterprises. It is then up to the tenants to work out how they will co-ordinate their activities to meet the goal of providing for as many of the needs of the householders as they reasonably can. Meanwhile the householders get on developing other enterprises to meet needs they have in common. A large barn is converted into a store with frozen and refrigerated areas. Bulk purchase of common items enables the co-operative to negotiate good prices on everything from toilet paper, to rice, lentils, coffee and pasta. All the products, including those from the farm are listed on-line where households can place their orders. Each household is supplied with a secure drop off box where a delivery vehicle can place the orders that are all paid for by debit card. The supplying partner is instantly credited, so there is no delay on payment. Once the main food enterprise is established, the co-operative focuses on other ways to save households money. Using the existing expertise in the community, a household maintenance company is formed that also conducts a survey of all the homes. This includes a plumber, electrician and general builder. Again the households undertake to use this business as needed and in return the new business agrees to give its best rates. With a secured bank loan (secured against the farm land) the co -op is able to provide each household with low cost loans to make the houses more energy efficient. Following the purchase of land for a community biofuel woodland many households use the loans to put in combined heat and power pellet burner generators. Discussion on car use needs results in the co-operative purchasing a small fleet of vehicles for shared use. This enables some households to stop owning a car and others to reduce to one vehicle. The co-operative in due course develops its own insurance company that reduces car and household insurance significantly by agreeing to pay the first £3,000 of any claim. After three years the co-operative calculates that as a result of savings that the return on the £10,000 invested is over 15%pa. In addition the households benefit from improved community life and have benefited from access to the farm,s camping and leisure opportunities. Most members feel that they have gained improved social status, with friends, neighbours and family envious of their improved quality of life.

Please leave your thoughts and comments below and email 21stCenturyPeasant@gmail.com if you are interested in this idea. If there is enough interest and offers of help it can be a reality.

The Edge of Tyranny

In this essay I outline the crisis we are in, describing the way we got here and my fear for what happens next

In the 1930’s the collapse of a credit bubble resulted in a strong enough economic collapse that there was radical reform of the finance industry.  The reforms aimed to give government stronger control of credit, so that it was used to finance productive investment, rather than speculation on asset values and projected returns. These systems of credit control were steadily eroded from the mid 1950’s on, in large part because they were based on control of capital flows between countries. In practice it was unrealistic to have controls on the primary trading currencies. As the offshore banking of US dollars, in particular, expanded, so too did the opportunity to undermine the controls on credit put in place in the 1930’s and consolidated at Bretton Woods. This in effect gave rise to the low tax, low regulation, high secrecy jurisdictions often based on former colonial islands. This was no accident, but was actively supported by the Bank of England as a means of stemming the decline of London as a financial centre as finance became dominated by the US. In due course this led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods controls on credit, followed by the end of controls on the movement of capital. By the end of the twentieth century all remaining controls on banks were effectively removed as the US and the UK competed for dominance in global financial markets by offering lower and lower standards of regulation.

As regulation declined, speculation increased, particularly in asset values where speculative investment itself was the driver for higher values. The increased availability of credit enabled real wages to stagnate as workers were encouraged to use their income to finance debt to improve their lives, rather than financing expenditure only from income. Combined with other work place changes, this facilitated the decline of unionised labour. The result was a win for capitalism as more people consumed more while feeling richer if they had property investments. In the background however was the need to keep expanding production and consumption in order to enable the credit to be repaid. As the relationship between savings and credit became uncoupled, assessment of risk, rather than the banks’ capital reserves became the factor limiting the expansion of credit. The systems for evaluating the risks associated with financial institutions and their products had been set up when there was a high degree of effective bank regulation. They were and are, not fit for purpose, with the result that the liabilities held by the world’s leading financial institutions are a time bomb.

After the start of the crisis in 2008 there was a push to get banks into a safer condition by insisting on larger reserves on the grounds that governments and their taxpayers could not withstand covering more losses. There was not however a reintroduction of controls on the banks’ ability to extend credit for speculation rather than for productive investment. Once their economies appeared stable most governments affected by the crisis began introducing austerity measures to decrease government spending so as to repay debts, primarily accrued through bailing out banks and providing an economic stimulus to avoid collapse in the early stages of the crisis. The resulting decrease in demand as jobs were lost and wages were pushed down created an environment where investment in production offered low returns. This effectively has left a vast amount of capital and credit capacity, both in the banking system and the predominantly offshore based shadow banking system looking for a home.

Despite the emergence of China, India, Russia and Brazil as rapidly growing economies, there has to-date been no serious alternative to the US dollar as a reserve and trading currency. Investment in US treasury bonds has therefore remained strong, as they provide the only secure and tradable investment for countries running trade surpluses. The high price of oil and gas, in part driven by speculation, has resulted in vast sovereign wealth funds. Together with the funds of other winners from the bubble and its burst this has created a concentration of power within the financial markets that has no morality and no interest in the lives of people. The institutions involved in the management of this money, together with some of the wealthy individuals, appear to be very deeply involved in manipulating the decisions of political leaders throughout the developed world democracies. In the US this has resulted in the formation of highly militarised state with the most obscenely powerful war machine that has ever existed and a vast network of slave prisons incarcerating a greater proportion of the population than any other regime, either now or in the past. The UK is closely bound to this emerging tyranny. With fears that some countries can not meet the costs of their sovereign debts, particularly in the Euro zone where the tools of economic management are restricted, the effect is to undermine totally the ability of our politicians to take steps to write off debts that can never be repaid and to return the economies involved to proper functionality.

What is happening instead is very alarming. Governments fear unrest at home and their loss of power and influence overseas at a time when access to food, energy and other commodities is becoming increasingly competitive. They are not speaking out against the US, but are keen to be seen as on the same side. They are finding common cause with corporations keen to protect intellectual property assets vulnerable to free distribution on the internet (never mind that the value of these assets has been inflated by copyright protection that is not in the public interest) as they explore how to control the explosion of self education that the internet is enabling. To control unrest governments are engaging in inventing enemies and threats so that they can bring in restrictive laws. This abuse of the law reflects the shift of power away from ordinary people and to those who control wealth.

So what happens next? Will the sand castles of finance be washed away by waves of worthless debt and in the chaos that ensues will order be maintained at the end of a gun with the millions of CCTV cameras managing curfews. Will the views and networks we described ourselves by on Facebook become the evidence for our confessions in night courts. Will our release onto cold streets with our clothes stinking of our own piss and shit and our bodies and minds battered be the expression of how benign is the new regime. Will our young people find some pride in their recruitment to serve the nation either in some overseas horror or in creating order through terror at home as we adjust to the new dark age. And God help you if you are different for the compliance of the masses requires the “thank God its not me” sacrifice of some vilified others.

Or are we better than that. Can the meaning of being educated include the ability to challenge this emerging tyranny? Can we make it clear that this future is not and can not ever be an option? Not for you. Not for me. Not for brown people with beards or for people who protest. Not for anyone. Our politicians must understand that they must turn on the rich and their institutions, not on us. We can cope with the hardship, but only if we know that the power is coming back to us and that the systems that are then put in place are the systems we need to be able to look to our future with hope, confidence and pride.