permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>]

Date:         Tue, 22 May 2001 11:53:12 -0700
 
Reply-To:     Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group
               <SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>
 From:         Misha <mgs2369@HOME.COM>
 Subject:      Re: Ag Terrorism

 Howdy, all--

 A quick query about Dan's question:

>Is there anyone out there (or do you know of anyone out there) who     
> is working on agricultural terrorism, specifically how if might relate to
>sustainable agriculture? I can imagine lots of potential connections
>between these two issues and how the principles of SA (if implemented
>broadly) might also provide some protection from ag terrorism. Any thoughts?

 Dan, can you define "agricultural terrorism"? Or anyway give some
 examples of what you have in mind when you use the phrase? I'm not
 clear on what you mean by that.

 By "agricultural terrorism" do you mean the corporations of one
 nation having the power or threatening to starve another nation's
 people by withdrawing trade-grain supplies for political reasons?

 Or when the corporations of one nation seek to replace the
 indigenous/landrace crops of another nation's people with proprietary
 varieties, simultaneously replacing a commons social system with a
 license-and-user-fee-based one, so that food is no longer a gift of
 abundant land and focused labor, but a consumer product requiring
 participation in a cash economy?

 Or the corporations and policymakers of one nation driving its
 farmers off the land using urban-derived economic formulas for land
 valuation, debt, and ROI, and with no consideration for or care about
 rural economic realities or the people who live there...even though
 the entire nation's economy runs on their work?

 Or a nation's media establishment propagandizing against rural people
 in general, representing their lives, work, and history with hostile,
 bigoted stereotypes of slack-jawed yokels, incestuous hicks,
 gap-toothed gun-toting sodomites, spunky widows, and apple-cheeked
 "farm wives"?

 Do you mean a nation's corporations partnering with its public
 institutions to accrue private gain from publicly developed and held
 assets like seeds, soil, and multi-century agricultural knowledge,
 and the consequent destruction of cultural memory?

 Or agribusiness depending on the labor of families of desperately
 poor, unskilled, undocumented, wandering workers to provide
 lowest-common-denominator fieldwork that can't be done by machines?

 Or perhaps a nation's powerful corporations deciding that it is
 profitable to package the byproducts of industrial processing as
 foods, feed it to people, but never test it for its health effects,
 and then blaming women for their breast cancer, children for their
 hyperactivity, everyone for their obesity, and old people for
 dementia?

 By "agricultural terrorism" do you mean tinkering with the genomic
 base of life on earth in order to find the latest fad in marketing or
 profits, and destroying the careers and lives of anyone who questions
 that?

 Do you mean policymakers and industry groups ignoring the sound
 advice of scientists with decades of research on, say, the
 transmission of prions, allowing hundreds of thousands of new cases
 of brain-wasting dementia to develop among people who are being told,
 by PR firms, that their food is safe?

 Maybe an example of what you're thinking is the consolidation of food
 sectors, such as meat slaughtering and packing, or grain processing,
 so that local communities must do what the corporations who hold
 these industries tell them to, at the risk of losing their economic
 base, their jobs, their homes, and their families?

 Or perhaps a corporation going into a rural community, seeking to
 site a major toxic-waste-generating facility there, securing tax
 breaks from the community, hiring its workers, operating for a couple
 years, then withdrawing, and leaving their environmental, economic,
 and social wastes behind?

 Maybe you mean the shipping of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and
 their derivative products, back and forth across continents and the
 planet, "adding value" (i.e. profits for selected organizations)
 while using huge amounts of fossil fuel energy, holding the entire
 planet's ecosystems hostage to air pollution and greenhouse gas
 emissions, and holding consumers hostage to the fossil fuel industry
 as well as agribusiness?

Or are you using the received definition of the term--deriving from
 government and corporate interests--which means things like a handful
 of activists uprooting a few test plots of GMOs, an activist
 deconstructing a McDonald's, or other nations' technicians developing
 microbes that could quickly unmask the fragility of a highly
 vertically integrated, industrial, fossil-fuel-driven,
 monocrop/monovariety-based food system?

 "Terror" seems to be the densest element of the term "agricultural
 terrorism." Whose terror are are you referring to?

 peace
 mish
 
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L.F.London ICQ#27930345 lflondon@mindspring.com
www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech  london@ibiblio.org