Whose life is the most important?

Who should live or die?

We have grown up with the thought that we are all important, and I am still talking about my culture, I don’t know enough about other cultures to make sweeping statements. However, there are rumours of double standards, even here in our so called civilization there is a debate about whether everybody has the same rights to life or choices in their own care.

There are rumours of some elderly and/or disabled, not being given the same treatment in hospital as the young and abled. Arguments on the very premature and even the right of having children. Choices being made, without our consent, on the rights which  individuals / society have over our lives. I believe the consensus would be, that we are all entitled to live. This idea of the equality of all persons is relatively new in our history and has been hard fought for. It flourishes now in this land in a climate of certainty and social cohesion.

But in a climate of uncertainty and anarchy, what then? In the Sefuty Chronicles what would those settlements decide when it comes to making choices of food distribution. Back to the basics of survival.

If food is limited, should people who cannot, or will not, pull their weight in the manner of work, be looked after by others. The old, infirm,or very young, for instance?

Are all children wanted, should population controls be put in place, a limitation too how many or when they are allowed to be born?

If food is limited who should receive rations? Are women as bearers of children and so the future, worth more than men with their strength to provide protection and work the land?

Just how many children are needed to keep a population stable, when each year' rates harvest , illness and accident rate is uncertain?

How many of the old with the knowledge and skills are needed to pass on valuable information?

There comes a point in this scenario I set up in The Sefuty Chronicles, when some kind of population control is needed. I had many isolated settlements, no interaction with others, closed societies abandoned by any kind of central government. But all with a history and culture of modernity behind them. How in the extremities of survival would they choose?

How would they divide, first the food still in homes and shops, second what they can provide for themselves?

 To the men because they need the muscle power, 

to the women because they need to be healthy to nurse the children, 

 OR

to the children for their successful growth?

I remember, decades ago in the 60s, when TV showed pictures of a famine for the first time, hundreds of bone thin refugees, having made their way to a camp for help. Pictures of starving babies being lovingly cared for. An angry refugee male arguing that it was madness to feed the babies, the young adults needed the food, what use to a dying society to have well fed babies? What use was a baby, what could they do? Nothing, until years had passed. It was shocking to hear yet even then in my youth I could understand his logic and anger I cared for children, it was my chosen career for decades and what he said was against every fibre of my being, but I could understand.

Some societies in a famine will abandon the child (anathema to us) but, it does actually make sense, if you keep adult men and women alive more babies can be conceived when the famine has passed. If you keep children alive and let the adults die the baby on its own won’t survive. This chicken and the egg again. Other societies have many children, as an insurance against old age and infirmity, someone always there to help you stay alive.

So decisions about food divisions and population control would be be needed in my dystopian world. It is not sensible to trust to luck against natural disasters. 

Children apart, what happens to the sick, injured and old. What worth do they have? If the sick cannot work or contribute to survival are they abandoned/killed - if an injury is not so great, does everyone else carry them until they are back working alongside again? The old, are they useless mouths,a repository of knowledge and advice or cherished parents? Do our modern ethics, so hard won over the centuries, or our ancient religious beliefs, get used as our guides, or would they be abandoned to the even older instincts for self survival.

I thought long and hard about these choices, came up with a few variations for different communities. Impossible to know how any of us would react to supreme extended disaster We all hope we would maintain our moral standards.

Would we?

Could we?

How would you decide?

The magic of seeds, cleverness of mankind

 

Many of you are gardeners; some may even be grander persons working a small holding, a farm.  There are  indisputably many who know so much more than I do on the usefulness of seeds.

I fell in love with this particular magic quite late in life, back in the late 70s after having already fulfilled my first grand ambition in life of travelling around the world.  I had come home determined to grow some herbs and create beautiful soap -  don’t ask, another tale altogether - my parents were gardener’s but more of the plants-man type than the seed growing ones. In fact they mostly cursed seeds , the most likely offenders being those prolific weeds which seem to pursue personal vendettas against plants-men.(please do not respond with PC speak - man/men as in human kind)

I opened a packet of lavender seeds - tiny insignificant seed and scattered them forth onto small pots of earth. I followed instructions - I am good at written instructions - and waited impatiently.

Everyone warned me they may not all grow, maybe I’d be disappointed.

I am willing to swear they did all grow, dozens and yet more dozens of tiny lavender bushes peeped out at me.  Seeds, earth and water - now if that’s not magic I don’t know what is.  Yours truly was hooked on a line stretching to the next century.  Flushed with success I threw seeds at every available patch and pot of earth, they grew, they grew. Not all with the 100% of those first but they hustled and bustled their way to the sunshine. I am still indulging.

I needed to know more, I read everything I could find on the seeds, the growing the tending. It led me of course as all my wanders appeared to do down the path of the world, the globes, the planet.  Seeds I found were the staff of life not bread, as I had always been led to believe. 

No seeds, no life.

Well of course it isn’t that simple I know, I know, no need to chastise me.  After I could say it about water

No water, no seeds, no life

Or oxygen and carbon dioxide and warmth and. . . . and . . . and. . . but you get my drift.

In the wonderful way time elongates back into the mists of caves and bearskins I discovered those wonderful heroes of mine (early man) knew all about seeds, all about the tending the harvesting the use of them. 

Clever, clever, early man.

When did the apes notice the effect of seeds and the next meal I wonder?

   

When did early man suddenly decide to crush some seeds, leave them lying around and then cook the rising concoctions  and slice their bread, I wonder?

         When were we ever so clever again, as early man was?

So we have a magic seed to rival Jack’s - happy and content in which ever patch of land it had opened roots. Bathed in sunshine and just enough warmth to suit whatever plant it is destined to become.  Stop for a bit, think about it, a tiny seed with the whole of the grown plant within it.  Magic.

But we know the climate has changed many times, so those warm lands may be icy one day, those icy wastes of now may have been tropical forests at some time.  Now here’s the real magic, those insignificant tiny cases of life are not just that - they have more magic hidden within those casings than we can ever dream of.

They can adapt, they can change their DNA to suit themselves. 

Well, yes, we can do that, but we are big, we are supposedly sapient - although I do have my doubts on that point:)  Seeds are just things to curse because they have decided the rose garden is the correct place for them

They adapt and early man noticed this, they gathered the strongest of their early crops each year to sow again the next and over millennium the plants being grown for food changed almost beyond recognition, always suiting their conditions.  The magic of the seeds and the cleverness of early man combined.

Now, I fear, the cleverness of man has begun to tamper rather than go with the flow.  Now it is not enough to take those best suited to conditions but to take them and ensure their ever changing seeds can no longer change.  Infertile food crops? What is that about?

Apart, of course, more money for huge companies who control the seeds. As weather and soil conditions change, where are the generations of seeds which magically adapt. 

To breed super crops to feed the billions seems like such a good idea.

To deny farmers the ability to find the new stronger generations is not.

To cut costs to the farmer and thereby supposedly the cost to the billions sounds laudable but

To create miles of mono-culture, which can be devastated in one new disease is not.

Late, very late in the day, seed banks are being set up as insurance against the worst, however, they are climate controlled by man made means - if the lights go out what then? Small voices sounding sense, warning of trouble ahead, battle against company’s greed and self righteous mantra of feeding the starving millions.

At the moment there is more than enough food being grown in the world to feed everyone. 

The millions starve because they have no power

They starve because those that have, waste/throw away over half the food produced

They starve because of our ignorance and greed.

Let those magic seeds feed the world, they can do it, if inherited and learnt wisdom are allowed to tend them. Let man’s knowledge help but it should always be partnership between magic and man. 

Without the humble seed:food security

Then we were taken to the seed bank. Well, it was, as I could see Ellen thought it would be, the highlight of the day. The Security was intense but the results were well worth it. It may not seem that exciting to look at, not like the Library, but oh … all those drawers filled with the future of life. Many of them no longer have a niche Outside to grow in but still the Scientists germinate and grow them to collect the fresh seed and store it for that magical ‘one day’ that we all know we’ll never see.        Ellen’s Tale by Alberta Ross 2009

From the very beginning of The Sefuty Chronicles food security has been at its heart. Sefuty itself stands for it; Se = security, Fu= food. No matter what happens to us, the world, in the future, food security is still the most vital aspect of living. Always has been and always will. I have been running a short series here of collapsing civilisations, when the lack of food security has driven the demise of mighty empires and nations. We mess with food supplies at our peril.

I have blogged before about how precarious our hold on this security is. Natural disaster, or man made one. The global economy binds us all into the world in a frightening way. I cannot quote other countries, but this small overcrowded island is self sufficient only to the tune of 58.9%, despite the government of the day, back after the 2nd world war, declaring we should become self sufficient in the matter of food we import. We have 63+ million people (and rising) to feed and have areas already designated ‘arid’ zones - when I was at school ‘arid’ zones belonged somewhere overseas. Okay, most of us here could survive on half what we eat now if something drastic happened, but for how long, and how well?

All food comes from seeds. Even the meat and milk, grass feeds the animals who provide it. Our wood and many of our fabrics come from seeds. Life on earth as we know it would not have flourished, nor will it, without the humble seed. So the news this week that the EU - up to its tricks again- is thinking of banning heirloom seeds comes as another of those ‘When will we ever learn’ - ‘Doesn’t history teach us anything’ moment. This country doesn’t have to go far back in our history to remember the Great Hunger in Ireland when a million died of starvation when the potato crop they relied on failed, a million more emigrated. If our conveys had not prevailed during the second world war we probably would not, as a country, have survived.

Mankind’s stupid gene means we don’t ever learn our lessons, how can we be so clever and yet so stupid at the same time?

The Monk's Tale: food security part 4

To 'world build' the background of The Sefuty Chronicles I have had to trash it – these wanderings through history , which are selective I confess:) are showing how easy it is to trash a world.  We humans are past masters at the process.

When the Romans fell into nothingness so too did their great Empire – soldiers deserted when the money dried up, city folk vanished back to the land. Western Europe lost its network of trade routes, its security and its granaries. With no security on land or sea the great merchants sold up and folded their wings, no trade and the non producing cities died slowly.   Starvation and disease followed hunger, farmers eked out precarious livings on used up and mismanaged soil.  It is estimated that the population of Western Europe was halved between 200-600 AD.  So how did Europe hoist itself back up over the next few centuries to become the rampaging plunderers of the world?

Around the fourth century A.D. St Anthony rediscovered organic farming. I say rediscovered because of course before large-scale trade had changed the natural order of things all farming was pretty well organic. He was disgusted by the lawlessness and hopelessness of the world, so found himself this little bit of land, in North Africa, with a spring on it. 

Perfect. 

He tilled, sowed and lived off it in harmony with all things, taking nothing from anyone else.

Rather in the way of all these things others who wished to stop the world, get off and live simply and harmoniously, flocked to join him. This movement of St Anthony’s continued a long time. A hundred years after St Anthony had begun his simple life another churchman, Cassian, arrived on the farm so to speak. He was inspired by what he saw and decided to transplant the idea to Marseilles. His intentions may have been pure and good, but this was probably not the best place to set up his simple life. The city was large for the time, had a harbour and prospered after a fashion. Oh, but the doors to the temptation of expansion, ever present.

His community prospered and the idea of a simple life running alongside prayer and devotion caught on. A while later St Benedict, with his own version of the idea, began the Benedictine Order.  Many other orders ran monasteries but possible the Benedictines were the most well known. Saint Benedict changed the regime a little, well quite a lot actually, instead of a very simple monastic life he allowed some luxury as well.  More meals in a day, mattresses to sleep on – actually being allowed to sleep your fill was a new one.  His, were the best of reasons, if hard physical labour is required then adequate nutrition and rest was equally so. 

Good intentions! 

Now all of us can visualise that wide straight path, gleaming with bright optimistic paving, yes that one, leading straight down to hells fiery depths!

To be fair to Benedict and all other monks, their lives were a model to be emulated. The tools available at that period meant that sewing, tilling and harvesting were all backbreaking jobs. And, because of the decline in agriculture after the Romans collapsed, the land had gone back to the wild. They hacked out field after field, from grasslands, marshlands, and woodlands. To begin with it was a self-sufficiency exercise. To enable themselves to live in these communities and pray for themselves and others, they needed to be self sufficient.They worked hard and industriously.

After the first one was established then, of course, when the second one started the first would help them and send foodstuffs to them. To keep them going until they had built up supplies for themselves. The second would help the third and so forth. In a very short while they had a nice little network, complete with connecting roads,  monasteries that could be relied on to help each other out in times of need.

They became experts in farming, replacing fertility and good harvests.  They were good. The early monks. Their monasteries attracted not only the local peasantry but younger sons of the well to do.  The middle classes who had no other work to do would gravitate also.  Some good brain power and ingenuity was being harnessed within the monastery walls.

This collecting of brawn and brain was not all one sided.  Those in want were given food and shelter in return for their labour; some were taught trades or other skills.  Indeed our very own Bede, a peasant’s son, was taught his letters and became England’s leading historian and author of the time. Skills came in with these outsiders and, combined with those of the monks, modern technology advanced apace.

The Benedictines spread right across Western Europe, they became very powerful. They had two strands of power going for them. They were industrious, clever and legally keen, making sure that they retained the monopolies for anything that was likely to bring a profit.  They ended up controlling the manufacture and trading of alcohol, the mills, and therefore the staff of life! Also land rents and the trade fairs. They controlled food.

Although they had food security in their hands they had another possibly greater power.  They were in charge of everyone's immortal souls.  If those early visionaries had not set out control Western Europe their descendants certainly ended up doing so.

Another advantage of the monasteries is that unlike the lands of the great and powerful when the monks died the monastery still remained. Never carved up between sons, or dispersed. Therefore over the centuries an amazing amount of money (and with it increased power) built up.

As they grew more successful, they began to force the peasantry off the land, into the cities. They began to look at specialisation; bad move, mono-culture destroys the land! For a while everyone's life was much more pleasant. Such huge surpluses of food were being produced by the very efficient monasteries that even those displaced from the land and sent to the cities could be fed. Populations began to boom. In 650 A.D. the population in Europe had dropped to about 5 1/2 million within 600 years it had risen to approximately 35 million.

Both church leaders and kings began an architectural bonanza, the wonderful cathedrals and palaces we gawk at when doing the tourist bit were financed by the wealth accrued and built by that displaced peasantry.

The old picture begins again; as the food increased, so too did the population. As the population increased the amount of food needed also increased. Whole swathes of land were deforested, tilled and planted. There was less and less time to leave them fallow between growing seasons. Land that had regained its fertility over the centuries since the Romans, purely by being left fallow for so long now began to lose that fertility and, as the soil degraded, harvests plummeted. All that expansion had happened during a warm period in  Europe, so all might well have saved if the weather had continued its kindly way.

By the 13th century Europe was in the grip of raging inflation.  Then, as it is wont to do, the financial system, that was bolstering everything, imploded.

The banks failed.

Maybe still savable? It's a never ending and familiar scenario throughout our history. The warm period that had helped it all happen ended and Europe descended into a mini ice age. A few years of torrential rain rotted harvests, combined with plunging winter temperatures and starvation took over with disease rampaging cheerfully behind. The  European population died in their millions. By the end of the 14th century it is estimated that between 25 and 45% of the population had perished.

Oh dear, but now maybe humanity had learnt their lesson?

Consumerism part of our genetic code?The Romans

Well it could be that not many of you had heard of the Sumerians and their Empire, the Bronze Age was a long time ago after all. But most people, I think, will have heard of the Roman Empire. Moving into the Iron Age they were, in fact, an incredibly successful Empire.

They began small, don't all Empires. Italy didn’t in fact have incredibly fertile land. To feed a growing population those in control looked around for new trading partners. There are some very fertile lands around the Mediterranean Sea, and the Romans decided to go to war to obtain access to them. Well it wasn't that simple of course, I am condensing decades of history into a few paragraphs, and I  am cherry- picking my arguments here. Fighting a number of wars, over a number of years against the Carpathians, Rome gained control of the Mediterranean. This included the amazing fertility of the Egyptian floodplains around the River Nile. The breadbasket of the Mediterranean, as it was to turn out to be.

Much of these years of warfare were in fact waged by the Roman Navy. We don't hear much about the Navy; it is the Roman soldiers marching across the world that lives in our imagination.  The wars were extensive and prolonged. Hundreds, probably thousands, of trees had to be felled to build the ships that were to win the new lands. We know about the dangers of felling too many trees, especially in hilly areas such as Italy!

The Romans at the end of this slaughter had access to better quality grain, wheat, which Egyptians grew well, was more nutritious than the barley that the Romans grew. Grain was the bedrock of any civilization and Rome was no exception. They also could import food from all around the Mediterranean Sea. Enough food for the populace and enough to start accumulating a surplus to strengthen their trade routes. Now speculators moved in, buying up the small scale farms around Rome, dispossessing the peasant farmers, building villas and investing in olive groves and vineyards.  Niche foods, which would obtain large profits.

The farmers migrated to the cities. At one stage, in the first century BC, the population of Rome stood at 1 million. If you consider just this one city and the population, then begin to wonder how all those people were fed. It was a logistic nightmare, but, the Romans were good at  logistics.

They have left their trace in every country they conquered. It was almost a ‘do it by numbers’ operation. They definitely came, saw and conquered. They set up an amazing network of  overland, as well as sea, routes, to facilitate their trading partners. But this was the Iron Age not the steam age. Road haulage was done by oxen and cart, it was slow and dangerous.  Sea transport was totally dependent on prevailing winds and clement weather.   Over land were thieves and bandits, on the seas the danger came from piracy; the problem of bandits and pirates is an age old one. If you can take your food and your luxury goods without any effort, apart from killing a few people, why not?

Another problem Rome had, from the beginning, was that the water approach was very shallow, so the large ships required to bring in huge shipments of grain had to stop at a place Ostia, which is 15 miles from Rome. The large granary ships would stop there, transfer cargo to a flotilla of smaller craft, to finish the journey to the city.  To unload a shipment of a years worth of grain for the city required 4,500 return trips of three days of these smaller boats.

And harvests only occurred once a year, so a  whole years worth of grain had to be brought in and stored.  One of the large granaries indicates that it had 225,000 ft.² of storage space, the Coliseum only had 29,000 ft.² This particular granary was not the only one that the city possessed. Building a granary of this size, which would keep your grain in good condition for an entire year, was in fact quite a feat which for a long time the Romans managed very well. The granary had to be weatherproof, rodent proof, dry and cool, well ventilated and well protected from thieves. Our ancestors from long ago were very clever people.

Of course with the Empire, demand for luxury goods grew. I am almost convinced that consumerism is inbuilt into our genetic code! At one stage Italy was importing more than it was exporting. An imbalance was building up, and a steady stream of silver was trickling outwards paying for goods and reducing the roman treasury.

One of the most desired luxury goods was pepper. As one reads about the history of food exchange and trade one finds these enticing little spices and herbs, that we all use so casually, caused more trouble than you would think they could possibly be worth.

So ships left Rome using wine and timber and olive oil for ballast and returned loaded with pepper. This spice attracted the speculators; huge fortunes were made and destroyed on the back of it. I have a Roman cookery book, I collect cookery books, and pepper seems to be in almost every recipe. I can only think that the normal Roman fare back then was very bland. Nowadays people invest in the banking/financial system – or maybe they don’t after this last fiasco! Back then they invested in olives, wine and pepper.

Rome almost starved many times, at one stage pirates launched an all-out attack at  Ostia, sinking the ships and looting the warehouses, Rome tottering almost to it’s knees from starvation and riot, caused the Senate to pass new immediate laws regarding the control of piracy, not an easy decision as the laws went against the grain of their principles, but what would you do when the city was rioting; more of them then there are of you! These periodic starvations instead of teaching the Romans a valuable lesson in not congregating too many people in one place if you couldn't feed them, just made them march out to conquer more lands.

The collapse of food security was not what brought Rome to its knees. But it was part of the problem. A succession of bad rulers, corruption and unwise decisions. An increasing financial shortfall, all helped as well. Because of their Empire the land around Rome had become heavily degraded, not helped by the stripping of all those trees. This in itself might not have been so disastrous if the farming was still small-scale and the climate was with them. At the height of their power the Romans were living through a very benign warm period of climatic history. During their decline the climate was also declining its pleasantness. The weather became cooler, the growing season became shorter, rainfall decreased. Then if the land had been in good heart, and didn't have the task of feeding millions, disaster might still have been staved off.

When those at the top, who are meant to lead and to organise, would rather play with expensive toys and over indulge on the good life, when the money system goes skew whiff, then the essentials of life soon cease. Armies need paying or they vanish into the mist, the population needs feeding or they drift back to the countryside. Road routes need constant repair, security needs to keep thievery of the highways or the peasants will not risk their lives taking food to the markets. When the markets fail, trade routes crumble.  Those who can, return to the land to scratch out an uncertain future. Empires don't fail overnight it takes time. They grow, they overextend, and then they are ripe for defeat and chaos . . .

Here come the dark ages. . .

Recommended books:

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D.G.Fraser & Andrew Rimas 

A Splendid Exchange; How Trade Shaped the World by William Bernstein

Did it all begin in the Bronze Age?

Food Security part two.

It began a long time ago - humans began this cycle way- way- way back when.  It is a fact that food security actually depends upon a surplus of food. Some of my favourite Neolithic peoples are the Sumerians, from ancient Mesopotamia.  They, at about the same time as the Chinese, developed, what is thought to be, the first stable agricultural system. Around 3500 BC the Sumerians constructed a mesh of dykes/ditches through the swamps of what was to be Mesopotamia. And turned the area into a land of agricultural surpluses.

Agriculture had begun in this area before 7000 BC, in the uplands of the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. After that first ditch had been dug, there were great wheat fields across the land and the first cities that we know off had started to be built such By 3000 BC it was a city of great stone walls temples, and palaces. Ruled by priests and kings. Don't forget, this was way back in Neolithic times.

Growing grains, setting up a network of roads, conquering the sea and establishing trade routes made the area very wealthy indeed. Good on them, you may think. They only had land, water and agriculture and became Empire builders because of it, and because they lacked other vital resources needed for power.  They used their best resource for trade, and did so in an arc which is believed to have encompassed 3,000 miles.  Reaching from Anatolia to near the Indian Ocean and to the present day Indus Valley.

The area became enormously wealthy by trading their food surplus to other areas by their trade routes in exchange for all the pleasures that could be had in the Bronze Age. Such as vital textiles and semiprecious metals, stone and weapons. Records written approximately 2100 BC show that there were shipments of as much as 20,000 litres of grain at a time. That's a lot of grain! With this trading the coastal towns grew, populations increasing, the inland towns became richer. The Mesopotamians had to look after those fields.

A food surplus depends on:

Reliable water sources

Fertile ground: and in those days

Intensive farming with backbreaking work.

That last task very soon fell to the lowest of the low in society and to slaves.

This very early agricultural revolution produced not healthier living as one would suppose but a dip in the quality of the diet compared to that of the hunter gatherers they had been, causing:

Tooth decay

Deficiencies

And stunted growth.

Also in the increasingly crowded towns and cities that sprang up all along the trade routes

Diseases such as TB

Joints and bone disorders, due to the long hours of hard labour

Another consequence of this agricultural revolution was an increase in warfare, as populations grew so more land was needed.  For the defence of land already possesed

  

Standing armies were formed

they could be used to gain more land - by invasion

Empire building began

An underclass was formed as inequalities between the wealthy and the poor, the well fed and the underfed became more common

To control the empires, the armies, the underclass, the slaves, strong dictatorial governments became the norm.

More and more hunter gatherers became agriculturalists, probably because they had no choice. Because the farming communities became aggressive and territorial, gathering food surplus, and invading new lands, enclosing these lands, they either joined or died.

Climate change helped to fuel this revolution as well as destroy it.

Until 8,000 BC this area had been cold and not that promising. Small scale agriculture had been practised here. Then there was a period of wet warmer climate which encouraged excessive growth.

The downfall was caused by various reasons some of which included

Over grazing livestock on the hills

De-forestation on the hills

These two resulted in loosening top soil which was washed down into the canals silting them up. When the rainwater went through this denuded hillside soil it left high sodium levels which dried out in the sunshine of the Middle East into salt deposits on the earth, which blocked vital minerals from being absorbed into the soil.

Between 3000 and 2350 BC Mesopotamia was achieving 2,000 litres per hectare. In 2,000 BC this had dropped to 1,130 litres per hectare. 300 years later it was 370 litres per hectare. The bottom had dropped out of this particular market.

Climate again had helped this fall, between 3,100 BC and 1,200 BC it had suddenly become very hot and dry.

The Sumerians apparently were the first people in history to come to blows over irrigation structures, although we only believe they were the first because they left written records of disputes.  Who knows what was going on before. A series of tablets have been dug up which record the story of clashes over boundary marking canals. The owners and their followers waged war over this dispute, slaughtering and vandalising in an ever increasing vendetta.

The intensive farming, deforestation, and vandalization of the fertility of the soil all led to the Sumerians downfall. They had a good innings, but once food supplies began to dry up they lost their power, began to lose their riches, and were ripe for a takeover by someone else more powerful.  

Eat live insects, eat human flesh?

Food Security and the part it will play in our future.

I am often asked why Sefuty? and have explained that is standing for food security – se and ty = the security bit and fu = food.  Why food security as a title for a series?  Well, it started as a short story, as I have said before, but when I realised it was going to be long and I had to find a title for it Sefuty sounded about right. The whole premise of this world I created, the earth in the near future, 2100s, is about the effect extreme climate change has on food supplies.

The world goes to war over the resources needed for life.  We may think it will be fossil fuel shortages that will cause our downfall, and so it will but not so much because we cannot heat or cool our homes or drive our cars, but because food production globally is tied so tightly into intricate knots with fossil fuel/technology.  The global population will crash if anything cuts the knots.  We cannot feed 6-9billion people without technology. 

I have been interested for many years now over feeding the world.  Food is of interest to me.  I have travelled widely and enjoyed the different cultures and been intrigued as to how closely bound each is to its own food stuff.  To the extent that some, that are starving, will not eat a food offered if it is not culturally theirs.  Who will eat a live insect?  Well I hope I would, if I was starving, but the taboos are hard to break through.  Eat human flesh? (if dead of course!) many will not, even to save themselves from the same fate.  To be able to overcome the bodies natural instinct for self survival needs a mighty strong force.  That something as basic as food can do this I found fascinating.  The other side of the coin is that since mankind began we have been lusting after ‘other’s’ foodstuffs.  Global trade began very early.  We are complex and odd creatures.

I have read extensively on and around the subject of food before, during and after taking a food science degree in my 40s.  Enjoying the books on the history of trade, an extension on a life time interest in travel and foreign parts. Discovering those Neolithic traders (amazing folk they were).  It became obvious that although trade helped to spread humanity around the world it also caused some horrific behaviour from Homo Sapiens. War, enslavement, torture being the worst. Because of course trade encouraged greed and don’t we all know why greed is quoted as a deadly sin!

Huge profits could be made, especially in foodstuffs – the spice wars were vicious and caused ethnic cleansing before the phrase had been invented, because the wealth to be made was tremendous – where there is rich profit there are speculators.  Where there are rich profits there will be the exploited. The more I read over the years the more the patterns grew.  The more convinced I became that we were repeating the pattern this time on a massive scale.  Even back 40 years ago, I thought that the starving of the world would be what brings us to our knees.  The poor, the discarded, those who have nothing left to lose.  Now I see tensions rising and spilling over.

I want to present a short summary of our history in the next couple of blogs, showing what the pattern is like.  Explain why the climate change behind The Sefuty Chronicles is about food more than it is about defunct air conditioning units.

Who is to live and who to die?

So okay – in my Sefuty Chronicles’ world I trashed the planet and caused devastating wars over diminishing resources!  I divided the survivors into three.

 1)      Those who made it into purpose built cities before the doors shut (for ever). 
2)    Those who hid behind rings of land mines on the promise that they would be rescued soon! (50 years) 
3)     Those who managed neither and were left to survive or not by their own ways.

I have not written about the whole world, other countries are mentioned but these Tales are a localized affair set in a locale I know reasonably well, and so some solutions may not ring likely to other nations.  Bear with me, the problems are still the same.

Whether or not the climate change disaster was caused by mankind or by natural changes matters not when the world is home to billions of our own kind.  We don’t really care if the ancient life forms millions of years ago went through the same and became extinct.  Now it us and it is  personal.  9 billion die before my Tales begin as one old man put it

‘By the time it was finished, the victors of the world stood on a mound of billions. We committed the greatest genocide of all time.  To save ourselves we killed them all.’

He was by anyone’s standards a good man before the Wars, and he struggled to do good after the Wars.  But things had changed. 

The next problem I had with this new world I was inventing was by how much would our nature change when the chips were truly down. How much does our civilized code depend on the basic security of food, health and shelter. Does the fact that the fall from our pampered world to bare basics would be huge make any difference to that code.

Each of my groups of survivors would need to tackle their changed lifestyles in different ways and this took much pondered time.  Studying historical events, anthropological theories, listening to people and tossing the mix together.  Testing my ideas.  I enjoyed it and what does that say I wonder?!

Population Control

Food Security

Law and Order

All these are the matter for heated debate and none more so than population control.  You scoff, why is it needed if the worlds population has crashed to Neolithic numbers? Well in the first two books of the Chronicles the City folk have no land to grow food, the mined areas have no room for expansion. Population control and food security walked hand in hand.

Population control is an emotive subject, complete with a dark history of coercion and eugenics, which has rendered the management of it almost a taboo subject.  There have been world summits over the years.  Many strands mooted as to how best manage the worlds rapidly climbing population little has happened, because we are scared of the subject. (a subject for another day) 

In my diminished world some of the problems remain. 

*  If there is not enough food or water who decides on who has the right to it?

*  If survival depends on the co-operation of the many what place is there for the ones who cannot/will not contribute?

*  If survival depends on the next generation who is to be allowed the right to produce that generation?

*  If medical expertise has vanished who is to be saved and who not?

*  Do people make their own rules or try and follow the old rules?    

You can see some potential trouble brewing in these questions. I wandered into murky depths and had to tease out some moral and ethical as well as practical solutions. 

World Building:Food Security

When I took finger to keyboard to write a short story it never crossed my mind that first it would become a full length novel or that it would be the first of a few. Neither did I realise that I would be writing about so many modern day conundrums. The list is formidable: from genetic manipulation to food security and taking in population growth/control, climate change, globalisation and the modern world with all its toys.

It is fair to say I am interested in all of them and hold, as do many others, mixed and sometimes conflicting views on most of them. On many of the above subjects I have come to decisions but don’t see how anything will be managed, others I know ‘I shouldn’t’ but find I ‘still do’. Life is never easy, I envy the purists in any discipline for their fortitude but I am full of human frailties!

The ‘Sefuty’ in the ‘Sefuty Chronicles’ stands for food security in this post apoplectic world I have invented. ‘Se’ and ‘ty’ are the first and last parts of security and the ‘fu’ for the food in a manner that so many pronounce the word. Of all the problems that may, or may not, face the world I feel that food security is the most pressing. Solve that and much good would ensue and not just because we would not be at the mercy of the markets. Many disputes and wars would cease! Hopefully, resources that are fast running out, such as useable water, would cease to be plundered in a crazy manner, healthcare in so many parts of the world could be afforded, and population would stabilise. Well - these things could happen if there was food security around the world; of course, as with many great ideas such as communism and democracy, if human beings are involved it will probably go wrong!

A cynic? Me? No!

Many decades ago I declared to the world – well family and friends – that I thought our greatest danger lay not in nuclear holocaust but in the movement of the hungry, when they got desperate. I was dismissed as an idiot because I thought both sides having the bomb made us safer; of course, as far as large and nasty bombs are concerned, the goal posts have changed now. However, at the time, I had started out on my travels and was young and impressionable; I journeyed to countries where the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was extreme in a way we hardly know here.

I am talking of the days before rolling news and wars fought and won by TV. Decades ago and even now there is no better way of seeing what hunger, want and despair looks like than by being there. It looks, smells and sounds different in the reality. As we wandered around poverty we were also aware that there was the land, the water and the wherewithal for this not to happen. We were not in any war zones; there a different grim picture was emerging. It was the beginning of learning about politics, local and global, of differing ways of ruling and containing societies. Not a particularly political animal I learnt the lessons very slowly over the intervening years of travel and reading and listening.

Food security is not just a problem for the undeveloped nations nowadays, although they are already suffering from the effects of globalisation and price capping. For us, a small shiver of anticipation occurred when a volcano blew its top on our doorstep. The percentage of food that we consume in this country which starts its life overseas is staggering; the amount that relies on crossing boarders and seas to reach us should be real cause for concern for all of us. We worry over foreign countries owning our gas and water, of imports of coal from thousands of miles away. Worry over food supplies. Worry over the declining agriculture industry here, of the closing of farms, the drain of farming youngsters into cities. We could live without the gas – I don’t want to mind – we cannot live without food and a population at 60 million + and rising living in these islands, it is time to be afraid, be very afraid.

Parts of this blog I have posted before in different places but it shows some of the thoughts that have fed into the creation of this new world I have created for the Sefuty Chronicles.

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