The corporate capitalist system is destroying people and the planet. Can we imagine alternatives? Ravi Logan and Jason Schreiner’s model is based on valuing our interrelatedness and interdependency within the natural world. It replaces profit-driven with cooperative enterprises, and emphasizes a balance between local self-reliance and bioregional networks, with some global structures to meet global needs like telecommunications. They describe applying permaculture principles like the zone approach in on-the-ground projects in Eugene, Oregon. [www.proutinstitute.org]
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Ravi and Jason spoke about moving toward a more localised form of economy and food supply. They didn’t mention it but should be aware of the HR.875 bill that was introduced to congress last February 4. This will have an enormous impact by placing onerous procedural and documentation requirements on small farms and small food suppliers. Part of my work is to keep up to date with HACCP (Hazard and Critical Control Protocol) procedures which is an earlier development of the Codex Alimentarius on which a large part of the HR875 is based. When reading the bill, one soon realises that by using the excuse “ensuring safety of the food supply” it requires all food suppliers in the USA and anyone supplying to the USA to be licensed under the requirements of the act. It took 2.5 people 6 months to initially develop a Food Safety plan for the company at which I work. To maintain it requires me approximately one day’s work each fortnight and more the week before an audit. We are audited at 6 monthly intervals and can be closed down if a major CAR (Corrective Action Request) is not complied with. There are some type of majors that can enforce an immediate close down.
The big concern with this is that small farms and food suppliers will be unlikely to have the ability or means to develop a plan that will be more complex than the one that I work to. The act provides penalties for non-compliance with the possiblity of incarceration for repeat offenders. This means that there will be no more food sold at farmers markets, school fetes or any type of fundraising event. The humble hamburger stand will suffer, meaning that only a larger business can afford to run a chain of hamburger stands. An untested fear is that you will not be allowed under the act to give or swap with a neighbour produce from your veggie patch.
I am sure that there would be many that would want to hear more about this. Janaia, your difficulty would be in finding someone to comment on it that would do so from a dispassionate point of view. There is a huge conspiracy theory (however well reasoned) that could cause an imprecise presentation to backfire. Maybe you could have Ravi or Jason comment on this?