WATCH: As California farmers make the hard decision to plow through crops no one is buying, analysts say the drop in food supply will be felt in a few months by consumers eager to buy produce at grocery stores https://t.co/F4LVLT5Gct pic.twitter.com/ecrWcGja7c
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2020
Some portion of my ancestors came to the US because there was, quite purposefully, no food where they came from. The one crop poor people mostly ate, failed. Just about every other kind of food a rich land produced, was exported. If it mattered enough, just a tweak of economics could have saved lives (a million people may have died, maybe a million more were saved by leaving). It wasn't that they couldn't have lived off what the land provided--it's that that nourishment was intended for other paying customers' tables. This sort of thing happens the whole world round. People starve not for a lack of food, but because the political climate doesn't allow it to be on their plates. It's either deliberately withheld, as can happen where the government is oppressive, or because there is no foresight on a government's behalf that food insecurity is a national security issue.
It's not just in light of the above story I consider that--it's a painful thing for farmers to produce good food and watch it go to waste and also know that it isn't just money they are out for their labor, but that the demand exists (people still need fed), it only needs a different path to the ultimate consumer. It's in light of images like this:
image of the line of cars waiting for food aid. Surely, they has to be a way for other plans to be made for more produce to be canned, dairy to be powdered, etc. possibly by an act of government, to make food more available for the people temporarily in want? The logistics for such a thing must exist. I know when I was a kid, people talked shit about government cheese (but it was good for grilled cheese) but that was a staple. We need the USDA to get it's top game on.
I'm not a logistics kind of person that knows exactly how to translate not plowing crops under into filling the bellies of people who just need tiding over until this virus crisis is licked, but taking inspiration from folks like Chef Andres, I know if the will existed we could find a way to do it.
That's the kind of thinking we should want in government. And the sort of thing I think government can make happen on a meaningful scale--but which shouldn't stop food relief groups, local governments, etc. from trying to manage, because I think the crisis is still unfolding, and future food shortages could drive inflation and just some really fucked-up realities. Basically, capitalism Venezuela. I could be wrong about that part, but I am not wrong about feeding the people and subsidizing the farmers. We all need to eat and we all need to take care of one another when things are rough. We are all in this together.
That is what makes a nation great.
3 comments:
This is a very good example of utilizing this pause, for lack of a better term, to think and talk about what we can do different. It's long been my complaint that of everyone calling for Revolution none have any idea what to do on the other side of it. When (most of us anyways) can see that what we're doing isn't working, that we need to stop, the first thing we need to do is stop, if only briefly, and take the time to talk about it. Digby alluded to it the other day, though in linking to someone else, but the gist of it is we need to collectively agree to utilize this time to do so.
Yes. If nothing else, we need to learn from failures, but also think about how to do things better.
Hey Vixen, I agree with you and Ten Bears.
We have a lot of anger and denunciations and outright hatred, but we don't have much in terms of unprejudiced solutions.
Politics has a tendency to quickly overstep itself and corrupt the subjects it's involved in. If politics gets involved in science, it corrupts science. If politics gets involved with medicine, it corrupts medicine.
As you know I'm in agreement with George Washington that political parties have the effect of making people more loyal to the party than they are to the American people.
Politics interposes itself between a problem and fixing the problem.
So my idea is that we need to find solutions that ignore whatever right and left biases impose themselves.
People need to think outside the box. As you may remember, I got back from Vietnam and went to college and got involved with radical student body politics. I was young and foolish, but I grew out of it. As far as I'm concerned, the “revolution” ended when the government stopped the draft and people were no longer forced to go to Vietnam.
What we need now is not a revolution but real solutions to the dilemma in which we find ourselves.
So my idea is to lose the politics and figure out what works. I still see people dragging out the same old tired political bromides. And yet we are in a new world in which these things rarely apply. Everyone assumes we will eventually get back to “normal”. I suggest we have no idea what this new “normal” will be. And it may bear little resemblance to what we thought was “normal” a short while ago.
Oh, one more thing. Right now we are not a capitalist country. There is little capitalism going on. We are sitting at home waiting for a government check. We may have been a capitalist society 3 months ago, but we aren't now and don't know whether we will ever be again.
In fact our lauded claim to capitalism is flawed. If you add the burden of state income taxes to federal income and FICA taxes we are basically on the same tax rate as the UK. And then throw in sales and property taxes and we are socialist as most Western democracies.
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