Dependent on imports

At the European continent, we have come dependent on a lot of import to provide enough food.

Now with this corona crisis many think we do have to change our way of life and our way of consumption.

Let us go back in history to think about today. Andrew James Chandler writes:

from the 1840s, was the demand for rails, wheels and frames for rolling stock necessary to build railways around the world. Britain was providing perhaps forty per cent of the world’s manufactured goods by the mid-century. The spread of steam power, for both railways and shipping, also created a great demand for British coal. In terms of imports, British demand for wool from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa grew significantly. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had been self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, but developed a great demand for ‘luxuries’ from the tropics such as sugar, tea and coffee. They soon became cheap, available to all social classes. Home agriculture was protected by the Corn Laws until 1846, restricting imports of basics and kept prices of bread and other staples high. By the 1850s, population growth had made basic food imports absolutely essential, and protection was abandoned for free trade. By the 1850s about a quarter of Britain’s food needs were being met by imports. {Poverty, Emigration & Empire, 1821-1881: Australia, New Zealand & South Africa.}

In the future, we shall become more dependent, if we are not careful, on more food coming into the country we should make sure it is correctly produced, without slave labour, without toxic fertilizers and non-necessary additives.

Corona part of much too many or not enough

There are people who consider that the last few years we had so many sorts of corona viruses because we are with too many and have are animals locked up with to many in one cage.

About the matter of keeping too many animals in a cage, there is a reality we have to face. That creates a lot of diseases we could avoid when we would give those animals much more space to move around.

We do not think we are living in an overcrowded world. There is still enough space if we are willing to use that space properly and ecologically right.

Thomas Mathus (born 1766), a mathematically-minded person, who was convinced that people multiplied at a much greater rate than food was produced. For him the outcome, unless former was controlled, would be starvation and misery.

‘Son of the manse’ Andrew James Chandler writes:

Part of Malthus’ solution was to discourage marriage and any other relationship which might result in childbirth. He also deemed it wise to encourage individuals and families to emigrate. He regarded the colonies as a receptacle for excess inhabitants, and had a formula to back up his ideas. There were also a number of schemes which were capable of translating his notions into practical terms.

The collection of reliable statistical information was only begun with the first decennial census in 1801, but this was a barely reliable source for contemporaries and historians alike until 1841. There were no reliable government figures relating to unemployment until 1921. {Poverty, Emigration & Empire, 1821-71: Atlantic Crossings & North American Settlement.}

Avoiding getting children is one idea several people used to have control abut their ‘people of the state’.  Many forgot that those living in poverty were more often creating kids in bad circumstances. Also wages could create a condition to have more or less children, and got families moving from the countryside to the cities.

Although industrial wages may have been a little better in the Midland towns than in the villages, living and working conditions were generally worse, so that it was not until the beginning of the last century that people were drawn in any significant numbers into cities like Coventry, Oxford and Birmingham from the surrounding countryside. Although Birmingham and the Black Country had become heavily industrialised by the mid-nineteenth century, it was only at the end of that century that Coventry became a city of many trades, with the decline of the traditional craft industries of ribbon weaving and watchmaking, and the birth of the cycle trade in the 1890s, to be followed gradually by motor-cycle and car manufacture, and the establishment of Courtauld’s works in 1905. {Part Three: 1861-1914: Poverty, Progress and Prosperity}

When people had to spend a lot of time in the factory they had less time to create new children. But when there were strikes or people had no work they had more frustrations and man got to work it out at their wives and made more kids.

The growing urbanisation of the country which many thought aggravated the problems of the poor, also made it easier to deal collectively with some of the worst injustices in the early years of the twentieth century. Towns provided an increasing range of free services, and local government expenditure almost doubled between 1900 and 1913.

Free school meals and school medical inspections helped to improve health among children and better attention in hospitals which catered mainly for working-class patients in conditions that were generally much better than richer classes who still preferred to be treated in their own homes or in private nursing homes. Workmen’s trains, electric tramcars and cheap, second-hand bicycles enabled many wage earners to escape from the congested areas of towns to the suburbs, leaving more room for those remaining.

Better grocer shops, such as Sainsburys and Liptons, football matches and other sporting events on Saturday afternoons,  excursions by trains, music halls and then silent films, public houses with bright lighting, were all additional signs of an improvement in the quality of urban working-class life, and a departure from the past.  Working-class women benefited the most from these changes. There was a preference for smaller families, making their domestic lives easier, and the arrival of the typewriter and telephone were among the developments which provided more employment opportunities for girls.  There were also more scholarships, often to new secondary schools and technical colleges which gave bright young people of both sexes opportunities for further education and better jobs, encouraging greater social mobility than their parents had experienced. However, these changes were not as rapid as sometimes supposed. There may have been more women teachers, nurses, shop assistants, telephonists, typists and machine operators, but there was still a vast army of female domestic servants. There was little understanding of the home conditions of many of the domestic servants among those whom they served.

One child from a prosperous family, who had employed two maids before the Great War, later  admitted to the BBC that she had very little idea what poverty was. Her maids never complained of poverty. Neither did they complain of the hard physical work and sense of alienation that many of them endured in  service.

Alice Cairns, from Staffordshire, was placed as a maid in a big old rectory in the same county. It was still lit with oil lamps, not even by gas, and she had to clean the big range and get the fire going every morning before she could boil a kettle. After that she had to scrub the big kitchen, which had a floor like gravestones, scrub the tables and then take the cook a cup of tea before seven. …

It is doubtful whether British Society has ever been so beset with contradictions as it was on the eve of the First World War.  Old age pensions began to be paid by the state only at the beginning of 1909, and health and unemployment insurance at the beginning of 1913. However poverty was still alarmingly extensive in 1914, especially in the countryside. {The Fires of Perfect Liberty: Labouring Men and Women of England, 1851-1951: Part Three}

Who had enough food at that time and who had the children to have a lot of worries or to have no worries at all?

Today in the west the families are very small, two or max three children, or when it is a family with more than 5 children it is what they call a newly composed family.

Until now everything seemed to go alright, but since March 2020 lots of people have a totally opposite idea of the future. It is expected we shall get some population explosion by corona-kids. People having had enough time with their partner to enjoy themselves but also trying to forget the negative prospect of soon being without work and without pay.

For some it might look lie we are going to face some serious economic crisis after this health crisis. soon we might have again some more children, but with the temperatures rising, getting more dry and wet period endangering the food production, the matter or question:

Is theere going to be enough food?

is going to rise again. This in a time when the rich have become richer and the ordinary man poorer, and work prospects not so great.