And there are people out there who want to wreck it for them.
Annette Desmerais is associate professor justice studies at the University of Regina, Jim Handy a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. For the Western Producer (behind subscriber wall).
It is this neoliberal, industrial and corporate-driven model of agriculture that has been globalized over the past 30 years. This is a model that treats food like any other commodity, presents agriculture exclusively as a profit-making venture, concentrates productive resources into the hands of agro-industry and places food in commodities futures markets.
Here profit-hungry speculators, investors and hedge funds scoop up millions of dollars through frenzied bidding and betting on price changes and predictions of scarcities. Agriculture has moved away from its primary function, that of feeding humans.
Today, less than half of the world’s grains are eaten by humans, Instead, grains are used primarily to feed animals, and recently these grains are now being converted into agrofuel to feed cars. This is manufactured scarcity par excellence.
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National polices such as price controls, tariffs and marketing boards, designed to ensure the viability of small-scale farmers and an adequate supply of culturally appropriate and nutritious food through support for domestic agriculture, have been replaced by the voracious demands of the market.
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La Via Campesina, an international farm movement representing 149 organizations from 56 countries, argues that the global food crisis demonstartes the desperate need to build a fundamentally new model of agriculture — one based on food sovereignty.
[… They argue] that this crisis can be resolved only if governments support peasant and small-scale production, rebuild their national food economies and regulate international markets and if the international community respects and protects and fulfills human rights, especially the right to food.
A Saskatchewan grain producer of 50 years replies. You know him here as “Spike1”;
“Adequate food is simple justice” reads the headline.
Well, well well, a professor of justice and a professor of history, chiding the growers, traders and distributors of food for treating food as a commodity – blaming profit hungry traders, speculators, and hedge funds for the high price of food. This drivel from professors that earn a scandalous return on investment, (with tenure, by the way), by being paid tens of thosuands of dollars with not one nickle invested, makes me respond to the tripe.
A professor of history that ignores the great famines of the past in Russia, China and elsewhere under the communists, the famines of the present in North Korea and Africa that have nothing to do with traders and speculators, but with despots willing to starve their own people.
A professor of justice ignoring the tariffs and other governmenbt restrictions on the movement of food. A professor of justice that thinks that others should be responsible for feeding him and others.
Professors that distain the feeding of feed grains and ethanol by-products to livestock, thus converting waste products into concentrated protein for human consumption. Professors that live in a city where not one in a thousand, including themselves, are self sufficient in food.
La Via Campesina wants a return to the “back to the land” movement – as happened in China when millions starved and the government controlled the availability of food.
Professors that advocate a cheap food policy for the world’s poor, but support marketing boards that restrict the production of food to maintain the artificially high price for commodities (with the resulting quota bidding) better remember which side they are on.
Professors that seem to be ignorant of the need for animals for motive power and agriculture in all countries. Cattle and sheep that harvest the grass in dry and mountainous regions, thus converting it to protein for human consumption. Yaks that till the rice fields, horses, oxen, and other animals that haul farm produce to markets, cows that graze at will and supply milk and fuel in India, the list goes on.
The Canadian government isntituted a cheap food policy in the Trudeau years, and the result was the decimation of the farm population. Maybe it’s time for a cheap university education policy – not with subsidies, but with the slashing of income for professors, like the cheap food policy did for farmers.
The mansions built in University Park weren’t built by traders and speculators in food.
