Take Control of Your Destiny = Take Control of Your Food
Julian Rose
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” Henry Kissinger
Just six transnational corporations control 80% of all commercial seeds and over 80% of post industrial mankind’s current diet is provided by less than a dozen plant species. 98% of vegetable varieties have disappeared from the western world during the past century and the ones that remain have been hybridised and genetically modified to suit the profit making goals of ‘the food industry’ and dominant super/hypermarket retail chains.
The nutritional value of all such foods have plummeted in the process. Recent scientific studies reveal that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replace every year and 40% of global farmland is so depleted of life that it is not able to produce any food at all without large inputs of highly toxic chemicals that directly impact human, animal and soil health.
There is only one way out of this largely self-imposed race to planetary ecocide and that is the complete de-corporatisation of agriculture and a return to human-scale, diverse and caring ways of managing our food supply chain from field to fork.
Agriculture literally means ‘a culture of the field’ and the farmer’s role is to tend this culture, not to participate in a vast globalised industry controlled by Big Agro, Big Farma, Big Super Market, Big World Trade Organisation and Big Banking. Most supermarket shoppers have no idea that they are supporting the destruction of the planet and the running-down of their natural disease immunity in the process. If they did, we would see a dramatic increase in the consumption of pro-ecological and organic foods, a rapid rise in the number of organic holdings; a huge improvement in the health of nations; a worldwide increase in natural biodiversity; rapidly improved soil fertility and ‘living’ as opposed to ‘dead’ foods, forming the foundation of the human diet.
Only by de-corporatising, re-localising and re-humanising agriculture can this positive transformation come into being. The corporate globalisation of the food chain has led to the contents of a typical supermarket trolley having travelled more than 8,000 kilometres, enduring at least five large temperature changes, heavy processing, packaging, devitaminisation and a sales pitch declaring the end product to be ‘natural and fresh’. Even organic foods sold in chain stores suffer the same fate.
We have just one way to go to change all this: create a human-scale supply chain which directly links farmers and consumers and comprises organically raised foods utilising the minimum packaging—especially plastics—now found to be polluting water courses in all parts of the world. We must stop shopping in superstores that suck money out of local economies/communities while sourcing their produce from vast arid chemical monocultures and totally inhumane animal concentration camps.
It’s time to get behind a people’s take-over of our local, regional and national economy. That means an end to what is called ‘efficient’ ways of relentlessly exploiting the land and each other—for profit—into nuanced ways of nurturing mother nature back to health as a collective endeavour involving all of us playing our part.
Now is the time to make food security and a non-exploitive sovereign banking system the number one priority of all nations of the world. Our future is in our hands—we are humans—not politically processed robots.
Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind—Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly prescient reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info.