Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

There's a huge gulf between policy that supports and policy that 
subsidizes.  Eliminating subsidies to level the playing field is what 
derailed the WTO in Cancun a few years ago and killed the Doha Round, I 
think they called it, and the WTO with it, almost.  But eliminating the 
subsidies is only taking the elephant out of the living room, treating a 
symptom rather than the disease.

The human food production system is what needs vigorous policy support.  
Right now, that support consists only of subsidies to "commodities 
production." This is an obviously obsolete policy that continues only 
because those subsidized contribute funds to The Farm Bureau and a ton 
of other support organizations for industrial agriculture who provide 
lobbying in DC on a par with the financial and fossil fuels industries.

Local growers have no such organization to support their operations and 
lobby for policy support and such.  UC Davis spawned a family farmer 
organization whose name I can't pull out of my brain right now  (CAFF, I 
think, Community Alliance of Family Farmers) that plans to do that on a 
statewide level.  It came out of their Rural Community Organization 
program.

This list would be a component of something like that, where people 
communicate their needs both to each other and to the organization which 
would then form policy (that the community likes) for which to lobby, 
etc.  Industrial agriculture runs on a model of domination.  No 
competition is allowed.  Policy-level work is required to combat that, 
or it will remain the status quo until it collapses into its own excess.

I think that's too long to wait.  But community is really hard to build 
in a culture that's been deliberately atomized.  One of the things 
several farming states did was to pass a law that farms had to be owned 
by those who ran them.  No absentee owners.  That will make a 
difference, but large farm owners have to play commodities markets, file 
paperwork to get their subsidies,  manage debt, and grow crops, all at 
the same time, just to keep from losing their land.  It's a very brittle 
system, besides being so destructive.  For several reasons, that system 
of farming is doomed, and the human food production system needs to 
continue, no matter what happens with industrial agriculture.  I think.

Smiles.
Tommy


On 8/14/10 10:35 PM, Tradingpost wrote:
> Exactly. This is why making growing profitable is such an uphill struggle. 
> And why it's a topic almost taboo among growers. But if sustainable growing 
> can't first sustain the growers there won't be enough growers no matter how 
> much people want real food. Bottom line.
>
> I can't go with the argument that policy should subsidize our work, not at 
> all. Policy should stop subsidizing industrial agriculture which makes junk 
> food cheaper than real food. That's not all. Fortunes have been spent 
> promoting junk food - not real food, not natural, unprocessed, unpackaged, 
> unadulterated food. It's a miracle there's an organic or fresh local movement 
> at all considering it's against all odds.
>
> But things change. Here's the last person I'd expect to see promoting home 
> cooking - just tonite Barb showed me what Guy Fiero (punked out show host) 
> was doing on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, who's on a reality show tour to 
> cities showing ordinary people *how to cook*. He told his audience about 30 
> years ago people stopped cooking at home and need to do it again and involve 
> the kids. His audience went wild.
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
>