Holy shit, I turn my back for twelve hours and come back to find that this thread has blossomed like a peach tree.
Kudos to all.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Varq, I have always been curious about this parallel, but the area in particular that doesn’t get enough discussion is the “home-grown-food-as-national-security-issue”.
[/quote]
It’s true. The point does not get discussed enough. So let’s discuss it.
The Romans fed their citizens with bread made from grain grown in Africa, and shipped across the Mediterranean, up the Tiber river to Rome. This supply of cheap and plentiful grain destroyed domestic Italian agriculture, much as the supply of cheap and plentiful grain from America destroyed British agriculture in the 19th century once the Corn Laws were repealed.
In any case, the farms in Lazio around the capital city were abandoned, or else were not producing, because domestic farmers could not compete. As a result, the citizens of Rome were totally dependent upon this imported grain. They were, in a biological sense, not living where their homes were. Their food, in other words, was not “home-grown.”
And because of this, the grain ships from Africa were the weakest link in the imperial security chain. Note, too, that the barbarians who disrupted the food chain (so to speak)did not need to invade. They were already within the borders of the empire, having been pushed out of Germany by the incursions of the Huns. Back to that later.
Now, compare this precarious situation to the current situation in the United States.
American agriculture is the most productive in the world. We produce so much food that over sixty percent of our population is obese–even our poor people are fat-- and still we have enough left over to sell to less-productive countries, to dole out to poor people in our own country, to donate to other poor people in third-world countries, and still more is left over, which we simply throw away.
Surely, this is the very definition of “home-grown food,” totally invulnerable to the kind of attack perpetrated by the Gothic barbarians in the 5th century.
Or is it?
The majority of our citizens in coastal cities are, like the Romans, not living where their homes are. Lettuces from California, oranges from Florida, beef from Nebraska, corn fom Iowa… all this ends up on the tables of New Yorkers and Washingtonians by means of an elaborate transportation and distribution system depending on trains, ships, airplanes and trucks.
Should this distribution system become distrupted, by means of a terrorist attack on major Interstate highways, railways, harbors and airports, the flow of food to the metropolitan areas would grind to a halt, and people in the cities would starve, just as they did in fifth-century Rome.
An even more subtle way of achieving this same end would be to attack and disable all oil tankers attempting to enter American waters, coupled with attacks on domestic refineries and pipelines. As I mentioned on another thread, American agriculture depends entirely on imported oil, from the first tillage of the soil to the final transportation of food to the grocery store. Stop the oil flowing, and you stop the food, just as sure as a blockade of the Tiber.
So no, Thunder, I do not believe that home-grown food equates to national security in this case, in that we are just as dependent on imports for our sustenance as the Romans were.
As to the comments about barbarians, I define a “restless barbarian” in this case as anyone within or outside the borders of the United States, who refuses to be ruled by the American hegemony, and who is prepared to initiate violence in order to disrupt the advance of the American sphere of influence.
And of this sort of person, there is no shortage.