318. RICHARD "POL POT" HEINBERG

During his time in power Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian collectivization whereby city dwellers were relocated to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects, conceived as a restarting of civilization in "Year Zero."

--Wikipedia article, Pol Pot

In the Dec. 2007 issue of his Museletter, Richard Heinberg* channels Pol Pot, and gives us his new-age version of the "Year Zero":

Because ecological organic farming methods are often dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture, their adoption will require an economic transformation of societies. The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

[...]

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations from their regional resource base. In some cases, relocation of people on a large scale may be necessary.

[...]

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap food. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.Source

*) For those of you just tuning in to the peak oil issue, Richard Heinberg is author of "The Party's Over" -- a popular peak oil primer. Like a number of others, Heinberg is a fearmonger attempting to advance an extremist agenda under the pretext of peak oil.

by JD