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Long term food and agriculture policy needed: stop squandering our environmental capital

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by Monica Davis

“If our agriculture is not sustainable, our food supply is not sustainable.”  Wes Jackson, President, Land Institute

The communists were notorious for their long-range plans. Five year, ten year, 20 year plans, launched by strangulating governments which tied up materials, manpower, production and agriculture into a morass of inefficiency. While communism died a nasty death, and collective farms have gone the way of the dodo, we still need to plan for future food needs.

American agriculture is full of so many antagonistic forces, that the consumer, the person whose life depends on a supply of healthy food, is often standing on the outside while the big boys in industrial agriculture ply their trade. Most of our attention today is focused on banking, what’s going on with the latest oil spill, who got arrested for meth, which politician or actor is doing the perp walk down the courthouse steps.

We’re not thinking of food, something we can’t do without, the quality of which continues to degrade as pesticides, fertilizers and environmental contaminants wreak havoc with our food supply. We’re not thinking of the USDA’s long term plan to eliminate family and small farmers and move the nation to a more “efficient” food production system (www.dailykos.com/…/-Young-Executives-Report:-1972-Declaration-of-War-Against-Family-Farmers)

We don’t think of where our food comes from, who’s producing it, or how safe it is. We take it for granted, to our cost. It’s time we set some priorities: food, shelter, environment and sustaining an environmentally rational way of living.

“We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what’s in the bank,” said Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute. “If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won’t much matter.”

Jackson doesn’t minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a “50-year farm bill,” which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op/ed earlier this month. www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05berry.html

Many family farmers and environmental activists believe that we need to pay more attention to the soil. In his interview with Wes Jackson, the founder of a research center on ag policy,   Robert Jenson quotes Jackson’s views on sustainable agriculture: “A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination.”

Jackson says that, “For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.”

“Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it’s clear that we don’t really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, over-consumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year [Agriculture] bill is sensible right now.”

As we see from the devastation in the Gulf of Mexico, we can’t take food and our food supply for granted.  How many shrimpers and fishermen will lose their livelihoods?  How many people will become sickened by eating oil contaminated seafood?  What effect with this hit to our fishing industry have on the economy as a whole?



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