p33 FarmMar

Prayer for the Farmer Martyr
By John Taylor; 2008 Apr 10, 2 Jalal, 165 BE

 

A few days ago I commented on some predictions made in the 1920's by August Forel. The last of these I promised to go into in more detail. Here it is:

 

"Gradual replacement of our technical, feverish lifestyle by quieter living, return to agriculture, development of science, deepening of art, and of our knowledge of human psychology."

 
There really should be a "return to agriculture," that alone would improve our psychological well-being -- Forel, by the way, knew of what he spoke. He was one of the founders of the modern science of sexology, and Sigmund Freud used his research to form his theories of the mind, though Forel himself disapproved of how Freud used his findings.

 
Forel sums up here the spirit of my proposals for changing society through a new kind of cooperative, one that uses ownership shares rather than sole proprietorship, that allows access to land by dynamically negotiated usufruct, has collective, full-service housing, and so forth. One aspect of such housing is already becoming quite an important movement, the integration of agriculture with cities. Meanwhile, new standards have been devised to assure that new buildings are designed according to environmentally friendly standards. I have already featured here a link to a museum in California that this standard indicates will one of only fifty in the world to merit its highest green rating. At least one California city is incorporating post-global warming standard building codes for all construction.

 
"San Francisco may soon boast the greenest buildings in the US. Last week, the local government took a decisive step towards agreeing (upon) what are probably the toughest environmental construction standards in the country. Families and companies planning to build offices and homes will be required to earn green points by introducing energy and water-saving measures - or they risk losing their construction permits." ("San Francisco to boast the greenest buildings," 29 March 2008, New Scientist,

<http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19726492.900?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19726492.900>)

 
Many of these new buildings allow for so-called "green roofs," where plants are grown up top, but unfortunately the complete integration, putting vegetable plots as near as possible to point of consumption, is far from a central goal. Fully integrated agriculture would make every rooftop into a vegetable garden and every yard a productive agricultural asset.

 It should be a moral imperative everywhere to get down and dirty and grow your own veggies, like "victory gardens" that were everywhere during the Second World War. If most city dwellers worked outside on garden plots, it is unlikely that depression would be so widespread, or that industry's gross pollution of the air would be tolerated as it is today. Most people, instead of frittering away their precious leisure time on television, video games and computers, would be directly involved in something productive. Of course, growing plants and animals for food is not a calling for most. On a large scale it is too demanding. But still we need large numbers to be involved in order for agriculture to be a central social goal. For the farmer to come first, there needs to be a second and third prize as well. If most were amateur growers, professional farmers would be revered like rappers or rock stars. George Monbiot in his column of April 7, 2008 hits the nail on the head with "A Cunning Plot, How to grow vegetables without breaking your back," which is available at:

 

<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/07/a-cunning-plot/>

 

He gives some excellent advice on how to get started on a small plot. Safe to say, if we spent as much time tending gardens as we do watching advertising and sports, there would be no food crisis and there would be far more constructive involvement in "growing" civil society.

 Unfortunately, most have lost touch completely with the earth that nurtures us.

 

We should have all stood up and taken notice when, five years ago, Lee Kyung-hae, the farmer-martyr, took his own life on the barricades of the World Trade Organization. He had been an innovative farmer but got sunken into debt, lost his farm, and then devoted his life to advocating for farmers. His knifing at his own hand was a solemn protest against an "inhumane, farmer-killing and undemocratic" form of globalization. This, he wrote, "should be stopped immediately, otherwise the false logic of ... neo-liberalism will perish the diversities of global agriculture and bring disaster to all human beings." (see the Guardian's report of this tragedy in "Field of Tears," at:

 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/16/northkorea.wto>)

 

Just as Lee predicted, the disaster is upon us. The policy of the past twenty years has been to squeeze out farmers who used traditional farming methods and replace them with agri-businesses that depend exclusively on petroleum fertilizers and genetically altered seed stock. Like the press and the American executive branch of government, many farms have gone beyond toadying to greedy corporations and have actually become corporations themselves. The result was just what Lee saw would happen. The price of oil spiked, and suddenly the masses are starving, rioting in the street, crying for just what Lee gave his life to preserve. As he said, sometimes it is better that one should die for ten than ten for one. Unfortunately, such is the power of the elites that all eleven died and the rest of humanity is next in line.
 

Once more I am moved to cite this wonderful prayer of Socrates for pure wealth, for wisdom and for harmony with the gods of local, bucolic living. The prayer ends Plato's dialog known as the Phaedrus, but it could have been written for the farmers of the world to whom we all owe our daily bread,

 
"Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry."

 
The plight of Lee, the farmer's martyr, was very distressful to me. For a long time after I heard about his tragic life I worried and prayed this prayer every day. I keep wondering how we can reverse our vortex into famine.

 
I fear the coming famine will be on a greater scale than anyone dare contemplate. Here we are eight billion souls on a ship of world governance that is spinning down the rim of a giant whirlpool, with no tiller, no hope of escape.

 
The worst plague in history was the Black Death, which killed over a third of the population of Europe in the late Middle Ages. True, that blood-letting brought on the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration and eventually the Enlightenment. Maybe this famine will redeem the entire planet through suffering in a similar way. But how to minimize the suffering to the extent humanly possible?

 
What to do? How do we tip the balance from all-powerful corporations lording it over impotent farmers to the other way around, a system where farmers can decide themselves what they need to get us all fed? Tomorrow I will talk about the eureka moment that jerked me out of these worries.