Chris Smaje thinks local food production will save us: George Monbiot responds that too much risks global starvation. An advanced localism is at stake

There’s a fascinating (and important) debate going on between two leading environmentalists around food production. One one side, journalist and campaigner George Monbiot, arguing that a ‘small and local is always beautiful’ approach to food production will leave billions starving in the wider world.

On the other, the farmer/social-scientist Chris Smaje, who literally practises and preaches the opposite - concretely building, and theoretically promoting, the localisation of food chains, so we can strengthen our skills to be resilient against major climate change.

You can hear Smaje in the YouTube discussion above (though very much in a room of comrades). But he began the dispute in his new book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Smaje takes Monboit’s advocacy of protein farms and precision agriculture as exactly the kind of “eco-modernist” approach that will do nothing to make our food systems more stable.

Monbiot produced a lengthy response to Smaje on his own website, provocatively titled ‘The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People’. It characterises a certain section of the back-to-the-land advocates as heedless of the wider sufferings of the world. If the “human survival niche is reducing”, as he puts it, may the need for some very global forms of distribution of food - from one surplus area to another deficit area - going to be explicit and urgent? How does it help the people’s of the world if breadbasket economies keep their fertility to themselves?

Chris Smaje is composing his own response to Monbiot’s piece (his 2022 review of Monbiot’s Regenesis may help prepare you for that). We assume that, if well-conducted, this dispute will expand and sophisticate the case for an advanced localism - or what we call “cosmolocalism”.