How many of you have seen pictures of Gandhi spinning thread
on a wheel? Of course, most of you have. The image is so ingrained in our minds
that when I was a child my older sister told me that the wheel on the Indian
flag represents Gandhi's spinning wheel. (Actually, it's the buddhist symbol
for the wheel of the dharma---the emblem of India's first king, Ashoka.) But
since I suspect that most of you have probably never heard about why the Mahatma
spent so much time spinning thread, I thought I'd briefly explain that and draw
some parallels to farming.
People usually don't realize that Gandhi had an economic worldview
to go along with his ideas about religion and politics. But in a very honest
and humble way he was the first person to develop a critique of the Western
notion of "development" and a new understanding of the economy that
would eventually become known as "small is beautiful". As such, he
was a grand parent to all the Green Parties around the world.
Because of his close connection to the humble people of India,
Gandhi had a visceral understanding of the village economy that was totally
absent from most of the other Congress Party leaders. Traditionally, the people
of India wore clothes made of a hand-made cloth known as "kadi". This
cloth was woven by agricultural day-labourers during the rainy season---when
there was no work for them in the fields. In Gandhi's time people were quickly
giving up kadi in favour of machine made cloth from the looms of England. This
was driving the rural poor into utter destitution because it meant that there
was no longer any way they could support themselves during the rainy season.
The Indian upper class could understand that trade with England
was draining off India's hard currency and preventing the emergence of Indian
industry. That is why they supported a campaign to ask all Indians to burn their
English cloth and only buy Indian-made materials. That was economic nationalism
and it made perfect sense to them. Gandhi took the issue one step further and
argued that the location of a mechanical loom didn't make any difference to
an agricultural worker. Whether it was in Liverpool or Bombay---she still starved
to death if it deprived her of a livelihood. To draw people's attention to this
fact, the Mahatma refused to wear anything except kadi and constantly spun thread
which he sold to handweavers at what he considered a just price. Gandhi believed
that the only way social justice could come to an independent India was by leaving
space for a village-based, handi-craft economy.
I suppose that some of you are thinking that Gandhi was a noble
man, but unrealistic. How could he think that India could somehow hold back
"progress"? I can only surmise that because he lived with the poor,
travelled with the poor and lived---to some extent---like the poor, he couldn't
forget about them. (In his writings he refers to them as the "skeletons".)
If you actually open up your heart to the poor and oppressed, their individual
lives become more important than abstractions like "progress" and
"the law of supply and demand". It was as if Gandhiji could not wear
machine made cloth because he could see the misery that was woven into its very
fabric.
Canada is not a Third World country, which means that it can
be even harder to believe that the choices we make in our individual lives can
lead to very bad things happening in the lives of others. The modern economy
builds a wall between ourselves and the people who serve us. Unless we make
a conscious effort to educate ourselves about the consequences of our choices
it is easy to participate in everyday crimes against humanity without even knowing
what we do. This gets me back to tonight's main topic, which is our food and
where it comes from.
The iconic image we retain of farming is that of a handicraft
industry. That is to say, small plots of land with a variety of livestock and
crops. The farm most city people think of is "Old MacDonald's", with
pigs, cows, chickens, sheep and goats. This method of farming is under attack
all over the world and has been pretty much replaced with an industrial model.
Industrial farming is governed by the same processes as a factory: ownership
by huge corporations, large specialized operations, division of labour between
thinkers and workers, and so forth. This has all sorts of implications for the
environment and the health of consumers, but I want to focus on the lives of
the people who work as labourers on industrial farms.
Let's start with an example from the Third World. In his book
Out of Poverty: and into something more comfortable, John Stackhouse
devotes a chapter to the Bangladesh shrimp industry. In it he describes the
utter destitution it has created among the small land owners and tenant farmers
who were displaced by shrimp farms. People who used to be able to raise their
own food, build their own homes, and gather firewood have been reduced to squatting
in huts on the banks of dams between the flooded fields. If they do have access
to a little land, the salt from the shrimp farms kill their gardens and the
trees that supply fuel. The men and children move to the cities to work as coolies,
women get jobs at starvation wages catching shrimp fry or sorting adult shrimp.
Stackhouse says that this same process has been at work all over Asia.
The ecological destruction continued in Thailand, Vietnam,
Malaysia, and later China, as large food producers moved
from country to country, eager to keep Western freezers
stocked. It was only the thousands of small farmers who
suffered, stuck as they were with enormous debts, lost
incomes and land laced with salt, lime, urea phosphate and other chemicals. (pp.198-199)
Nothing quite so stark has taken place on Canadian farms,
but much the same process has been at work here. In the last 25 or so years
there has been a dramatic decline in family-owned, mixed farms. Those farms
that still exist get larger and larger, and more and more specialized. Increasingly
farms depend on hired hands to get the work done (when I was young very few
farms were large enough to justify paid employees). The trend is quite clear
and has even been articulated. One economist's report to the US department of
agriculture states that in his opinion American agriculture should be consolidated
to the point where there would eventually only be 250 farms left in the USA.
Of course, they would be enormous industrial enterprises on the scale of Tyson
Farms and Cargill.
This "consolidation process" is not a painless exercise.
Peasants develop a very strong bond to the soil, one that city dwellers probably
will never be able to understand. I have not set foot on my family's old farm
for over twenty years, yet I can still tell you where every wet spot, vein of
clay, gravel or sand was in our fields. I can also tell you where the sugar
maples grow, the elderberries thrive, the oaks stand, etc. When we had to sell
out I cried more than when my father died. The process drove a wedge between
my mother, older brother and myself that we have only recently been able to
heal. This stress of "agricultural consolidation" has played itself
out all over Canada in the form of suicides, marriage break-ups, physical and
emotional abuse, alcoholism and so on. One doesn't have to be dirt poor in order
to suffer.
As if it isn't enough that we are destroying the class of independent,
family-owned, small farmers; this consolidation has created a horrifying change
in the quality of life for those few who do "succeed" and stay on
the land. My parents used to talk about livestock in a way that I could never
understand. It seems that when they were young many people in their parent's
generation developed a relationship with their horses that I could only marvel
at. For these folks, when a horse became too old to work they didn't immediately
send it off to be rendered into glue, but instead literally "put it out
to pasture". That is, they fed and took care of it until it died---even
though it was no longer able to do any productive work. I found this absolutely
dumb-founding, as my brother and I treated our livestock totally like they were
machines to be used and abused however we saw fit and with only their profitability
at issue.
The thing to remember about modern factory farms is that they
are concentration camps and modern methods have reduced farmers to the level
of SS Guards. This analogy is quite precise and accurate. If you look at the
illnesses that livestock suffer from, they are exactly the same as those that
inmates of Bergen-Belson and Auswitze suffered: viral pneumonia, mental retardation
through under-stimulation, ulcers, cannabilism, etc.
(As an aside, many of you might remember the humane society's
recent petition drive to have "puppy mills" outlawed. The reason the
government will not pass a cruely to animals law that would effectively put
puppy mills out of business is because any such legislation would also be applicable
to factory farms.)
Moreover, I believe that if you take a man and progressively
force him to routinely brutalize animals through forcible confinement in filthy
conditions, with bad air, incredible over-crowding, etc, you desensitize him
towards inflicting suffering on others. Police tell us that many mass murderers
are people who started out torturing animals. I can only shudder to think about
how many tortured souls we are creating through industrial agriculture. Industrial
agriculture has taken what used to be one of the most healthy ways of making
a living and made it a living Hell.
There is a bright light at the end of this tunnel, however. The fastest growing part of the food industry is organic. And most organic food is grown through small-scale, family run businesses. Old MacDonald is making a come back---but now he grows tofu and does companion planting! It isn't enough, however, to simply buy organic. We also need to purchase local food and develop a connection with the people who grow it. So try to avoid shopping at large grocery stores and instead try to connect with Community Shared Agriculture, the local farmer's market or independent health food stores. The important point is to remember what effect your food choices have on the lives of the people who grow it. Like Gandhi, try to make sure that nothing you wear or eat adds to the store of misery in this world.
Thank you, and walk lightly on this beautiful earth.
Bill Hulet is the editor of "The Ontario Green News". He gave this address as an introduction to a Slow Food event held in Guelph in November 2002.