Syndicate: mailradek no. 16 (on "green revolution")

[Oleg Kireev <kireev@glasnet.ru>]

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        				text no. 74
       			15.03.1999
        What was the "green revolution" promising in the 50s? 
First, it was promising to industrialize the agriculture and cattle 
breeding thanks to the successes of scientific, technologic and 
engineering practices; especially the industrialization of the 
agriculture would be successful through elaborating new ways of the 
tillage ground restoration and fertilization. Second, that the optimal 
plants will be introduced due to the successes of biology, genetics and 
new food technologies. These ideas of the "green revolution" did really 
pass the examination in the course of the 60-s and proved to be 
effective.

But a very few people can benefit from such effectivity now. The "green
revolution" methods have not been satisfactory enough in the light of the
recent population growth - more than 4 billions (and it will increase 
up to 6 billions very soon), because there's still a need to
expand new fields for crops, to use the fertilizers more and
more, and there's no cnance in feeding 6 billion people without
that. And since there will be more than 6 billions very soon it
becomes clear that the "green revolution" fails, it's
clear there's a need for some other revolution of some other color. This
revolution may turn out to be really terrible. The contemporary data from
fieldwork studies shows: the industrial methods of the ground cultivation
finally lead to its inevitable destruction, however refined the methods of
the cultivation might be, and an increase in new fields of cultivation will
also provoke global disbalances. Definite climat difficulties do already
show there's a beginning of something of this sort, especially in 
conjuction with other geophysical problems.

Recommendaions given by "serious" biologists seem to
be really strange. Contrary to all achievements of our civilization ("green
revolution" is just one of them), contrary to the XX century's opinion on
the agricultural and agrarian population and its role in employment
numbers, contrary to the fact that the number of people in agriculture in
the industrial countries falls and falls, - contrary to all these facts
some people like Zhores Medvedev propose to accept the less industrial
methods which seemingly can keep the natural resourses untouched and to
increase the number of people employeed in the agricultural sector. It means
to come back to the situation from which the culture has been escaping
during the last 150 years.

But some authors like Zhores Medvedev claim the market economy doesn't have
any mechanisms to stimulate such a process - a process of
de-industrialization in the agriculture and of the huge number of people to
work within the agricultural manual labour. They just claim it will 
decrease the prime cost of the agricultural product, soften the empolyment 
problem, and that fields and flora will suffer less. It means to jump into 
the early agrarian civilizatian from the early industrial. That's what the 
scientific-technical dreams of the XX century intellectuals have become.

Does it mean that intellectuals made a circle in their development and
returned to the pure conservatist positions? May be. But the data these
investigators show forces us to reflect on it anyway. And if the market
economy can't help in creating such an industrial, neo-early-agrarian newly
organized societies it will be done with the use of non-market mechanisms,
i.e. dictatorship. Imagine such a dictatorship: it looks like... the red
khmers. So, it's no solution. For there's only one solution: we do not need
these new billions of population. Those which already exist are quite
sufficient, I suppose.
                                                V.B.

(to be continued with V.B.'s explanation of what he understands as a
demographic crisis)


INFO: Krasnodar case continues. One of the prisoners, Maria Randina, is
released 
and stays in Krasnodar, two others (including pregnant Larisa Shiptsova) are in 
the jail. The Moscow anarchist-syndicalist group refused to participate in the 
campaign for their release claimimg that Shiptsova's ideological position is
not 
sufficiently correct. I think, this is loathsome.

An anti-fascist music festival "Rot Front" took place in Saint-Petesbourg at 
May 8-9 organized by the local "Knives and forks" and "Dolby systemu" crews. It 
was followed with the conference and anti-fascist demonstration.

A novel "Mud" by Dmitri Pimenov is published in Moscow by "Gileia"
publishing house.









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