Want to fix the US? Fix food. So says Mother Jones as they discuss US Agricultural Senator Tom Vilsack’s confirmation hearing.
If your newspaper even bothered to cover Vilsack’s hearing, the story was likely buried; after all, ag policy matters only to farmers, and farmers are 2 percent of the population. Never mind that 100 percent of the population is eaters, and that what we eat is responsible for one-fifth of US carbon emissions, that our industrial diet is bankrupting our health care system, that some $13 billion a year in subsidies goes predominantly to underwriting junk food, that growing and subsidizing biofuel pushes up food prices and leads to starvation, deforestation, and even greater CO2 emissions. What we grow, it turns out, is at the very core of how we live, how we run our economy, how we exist in the world. And if we want that existence to be better than soup lines at home, food riots abroad, and drowning polar bears up north, we have to fix food now.
At Gristmill, Jim Goodman argues our food problems can’t be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.
We need to explore new ways of local food production, such as hoop houses, grass-based livestock, and seasonal eating. We need to produce good food locally and push for economic reforms that enable everyone to afford that good local food. And we need to reorient our national priorities to food production for domestic consumption.
Internationally, governments need to promote people over markets, replacing the blind devotion to free markets that has only produced more poverty, more hunger, and an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. And we must reject the idea that farm workers in any nation should be forced to labor for less than a fair living wage.
(I’d add that no one should be expected to work for less than a fair living wage.)
Despite all this conversation from people and communities I don’t see a strong political movement in Canada or the United States for a serious rethinking of food and agricultural policy. Barely an official word is spoken about food security on either side of the border — in neither the context of global warming, commodities disruption, or the collapse of the old economy.
Much of the work to be done in the short term will have to be done with little help from our governments. Thankfully, I think we are up for the task.
