We Must Reclaim Our Farmland From the Rural Oligarchy

[Judi Lynn]

We Must Reclaim Our Farmland From the Rural Oligarchy
Monday, 20 May 2013 10:52 By Evaggelos Vallianatos, Truthout | Op-Ed

Traditional agriculture was the mother of human culture and societies. Small farmers raised food and created organized societies and states. In ancient Greece, small farmers invented democracy and the polis. They also defended the state. Xenophon, an Athenian general, a student of Socrates, and philosopher of late fifth century BCE, praised agriculture as the mother of all the arts and sciences and civilization.(1)

However, the fall of the Greeks and the Romans and the following Dark Ages transformed agriculture more to the liking of plantation owners who worked the land with slaves. Then the nineteenth-century "industrial" revolution added mechanical power to the plantation and, thus, the industrialized version of agriculture came into being. This is a mechanical powerhouse that has been remaking modern science and society to serve the interests of large landowners and industrialists. The damage of this monstrous institution has been monumental, even threatening the survival of the Earth.

There are fundamentally two reasons why industrialized agriculture has broken its ties with civilization. First, it causes a violent revolution by wiping out rural culture and traditions, mechanizing the countryside and making it a subsidiary of urban power. And, second, industrialized agriculture is deleterious to the natural world.

The poisons of industrialized farming, especially pesticides, seep into our food and drinking water, causing us debilitating and fatal diseases. They also kill insects and insect-eating birds. In addition, pesticides and the massive machinery of giant agriculture simplify and degrade ecosystems and, in some cases, do away with them altogether. For example, when we "convert" a forest or wetland to farmland, we obliterate a galaxy of life that thrived in the ecosystem of the forest and wetland. However, industrialized agriculturalists or businessmen don't think of ecology. They convince themselves that their machines, chemicals and empires of flat land will make them rich. Their vision of the world is confined to how much they can extract from that land. Brazil is wrecking the Amazon to produce soybeans for the animal farms of Western Europe and America. This massive destruction of nature is also going on in the rest of the world, just like mining companies in West Virginia and China blow up entire mountains to get to the coal and other "resources."

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16473-industrialized-agriculture-and-civilization

[cprise]

1. We need an anti-rentier movement

The article points out one aspect of this. Another is the generation of distributed renewable power, what some people are calling Energy Democracy.