If the priorities reflected in our nation's budget are defense and human services, consider just how vital the role of the Department of Agriculture is: if conventional food production is reliant on petroleum for production and distribution, it reinforces our country's dependence on foreign oil; where local, sustainable agriculture becomes a policy of independence from imported oil and a matter of national security: If intensive industrial farming and livestock operations have depleted the life in our soil and taken animal cruelty to new levels, leading to the degradation of the nutritional value of foodstuffs, then encouraging small-scale biodiverse agriculture becomes a matter of moral and public health.
Every one of these issues can be traced back to the cozy relationship between our representatives in Washington and lobbyists representing corporate interests. We all pay for "cheap" food in fighting wars to protect our petroleum habit, the staggering costs of epidemic health issues related to eating nutritionally inferior food, the damage to the soil, water and air around us, and in the moral corruption of selling out to the mighty dollar every day, not to mention the loss of the simple joy of eating well.
While the media screams increasingly loudly about the economy, the effects of lobbying are clear here as well. With no regulation, and unchecked by any moral sense, the players were courting disaster, one we must all pay for. This obsession with the economic climate will likely make many insist that something as mundane as agricultural issues need to take a back seat, but even in hard times, people need to eat. And if they eat well: healthy food raised by people who can make a decent living using time-proven methods, we will all benefit, in terms of reduced dependence on oil, increased national security, improved public health and healthy and sustainable economic activity.
While it has become a common way of doing "business" in Washington it is no longer a viable option: We need to get government out of bed with corporations now, not just because it is a gross adultery of democracy, but because our very survival as humans and Americans depend on it.
I wish you all the best in the coming years, and hope that you will find the fortitude to maintain your guiding principles in the face of many pressures.
