“It’s a dead end to try and eliminate subsidies, because then you get all of America’s farmers, who have political power out of all proportion of their number, unified against change. Right now the incentives are to produce as much as possible, whatever the costs to the environment and our health. But you can imagine another set of assumptions, so that they’re getting incentives to sequester carbon. Or clean the water that leaves their farm, or for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they’re growing.”
—Michael Pollan, reflecting a growing consensus
Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?
Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:34 pm
24 Feb 2009
Ok, let's not end subsidies.
But if we're paying for farming, don't we get a say in what...how...where?
How about more input into what we're growing and how we grow it.
Why is it that the customer is always right...except when the customer is a taxpayer!!
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Russ Posted 7:04 pm
24 Feb 2009
With energy we've long had a playing field heavily tipped in favor of fossil fuel gluttony, and it's still tipped that way. So what we need is to maintain the same (or an increased) incentive level for renewables, building efficiency, and mass transit, while stripping welfare payments from fossil fuels and the automobile.
So in the same way subsidies and incentives should be used to retip the agricultural playing field away from industrial monocropping and the globalist food distribution model, and toward
relocalization, organic farming, with a redistribution in favor of so-called "specialty" crops (i.e. real fruits and vegetables used for actual food - and while we're at it change that stupid terminology: "specialty", as if it's some prissy yuppie garnish), and in favor of environmentally sound farming practices, discouraging the production of unsuitable land, encouraging regional and local food distribution: CSAs, farmers' markets, community gardens, tool and seed distribution centers for a new Victory Garden campaign (and a public education campaign encouraging these individual gardens).
That last point leads us to the larger issue of America's public education curriculum in general. To be of any value, it needs to be radically refocused on every aspect of relocalization. I guess that's beyond the scope of the discussion here...
Then there's the issue of meat consumption subsidies. Offhand I'm not sure how to do away with CAFOs without directly attacking them politically. But done away with they must be.
Of course nothing - a food policy transformation, an energy policy transformation, a climate policy transformation - will work if they plow ahead with these agrofuel mandates.
One thing's for sure, no activist is going to be bored anytime soon.
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archigeek Posted 3:48 am
25 Feb 2009
The mellotron is your friend.
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