Read part 1 first here

Once upon a time there was a modest, unsuspecting Canadian corn farmer who had the great misfortune of happenstance having conspired with a strong gust of wind. Unbeknownst to the farmer, corn seed containing patented genetic material blew from a passing truck into his fields. Now, the gentle farmer had been saving his own seed for many seasons, perfecting his own special, local variety of maize, continuing one of the oldest North American traditions. However, clever agents of the company who owned these patented seeds serendipitously materialized one morning in their dark suits and dark glasses on the gentleman farmer’s land, to test his crop for evidence he had stolen their trade secret. Just as they suspected, their precious genetically-modified germplasm had indeed infiltrated the farmer’s bounty – or booty – as the man was clearly not an honest farmer but a thieving pirate! He was surreptitiously growing the company’s secret species without ever having paid for their seed. “No no,” pleaded the farmer, “it is their seed that has contaminated mine!” But the wisest and most powerful courts of the land saw through his humble guile, and the farmer was found guilty and ordered to pay reparations for his heinous crime.

There are a great number of stories like this; of them, this is perhaps the most commonly told. Unfortunately, these are not merely fables, but rather grim cautionary tales for those of us with visions of self-reliance in mind. Their lesson is that we must not take our belief in personal freedoms too far. Our lawmakers, and indeed many citizens, have come to mistake capitalism for democracy, assuming that the former always begets the latter. Thus, our so-called inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” afford ourselves and our communities with very little flexibility to stray outside the capitalist paradigm. Go too far, and we find that we are no longer quaint grass-roots activists but communist enemies-of-state.

But market values are very different than democratic ones. Law and policy will consistently countermand local movements to build self-reliance, because these movements undermine the dominant economic paradigm which values dependence on industry and the market. In the case of corn farming, for example, the court rulings against our gentle farmer were in the name of intellectual property, a cornerstone of modern capitalism. In other cases, for instance regulations that prohibit the distribution of fresh milk, policies that bring dairy farmers to be treated like drug smugglers bear the rubric of securing the public health. However, when considered critically, none of these measures actually promote the ends that they claim to protect.

Intellectual property laws purport to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, through the creation of a market for ideas. Yet patent laws currently allow companies like Monsanto to use their last-minute addendum to the maize genome as proof of ownership of the contributions made by thousands of years of selection and cultivation. When the courts support this claim, they effectively limit the number of entrants into the seed-saving market to those with the financial resources to implement transgenic laboratory science. Likewise, where pasteurization regulations purport to have solved a safety problem inherent to milk, the safety problem they solve is in fact inherent to the large-scale production and transportation of milk. The costs of pasteurization, however, once again create financial liability that limits market entry those with the ability to pay.

This critique is not of the industrial agricultural system or the political system that nurtures it per se. It is a critique of their hegemony. Ultimately, we must come to value the strengths of both local and industrialized approaches to food production as two ends of the same gradient, leveraging each where necessary in order to build a new, diverse and healthful American food landscape. No-one yet knows what this will look like when and if it happens, but it is certain that it will only occur within a re-imagined framework of civil liberties that expand, rather than limit communities’ ability to experiment with how and from where they get their food.

I argued in Self Reliance, part 1 that the pursuit of self-reliance is an inalienable right of every community. And it may be in theory, but is clearly not yet in practice. Our Bill of Rights does not afford us this right because the document is about individual rights, not collective ones. The Declaration of Independence, however, does speak to the rights of the community, it speaks of one people, and repeatedly uses words like we¸ and our, and united. It also states in no uncertain terms that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” There are few things I can think of that are more fundamental to the pursuit of self-reliance than the right to save seed, or to breed livestock, or to trade goods freely. It is clear that our system has become destructive of these ends, so what recourse remains, then, but to demand that this system be either changed or thrown away?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 12:36 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Democracy, Food, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.