There are a lot of variables, but I’ll focus on something others haven’t yet. Compare urbanization with employment in agriculture. The developed capitalist countries have a single digit percent of their workers employed in agriculture. The developing countries are more variable but for the most part as the productive forces develop, less people are employed in agriculture. China now is down to like 17% for instance.
Havana is a relevant case study for your question. 35,000 hectares of organic urban farms produce 90% of the city’s produce which is enough for 280 grams per day for each resident. Well, the data is over a decade old but it’s probably not that different now. About 19% of the Cuban population works in agriculture but I don’t know the stats for Havana specifically. And of course the organoponics are only supplementary to staple crops from outside the city.
So yeah, definitely depends on technological development. There’s also a dialectical aspect to it… the negation of the negation I think? Someone better trained in Marxism correct me if I am wrong. But mechanization and fertilizers negated the persistent rural and famine-ridden state of humanity while also sowing the seeds for its own negation. The agricultural techniques developed under capitalism erode the topsoil, cause eutrophication in the waters, and drive climate change. This makes necessary a socialist agricultural revolution, not a return to subsistence agriculture. While the technologies are in their infancy, this form of agriculture would be way more labor efficient. The future is a couple percent of the population employed in renewable and nuclear powered agricultural bioreactor factories and highly automated farms, not a fifth of the population doing large-scale organic farming.
There are a lot of variables, but I’ll focus on something others haven’t yet. Compare urbanization with employment in agriculture. The developed capitalist countries have a single digit percent of their workers employed in agriculture. The developing countries are more variable but for the most part as the productive forces develop, less people are employed in agriculture. China now is down to like 17% for instance.
Havana is a relevant case study for your question. 35,000 hectares of organic urban farms produce 90% of the city’s produce which is enough for 280 grams per day for each resident. Well, the data is over a decade old but it’s probably not that different now. About 19% of the Cuban population works in agriculture but I don’t know the stats for Havana specifically. And of course the organoponics are only supplementary to staple crops from outside the city.
So yeah, definitely depends on technological development. There’s also a dialectical aspect to it… the negation of the negation I think? Someone better trained in Marxism correct me if I am wrong. But mechanization and fertilizers negated the persistent rural and famine-ridden state of humanity while also sowing the seeds for its own negation. The agricultural techniques developed under capitalism erode the topsoil, cause eutrophication in the waters, and drive climate change. This makes necessary a socialist agricultural revolution, not a return to subsistence agriculture. While the technologies are in their infancy, this form of agriculture would be way more labor efficient. The future is a couple percent of the population employed in renewable and nuclear powered agricultural bioreactor factories and highly automated farms, not a fifth of the population doing large-scale organic farming.