Politics Of Food Production

4. Politics Of Food Production

Since countless members of our human family are already hungry or starving, it is imperative that we find solutions now. Anyone who has ever grown a garden knows the disappointment of losing some plants, whether to a hungry forest animal or to an early frost, and seeing the work of months of tender care vanish before their eyes. A neighbor’s cows got past a broken fence once and visited my garden; every corn plant was reduced to stubble and all my salad greens were lost to their hearty appetites overnight—months of growth were gone. Anyone who has ever planted a small fruit tree and watched its slow, steady progress, knows that it takes years before fruit will be harvested. It takes time to grow all food, and nothing can replace growing time when a crop is lost.

We may think we have enough food today, but we’ve long been pushing our luck, by pushing Nature time and time again and tampering with our environmental quality. We can no longer refuse to acknowledge and deal with our environmental and agricultural problems, and with the profound impact their combined effects have on our ecosystem and food supplies. We are dangerously out of touch with reality if we think we can defy the laws of Nature indefinitely with no consequences. We can’t just “wait for the weather to improve”, because the atmospheric carbon dioxide which is destroying temperate zone climate is increasing at an accelerating rate. Everyone who has ever studied the CO2 problem has warned that the result of permitting the rise of CO2 would be to alter the weather in ways which would be destructive to agriculture. Meanwhile, while our use of fossil fuels is increasing, our forests and jungles are fast disappearing. All this is a sure prescription for mass suicide.

What, if anything, are our world governments doing about all this? Our politicians should have begun programs for soil remineralization and biomass solar energy 15 years ago. We would now have major growing machinery and equipment industries related to food and fuel, and a better food supply with more mineral content. But what can we expect from an elective system that lets the Farm Bureau and the corporate structure buy candidates at election time? This makes the legislature and the executive branch putty in the hands of corporate interests. The situation is the same at the federal level. Congress dispenses (out of our pockets) palliatives by the hundreds, but if we suggest solutions to problems that conflict with corporate interests, they start squeaking like mice. Ralph Nader says that 80% of the time Congress comes down on the corporate side of an issue. It really takes massive public demand to make them listen, if they listen at all.

Our ancestors came to this country to be free and independent—we are being manipulated by the power of centralized wealth, and our system of soil destruction threatens our agricultural and technical civilization. The devastation of the biosphere is seldom perceived as the ultimate threat to survival because, for many people and their governments, this issue is overshadowed by what they imagine to be more immediate concerns: war, poverty, sickness, the energy crisis, inflation, unemployment, drought, famine, and so on. What they don’t realize is that the failure to conserve and rebuild living resources is closely linked to the worsening of these other problems.

Soil remineralization is a priority now. We were once blessed with an abundance of natural resources, but we have squandered them over the years; and we must now redirect our energy, money, and resources into positive, peaceful enterprises that will benefit all of humanity and life on this earth.

We can no longer wait for our governments to “take action”—nor can we depend blindly on systems, authority, scientists, experts, professionals,, specialists, doctors, or someone else in general, for our existence and survival. We cannot wait for someone else to care about our survival—it is we ourselves who have to survive. We are responsible for our own lives.

4.1 The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave

We, the people, are the government. Imagine you’re a passenger in a car and the driver falls asleep just as the car is heading toward a cliff. Earlier in this lesson we mentioned some of the different types of people who make up our world. Let’s listen to what they have to say, as the driver loses control of the car:

• Those who’re unaware that problems exist: “What a fantastic view!”
• Those who remain indifferent to problems: “So what if we go over a cliff?”
• Those who trust in the system, right or wrong: “It’s not the driver’s fault that we’re heading for a cliff—after all, his intentions were good.”
• Those who give up hope: “Too late now—I’d better cover my eyes!”
• Those who recognize problems, but are all talk and no action: “Maybe the driver will wake up in time! Whatever happens, it’s the driver’s fault—I’m not to blame!”
• Those who are aware and take action: “I’d better grab the wheel and steer for my life!”

What would you do?

If our leaders, “experts”, or drivers of our vehicles are asleep at the wheel, and we see the cliff coming, we’re not going to have time to “think things over”, evaluate more scientific facts, wait for the driver to wake up, or wait for a new driver. We will have to act with all the survival instinct within us, on a moment’s notice.

Are we ready?