Friends of Rural New York

Author of ‘Sustainable Capitalism’ indicts U.S. society for failing to preserve resources for future generations

By Susan S. Lang <mailto:ssl4@cornell.edu>

ITHACA, N.Y.—In the past half century, U.S. society has mutated into an impersonal, mechanistic and exploitive capitalist economy that “acts like a robot and functions like a cancer,” poisoning our physical and mental well-being and exhausting the world’s resources.

So said keynote speaker John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, speaking at the Campus Sustainability Day/Sustainability Summit, Oct. 26, at Cornell University.

“Somewhere in our pursuit of health and happiness we have lost our way,” said Ikerd, who is the author of a new book, “Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense” (Kumarian Press, 2005).

The seminar was sponsored by Cornell’s Sustainable Food and Agriculture Systems for Healthy Communities Initiative, which is supported by 13 campus organizations.

Ikerd passionately argued to an audience of 250 people in 233 Plant Science Building for a new type of capitalist economy modeled on living systems—capable of regeneration and renewal and ecologically sound, socially just and economically sustainable.

Since the fall of Communism, capitalism has been embraced around the world, even China, he said. But the United States, in its seductive pursuit of wealth, has developed and is spreading around the world a competitive, exploitive industrialized system that is dependent on fossil fuels, heavy metals, plastics and pesticides. While the United States extracts resources from the earth, it doesn’t put anything back for future generations, he said. At the same time, the economic system, he insisted, has abandoned the importance of relationships and ethics.

The result, Ikerd said, is skyrocketing rates of cancer, asthma, diabetes, depression, suicide and health-care costs, a growing sense of malaise and a decline in connectedness to family, community and social networks.

“There has never been a society where people had such wealth. ... But wealth has not brought us happiness,” Ikerd said, his voice rising in dismay. “To be happy, we need a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives … and it’s not from materialism.”

Ikerd urged young people (because, he asserted, older people are too invested politically and economically to change their minds) to reject—before it’s too late—the neoclassical industrial paradigm of standardization, consolidation and specialization whose quest is to maximize profits, growth and materialism while using up resources. In its place, he said, the country needs to build a sustainable capitalist society whose goal is “triple bottom-line management”—where the bottom line isn’t economic but ecological and the management is driven by ecological integrity, social responsibly and economic viability.

“Only then can we pursue individual self-interest in a way that is sustainable,” he said.

What would be the single most important way to go about doing this? Passing a constitutional amendment that guarantees future generations the same rights as today. That would force the writing of new laws to ensure that everybody—even the unborn—has the right to a clean environment.

“We have the greatest opportunity to turn things around. … We have the means if we have the courage,” he said.

The lecture was followed by a reception that included local and organic foods from around the region, coordinated by the GreenStar Cooperative Market. Following the reception, Dean Koyanagi, Cornell’s sustainability coordinator, gave a brief overview of sustainability efforts on campus. For the Sustainability Summit, about 50 people then broke into seven focus groups, facilitated by professionals from Cornell’s Department of Human Resources. The groups identified about 20 sustainable activities that the Cornell community should be pursuing. That list will be posted on the Sustainability Web site and feedback will be solicited.

Campus Sustainability Day at the other end of the calendar from Earth Day is devoted specifically to the achievements and challenges of sustainability in higher education institutions and their surrounding communities.

a Guest Editorial Submitted by: Thomas Linzey, Esq. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)

If only it was just about bad smells.

True, hog and chicken factory farms emit noxious odors so bad that most people who count themselves unlucky enough to live next to one can’t even enjoy their own air.

But if it were only about smells, and properly managing the millions of gallons of liquid manure that ferment in massive factory farm lagoons, solutions - while expensive - would be easy to envision.

If only it were that simple. If only the real harms inflicted on rural communities by corporate farming could be “regulated” away.

The Rendell Administration believes they can be. Their recent proposal would trade away the rights of rural communities to control corporate factory farms in return for increasing the power (and budgets) of State agencies to manage manure disposal and odor.

How will the Administration eliminate local control? Part of Rendell’s recent ACRE proposal would create a Board of political appointees with the power of a Court to overturn laws adopted by local communities. The appointees? The Secretaries of the DEP and Department of Agriculture, and the Dean of Penn State’s School of Agricultural Sciences.

Does anyone believe that those appointees - many of whom have publicly announced their opposition to any local control over corporate farming - would ever side with a rural community over an agribusiness corporation?

With proposals like these, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the Administration and the corporate farming apologists led by the Farm Bureau. Or between the legislators who have been pushing a corporate farming agenda for the past decade and Dennis Wolff, Rendell’s own Secretary of Agriculture.

Of course, the Rendell Administration has never represented that it has an interest in actually stopping the proliferation of corporate factory farms across the Commonwealth. Indeed, by his own words in a veto message delivered last year, Governor Rendell agreed with several environmental groups that corporate farming was somehow inevitable. He even stated that he actually favored stripping away local control - as long as State agencies could regulate the harms caused by corporate farming a little bit better.

That just isn’t good enough for rural communities and Township governments across Pennsylvania. Instead of merely seeking to make corporate factory farms cause a little less harm, many of those communities have decided that their rural quality of life shouldn’t be sacrificed to the economic and environmental damage wreaked by corporate factory farms.

Those communities have simply said “no” to corporate farming.

They’ve done what governments are supposed to do - protect the rights of the people that they represent. In doing so, they’ve followed the lead of nine Midwestern States that produce over 30% of the nation’s entire agricultural output - adopting local laws that ban corporate farming.

When four agribusiness corporations control over 60% of hog production in the United States, it’s no surprise that over 4,000 independent family hog producers in Pennsylvania have been eliminated since 1990. Nor is it a surprise that death by suicide for farmers across the country surpassed equipment related deaths as the number one cause of death for farmers in 2001.

It’s because the agribusiness corporate boys are not just eliminating competitors, they’re ripping out the cultural heart of rural America.

It’s nothing personal. And it’s eerily similar to the hatchet job pulled by Wal-Mart on Main Street downtowns across the country.

When the DEP “regulates” corporate farming, it places the authority of the State behind the corporate agribusiness war with rural Pennsylvania communities and family farmers.

It’s not called “permitting” for nothing.

Communities that say “no” to corporate farming are bravely rejecting an agricultural model that grinds up rural communities, quality of life, and family farmers. In the process, they’re rejecting the notion that agribusiness corporations - and their trade associations like the Farm Bureau - run their community, and not them.

At its essence, what the Rendell Administration seeks to trade away is something they lack the authority to trade at all - local control and democracy.

Over the past three years - as rural communities have battled it out with corporate farming legislators - it’s been about nothing less: the ability of “we the people” to be the ultimate decisionmakers about the future of our families, our communities, and our natural environment.

Many have begun to realize that when a small handful of corporations and their apologists make those decisions for us, that maybe this isn’t the democracy that we once believed it was.

E-mail CELDF

Copyright © 1997 Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Michele Payn-Knoper specializes in marketing, sales training and fundraising for the food industry.  Her clients include among many: Ag Retailer Magazine, AgroCulture Liquid Fertilizer, American Farm Bureau Federation, American Soybean Association, Feed & Grain Magazine, Indiana Farm Bureau, International Agri-Center/World Ag Expo, Monsanto Company, National Corn Growers Association and the National Pork Board.  The following statement on her website homepage is a presage to verbiage prevalent throughout the site, “Trusted as a food expert for three decades, she explains that very little separates GE (genetically engineered) food from the organic products so often recommended”.

Many of Payn-Knoper’s alarmist sound-bite headings from her homepage link to blank pages or to food industry sponsors such as: Fox News, News Media (fronts for the agri-business, the cosmetic industry and pharmaceutical companies), the ultra conservative ACSH (whose corporate funders include American Cyanamid, American Meat Institute, Amoco, Anheuser-Busch, Archer Daniels Midland, Boise Cascade, Chevron, Ciba-Geigy, Coors, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, Ford Motor Co., General Mills, General Motors, Kraft General Foods, National Agricultural Chemicals Association, NutraSweet Co. (Monsanto), Shell Oil, Union Carbide Corp., Uniroyal Chemical Co., and USX Corp), Decision News Media (publishes 24 Web sites providing breaking industry news and product and supplier information in the food, beverage, nutrition, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, science and packaging industries), and RISE (Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, a national not-for-profit trade association representing producers and suppliers of specialty pesticides and fertilizers. In short, Ms. Payn-Knoper’s sources are the very industries she works for, as well as their lobbyists.

Ms. Michele Payn-Knoper’s website links to the IFT (Institute of Food Technologists) site to inform us, “Organic foods are not proven more healthful nor safer than their traditional counterparts, but nearly a third of all consumers want the choice to buy them.”
Indeed, this should tell Ms. Michele Payn-Knoper and her employers something.  But, the website-rhetoric insults the intelligence, integrity and evolved awareness of that “third of all consumers”.  The US Census states that the estimated population of the U.S. in 2004 was approximately 294,000,000, with around 74.3% of Americans being over 18 years of age.  Ms. Payn-Knoper implies that the “third”, (some 73,0000,000 )“consumers” who choose to buy organic foods are obtuse.

Ms. Payn-Knoper also directs us to a site entitled, Where Your Food Dollar Goes, stating, “farmers only receive 19% of every food dollar, with labor, marketing, packaging and others comprising the remainder of each food dollar.” Ms. Payn-Knoper’s Agribusiness CEO clients carve large profits for themselves, leaving farmers the chaff.

In Ms. Payn-Knoper’s recent article, Agrifood Connections ~ Mistakes of Our Industry, she exploits mercenary ultra-right strategies to boost the profit margins of her employers in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and agri-business industries.  She attempts to enlist New York State Farmers in her attempts to discredit traditional sustainable farming practices and organics.

In this article, Ms. Payn-Knoper admonishes her industry for, “Waiting too long to explain the reality of farming today (and) why do many city dwellers have the romanticized view of how their food is produced and negative image of “mega-farms”?”
In fact, it is industry advertising that perpetuates a romanticized view. How many city dwellers would want to purchase agribusiness food products if they could see the reality of factory farming?

Agri-business PR experts utilize specific buzz-words to incite distrust and prejudice against anyone who questions the motives and practices of the industry, branding them “city dwellers”, “move-ins”, “agitators” and “terrorists”. Payn-Knoper fails to mention that large numbers of farmers across the US and the world eschew the agri-business model.

Ms. Payn-Knoper appears to believe that the citizens of the United States and people
throughout the world have no right to question the origins and quality of the food they eat and serve to their children. She admonishes those who dare question, report or oppose Agri-business’ inherent negative impacts to air, water and food quality, and
their maltreatment of migrant workers and animals.  She commands us to allow the “Big Brothers”, the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, to take good care of us.

I entreat local, New York State and world farming communities and consumers to become empowered, do their own homework on these issues and refuse to allow industry hired-guns like Payn-Knoper to dictate what’s best for us, our children, our environment and our futures.
See:
http://www.michelepaynknoper.com/

Chickens raised for food are housed in cramped, unsanitary conditions that are breeding grounds for viruses. “The killer H5N1 mutant is a virus of our own hatching,” said Michael Greger, M.D., HSUS director of public health and animal agriculture. “Cramming tens of thousands of chickens bred to be almost genetically identical into filthy sheds to stand and lay beak-to- beak in their own feces is a recipe for increasing the virulence and transmission of this virus.” The HSUS is currently preparing a report on the connection between factory farming and avian influenza.

Humane Society of the United States