How many of those are really left in the west? There are plenty of places where people grow food and raise livestock .. which feed into the industrial distribution system. Small amounts get sold locally via the farm shop system (high quality/price), but overwhelmingly to be economically viable you have to be part of the "system".
You get a bit of that with Scottish crofters, and I suspect some of the remoter parts of Eastern Europe are only loosely plugged into the Common Agricultural policy, but subsistence farming proper is extremely hard. And of course you can't subsistence farm petroleum.
Really the OP article should talk more about quality, and be slightly less surprised that in a market system high quality (food or information) is more expensive than low quality (food or information). And ask whether the consumers have the same price-quality mapping as the author.
>Small amounts get sold locally via the farm shop system (high quality/price), but overwhelmingly to be economically viable you have to be part of the "system".
We have no problem getting most of our food locally, and as often than not it's cheaper than the grocery store; eggs, meat, vegetables (I'm in Canada, so not much fruit). I assume this is fairly common outside the urban centres.
You get a bit of that with Scottish crofters, and I suspect some of the remoter parts of Eastern Europe are only loosely plugged into the Common Agricultural policy, but subsistence farming proper is extremely hard. And of course you can't subsistence farm petroleum.
Really the OP article should talk more about quality, and be slightly less surprised that in a market system high quality (food or information) is more expensive than low quality (food or information). And ask whether the consumers have the same price-quality mapping as the author.