Another reason to why we should be depaving and creating sustainable organic agriculture everywhere

“The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture uses 10 times more energy than it produces. It uses 10 times more water than biodiverse farming with water-prudent crops and organic practices use. In fact, when assessed from nature’s economy, biodiverse, ecological farms have much higher productivity than large-scale, industrial, monoculture farms. The illusion of efficiency is produced by externalizing the ecological costs.” / “…a polyculture [crop diversity] system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5,900 units of food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them. A common argument used to promote industrial agriculture is that only it and industrial breeding can maintain the increased food productivity needed for a growing population. However, since resources, not labor, are the limiting actor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labor productivity, which is the relevant measure. What is needed is more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. A 66-fold decrease of food producing capacity in the context of resources use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water, and biodiversity to feed the world.” (from the book “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace” by Vandana Shiva)

Influence. I want to be able to convince everybody with power around the world to actively support a transition away from a system that’s based on hierarchy and coercion to a decentralized and cooperative one.

We need to move away from a system that requires “funding” to operate. If we have all of the needed knowledge, resources, technology, human power, etc. - we should just do what needs to be done.

“Pfizer and its shareholders make more money from drugs that treat baldness and impotence than they would from drugs to treat diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, that are leading causes of death in the developing world. Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies likely have the know-how and the physical capacity to place more emphasis on developing and making drugs to fight these killer diseases. Though such drugs would do immense good for the world and could save millions of lives every year, the costs to any company that developed them would almost certainly outweigh the benefits.” (from the book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of Profit And Power” by Joel Bakan")