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At the centre A pre-modern countryside produces an enormous amount of food and almost no extractable surplus, which is the hard limit on everything the state above it can do. Holds BDBret Devereaux Read this korrent →

• Similar wording Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land. Holds GMGeorge Monbiot
• Similar wording Farmers were the overwhelming majority of every pre-modern agrarian society — 80 to 90 per cent of it — and that single fact shapes everything else about how those societies worked. Holds BDBret Devereaux
• Similar wording Being a rich or efficient agrarian economy is not what produces an industrial revolution, or one would have happened much earlier and somewhere other than Europe. Holds BDBret Devereaux
• Similar wording It is false that the world needs no more food and only better distribution of the food it has. Holds MGMichael Grunwald
• Similar wording An economy running on muscle power has a hard and low ceiling on total production, because its only real input is land and the returns to more of it fall away fast. Holds BDBret Devereaux
• Similar wording The central problem of the food system is producing much more food on much less land. Holds MGMichael Grunwald
• Similar wording Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood. Holds BDBret Devereaux
• Similar wording Before railways an army could not carry the food it needed: anything longer than a few days in the field forced it to live off the country it was in. Holds BDBret Devereaux