Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.
Biodiversity is a very good mechanism for resilience. Even on a tiny scale: if this year one of my tomato varieties doesn't produce due to heat/cold/damp, some of the others will. And if all tomatoes fail, I have beans. Or salad. And potatoes, and turnips, and carrots.
Yet if all you have is one variety of potatoes, and it gets sick, it can upset an entire country, kill millions¹
You'd think the solution is obvious, but the opposite is happening. Especially the staple foods that are now feeding the billions, are rapidly dwindling in varieties. Some crops, like bananas and agave already down to effectively one genetic variety - if (when) that fails, we'll lose the ability to produce bananas or agave (tequila, etc) almost entirely. Imagine this happening to rice or grain or potatoes.
