F.A. Farm

The December 23rd Seattle PI had a picture of a Zimbabwean farmer who was living on a "meager diet of vegetables, wild fruit and insects." This farmer's plight was the result of Mugabe's dictatorship and seven years of hunger. The photo got me thinking about Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, which I read last year. During a trip to reconnect with the continent where he had worked in the Peace Corps and where he had found himself as a novelist, Theroux had a miserable time and spared no effort to inform the reader of how bad life in Africa had become since the 1960's. The book was subject to cruel reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere, but I found it to be an honest expression of how a whole continent is going down the toilet for a variety of reasons. What most intrigued me about Theroux's account was how people were returning to subsistence agriculture as a result of craven NGO's, the IMF demanding wholesale selloff of natural resources, and the bloodthirsty greed of former revolutionaries like Mugabe. We are all Africans, since modern humans came out of Africa between 200,000 - 160,000 years ago, and I see the downturn of the world economy hitting Africa the hardest. So . . . is Africa another bellwether in the return to subsistence agriculture? Let me go one step further. Maybe we should do a little pre-emption and actually question whether we need to be focusing so much on animals here in the US. On my farm, I seem to be doing all right with green manures and cover crops. I buy eggs from my neighbor and eat a little meat each week, mostly for flavoring. I was a vegetarian for 11 years over thirty years ago and I don't especially see the need to become one again. However, I also don't see the need to hype small-farm animal husbandry so much. A little goes a long way. Many sustainable agriculturists seem to take it as gospel that a small farm needs chickens, hogs, goats, etc. It ain't necessarily so.