Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 58

                                         GOOD LIVING 
                                             (continued)

    From OverconsumptionTo Sustainable Community
                                             (continued)

                                  FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

  Our food and agriculture system is similarly designed to generate profits for giant chemical and agribusiness corporations with little regard for the health of people and the ecosystem. This system features chemical-intensive, mechanized production ; long-distance shipping ; captive contract producers ; migrant laborers paid bare subsistence wages ; and large government subsidies paid to giant corporations. The system is suited to the profitable mass production of standardized food products, but comes at the cost of depleting soils and aquifers, contaminating water with chemical runoff, and driving out the small family farms that were for many years the backbone of strong rural communities. This system delivers to the consumer highly processed, wastefully packaged foods of dubious nutritional value contaminated with chemical residues. Although the system abundantly fills supermarkets, it features misleading nutritional claims ; strongly resists any effort to inform consumers about additives, synthetic hormones, genetically modified 
organisms, and toxic residues they may be ingesting ; and gives consumers little option of choosing organically grown, unprocessed foods produced by local farmers. Our food choices have largely been reduced to whatever big corporations find it most profitable. 
   Even as adults intent on exercising healthful and responsible choice, we seldom have any way of knowing whether the piece of fish we are about to buy was caught by a massive foreign factory trawler sweeping the ocean bare with fine mesh drift nets or harvested by a local fisherman using environmentally responsible gear. We have no way of knowing whether a piece of meat is from an animal raised on properly managed, natural rangelands or from one raised on unstable lands from which tropical forests were recently cleared and fattened in feedlots on grain that might otherwise have fed hungry people. There is no way to tell whether the cows that supply our milk have been injected with artificial hormones, because under pressure from MONSANTO corporation, the government prohibits the labeling that would tell us.
   If our goal is to provide a good living for people, we need to transform our food and agriculture system as much as we must we must transform our habitats and transportation systems. Ou goal must be to optimize the use of land and water resources to meet an expanding population's needs for a nutritionally adequate diet, fiber, and livelihoods. And we must do it in an environmentally sustainable way.
   An appropriate system would most likely be composed of tens of thousands of intensively managed, small family farms producing a diverse range of food, fiber, livestock, and energy products for local markets. Farming practices would use bio-dynamic methods to maintain soil fertility, retain water, and control pests. The food system would be designed to limit, contain, and recycle contaminants---including recycling human wastes --- and would depend  primarily on renewable solar-generated energy sources --- including animal power and biogas --- for preparation, production, processing, storage, and transport. Steps toward such a system would include carrying out agrarian reform to break up large corporate agricultural holdings, providing adequate credit facilities for small farmers, creating farmer- based research and extension systems oriented to bio-intensive methods, requiring full and accurate labeling of food products, eliminating financial and environmental subsidies for agricultural chemicals, increasing the costs of food transport by eliminating energy and other transportation subsidies, and creating locally accountable watershed management authorities to coordinate measures for soil and water protection. 
   Although moving toward more localized food and agriculture systems and healthier, less fatty diets would require adjustments in our eating habits, this is not a vision of sacrifice and deprivation. Rather, it is a vision of a fertile earth and of vibrant and secure human communities populated by people with healthy bodies and minds nourished by wholesome, uncontaminated foods. The elements of this vision are technically and socially feasible. They simply require reconstructing the relevant systems in line with the human rather than the corporate interest.