Europe should become more self-sufficient

[Albion]

Today the program revealed that Turkish children get 1 euro for 1 hour work - and they work 11 hours a day while "the problems could have been solved" if their father would get paid 7 euro's an hour.

I don't know, you can give kids easy work like that I suppose. But I think 1 Euro an hour is ridiculous, it should be at least 2.50 taking into account that Turkey is a poorer nation and that 2.50 is something like half the average European minimum wage per hour of work.
I say this because it doesn't appear as tough work (kids shouldn't be given tough work anyway) and they're only kids so they don't need full minimum wage and by giving it them it'd push prices up significantly.

The welfare of the kids should be provided for, they should be provided with plenty of breaks, drinks and snacks - it's probably quite warm out in a field in Turkey.

but because we still have to import that stuff.

Lol, Civis, you old socialist.

That shocks me too. Hazel trees grow well in Atlantic Europe, we should be growing them here. We could easily mix them in with commercial forestry - two products from one plantation. Hazel trees aren't huge anyway. up

(Another idea of mine was that we should encourage the planting of fruit trees in all British hedgerows and gardens possible - free, fresh fruit and something to look at for the nation... but that's for another post... )

Solution: we should focus on growing hazelnut, cherry, fig, apricot, quince and pomegranate and all those other agricultural products that we now import from Turkey in our own European countries: mainly in Greece, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Southern France to the level that we can export it rather then import things from Turkey.

Agreed. Some such as hazel and cherry would probably be better in Eastern Europe than baking hot Southern Europe though. We could provide desperate Moldova with jobs - they have a good viticulture industry with Russia, we could help them sell to the west and develop fruit and nut orchards there and in Ukraine and Romania too. Plus it'd be much cheaper and still be from Europe.

I don't care about Turkish employment or the creation of Turkish unemployment but I care a lot about European employment.

Same here. Europe comes first.

If teenagers and young students - along with the unemployed or even prisoners (that are now sitting idly in a comfortable prison) can do the hard work for let's say 7 euro's an hour (prisoners shouldn't get paid) and when farms mechanise we can make sure that companies like Ferrero, Mars and Unilever doesn't have to import it from Turkey anymore --- and thus no longer supports their economy.

Yes, there is an unemployment problem in much of Europe. Unfortunately I have experience myself of farming and can tell you that much of that work would be seasonal.
Labour is needed at this time of year, I think Hazel is more of a spring "fruiting" tree though.

Prisoners shouldn't be paid I agree, but they should be repairing roads and schools as part of a chain gang, not out in some nice countryside.

Plus you have missed something - it'd probably still be cheaper for these companies to import from Turkey. You'd have to put in place laws protecting European produce, making it prioritised over non-European produce and making non-European purchases a last resort only by law.

[Albion]

I strongly agree with this and think it's actually important in the context of self-reliance. When I "settle down" in the long term I'll do my best to find a place with fertile land and grow as much of my own food as resources allow. More people really should do this imo. Self-sufficiency and strong, literal connections to "the land" are severely lacking.

I agree. In medieval times an Englishman's garden was a vegetable patch, it should be the same today.
I have grow a few potatoes, leeks and strawberries in the garden.

If everyone grew a few staples such as potatoes then we'd have to import less food, most of the rest could be provided by farmers.
People would also save money, get fresher, better food and would get outdoors more often.

European states are being engineered towards inter-dependency.

They are, but there has always been some degree of inter-dependency in these small countries of ours.

That is one of the aims of the European Union and it is dangerously inefficient and dysgenic and benefits only the plutocracy.

Yeah, we don't need the EU middleman telling us what to do.

Why should France and the UK sell each other potatoes?

They shouldn't. But France can sell us stuff we struggle to produce such as vegetables and warmer climate fruit whilst we sell them meat, fish and grain (cereals).

Why do British supermarkets buy beans from Kenya?

We shouldn't.

Why they are pretty much able to grow it themselves.

We can certainly grow and raise our own staple foods - cereals and most meat we are self sufficient in, these make up the main part of the diet.

We import a lot of fruit and vegetables because free trade killed our own agriculture in these products - veg comes from the Netherlands, fruit from France, Spain and New Zealand.

We should be as self-sufficient as feasibly possible, and of course, viable. There is no use for example growing oranges on a large scale here, but instead we could grow plenty of apples, cherries, pears and plums which do well here.

While beans can be grown in England... hell.. they can be grown in your backyard.

Yup, but they're missing the tomato sauce and the tin.

We just can. And we all pay taxes and assist each other. That's something that Americans have never ever heard off. It's called solidarity.

I can hardly say Europe is a utopia, but it seems Americans live to work. Britain is at risk of that too.

Just because we can grow rice does not necessarily mean that it should be our first priority.

No need to restrict imports or anything like that.

On things we can be self-sufficient in there is.

[Albion]

In England the price of land has gone through the roof. This is largely due to speculation, rich snobs buying it up and muppets messing around on horses.


But one thing that bothers me is this - I see lots of land wasted all around. We could maximise the use of land, increasing efficiency and output whilst still preserving the character and wildlife of the landscape at the same time.

A few examples:

• Farmland hedgerows - plant some apple, pear, cherry and plum trees in them for goodness sake! Why leave them as just a hedge when they can be providing fresh fruit at the same time which can be gathered by the farm or left for kids or locals to take? Plus fruit trees make great habitats for birds and insects such as bullfinches (which feed on buds very often, much to the annoyance of orchard owners) and woodpeckers which nest in the old rotting wood of these trees.
• Encourage people to grow staple crops in their gardens to boost their self-sufficiency and which would make us less dependent on foreign imports.
• Allow vacant council land to be used for allotments of which there is an large demand.
• Give over areas of the oversized council "playing fields" (aka vast wasteland with goalposts) to social housing.
• Instead of continually building houses with large footprints, instead make it the norm to build in the loft where suitable - there's extra room space up there going to waste - use it!
• Discourage front gardens since no one really uses them anyway and most are being paved over. They should be for a drive. The back garden can be made bigger without a front garden anyway by the house being further forward.
• Make it illegal to drain gutter pipes straight into drains if there is space for a rainwater butt. Water from this is to be used in gardens and to wash cars.
• Farmers often bring up stones in harvests - glacial till - instead of dumping it back on the fields with the soil they should be sorting the stones out and putting them in a pile, once they mount up then they can be sent for recycling as crushed stone for use in concrete, road laying or gravel.
• Empty fields in winter - it encourages soil erosion and doesn't put any goodness back into the soil once the crops have been taken. Make it illegal to have bare earth fields for more than two weeks, require farmers to plant more crops or sow temporary grass for livestock or clover which gets ploughed into the land the following spring and adds nutrients such as nitrogen.
• Instead of disposing of animal crap it should be used to replace chemical fertiliser. Cow manure is often used, but pig and poultry manure should be as well.
• Lawns - shouldn't be too large or should be broken up with trees, ideally fruit trees or nut trees such as hazel.