Sustainable agriculture vs. the merchants of greed

The famous journalist Ambrose Bierce once defined a corporation as "that inglorious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." In another era they were called "the robber barons." Today, the ADMs, the Cargills, the Chiquitas, the ConAgras, the IBPs, the Smithfield Foods, the Tysons and others have become the merchants of greed.

These merchants of greed see the World Trade Organization as a wholly owner subsidiary, raw agricultural commodities as the coin of the realm, food as an international weapon, a means by which they can enrich themselves while the poor go hungry, family farmers as "excess human resources," farm and food workers and peasants as the slaves they rent, politicians, regulatory agencies and academics as corporate instruments to be bought, borrowed and brown nosed, and finally these merchants of greed believe, in the immortal words of ADM ("Supermarket to the world"), "the competitor is our friend and the consumer is our enemy."

My good friend, former Sena. Fred Harris, is fond of saying that corporations can't be made responsible because they have no soul to save nor butt to kick, but they can be made accountable. That is our task here today, to make these merchants of greed accountable.

Food next to life itself is our greatest common denominator, literally history's staff of life. We cannot, we must not relinquish its vital role in our lives - its control - to the merchants of greed. We cannot accept when it comes to agriculture and our food supply what University of Missouri economist John Ikerd describes as the four pillars of the industrial paradigm - specialization, simplification, routinization and mechanization. Rather as family farmers, workers and environmentalists our belief is in what Virginia farmer Joel Salatin has described as nature's four pillars - diversification, complexity, flexibility and biology.

We here today must recognize that eating has become a political act. What we eat, where we eat, why we eat tells us whether we want McDomination or community sustainable agriculture, whether we want untested ,genetically-engineered foods or whether we want healthy, nutritious, naturally grown food; whether we want family farmers to receive a fair price for what they produce or whether we want to see the merchants of greed get richer and richer.

Former Yale University chaplain William Sloan Coffin once observed, "it is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, 'let justice roll down like mighty waters,' and quite another to work out the irrigation system."

Well, we are here today because we believe just as Thomas Jefferson did, just as the agrarian populists of a century ago and just as the prairie populists and peasants of the world of today believe, you can not have political democracy without economic democracy. So we are here in Seattle to fashion that irrigation system and just like the mighty waters of the nearby Columbia river, let the mighty waters of democracy roll down. Yes, Woody Guthrie told us right, "roll on Columbia, roll on."

- Remarks by A.V. Krebs, director, Corporate Agribusiness Research Project, WTO Food and Agriculture Day Rally, Seattle, Washington, Dec. 2