Excerpt:

“It is said that a civilisation that is loosing its seeds and destroying its soil is a dying civilisation: and we are. Today, over eighty percent of mankind’s diet is provided by the seeds of less than a dozen plant species – and most of these are ‘owned’ by just two or three transnational corporations. Ninety eight percent of vegetable varieties have disappeared from the diet of the western world over the past hundred years. Unless this catastrophic loss of biodiversity is reversed, our gene pool – upon which all life depends – will run dry within the span of this century.”

As US citizens remain transfixed by the financial crises engulfing their nation, the US House of Representatives is about to take a decision on a seemingly innocuous series of bills that appear to offer further protection against poor hygiene and sanitary conditions in the food chain. However, these bills are not what they seem. A carefully planned and executed heist is underway, care of the Monsanto Corporation and the ‘Codex’ arm of the World Trade Organisation, to rid the agribusiness dominated food chain of any genuine ‘organic’ produce. ‘Nutrients’ of virtually all descriptions are under attack as potentially ‘unsafe’ and therefore a threat to public health. They should be made illegal according to the protagonists of these bills. So only sanitized, irradiated and chemically treated ‘nutrients’ will be permitted to enter the food chain if these bills get through Congress. In fact, the food chain will be one step nearer ‘total ownership’ by the “two or three transnational corporations” cited in the above chapter of my book.

Its a very disturbing development for US citizens who, for the most part, still appear to be bathing in the ‘Obama Honeymoon’ with its still lingering promise of change and more power to the people. Barak Obama had, prior to his election, raised hopes amongst anti GMO and pro organic activists, by stating that he would support the development of ecological farming and critically review GM technology. As it is, he has elected Tom Vilsack, the most solid of GMO supporters, as Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack was named ‘Governor of the Year’ by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation in 2008. Just to compound the deception, the President’s wife instigated the digging up of part of the White House lawn in order to grow some symbolic organic veggies.

What happens in the USA tends, after a small delay, to arrive in Europe. Owing to the dubious distinction of the ‘special relationship’ between the USA and UK, almost everything involving US corporate aggrandizement and power politics gets ‘special attention’ by leading political figures in our Country. Blair was already promoting Monsanto’s GM technology on the behest of Clinton. Lord Sainsbury was given the job of pushing forward the UK GM agenda when he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. I was surprised to see his heraldic ‘Knights of the Garter’ flag hanging in Windsor Castle’s Saint George’s chapel, in 2000.

Blair’s team invested large sums of pension funds in UK GMO developments, but was no doubt disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm of the British public for GM foods and field trials. The trials were unceremoniously ripped up by protesters who knew that pollen from the maize and oilseed rape crops would soon contaminate the British countryside, causing irreparable damage to the food chain. Brown, not to be outdone, continues to press-on with secretive GM research funding programmes and Hilary Ben has never flinched from the idea that genetic modification still has an important role to play in the future of our food.

What all this tells us is that the Agricultural Policy in the UK, USA and most of the ‘developed’ world, is an unashamed attempt to exert almost total politico-corporate control over the food chain, and to do it using a technology that guarantees the patented ‘ownership’ of plants and seeds by the corporations that create them. This involves expropriating the seeds that are the intellectual property of peasant farmers from around the world, laying claim to the seed’s DNA, and selling them back again under strict contractual conditions that include prohibiting any subsequent harvested seed to be saved, as well as demanding royalties be paid on every new purchase. Such practices are condoned by our governments as part of necessary ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ policies for southern hemisphere countries. But the reality is that they force independent farmers into slavery to the vast corporate agribusiness and pharmaceutical agencies that profit from their carefully conceived ‘patents on life’ and the vast outreach accorded to them by the World Trade Organisation’s forcible demands that poorer Countries lift their protective trade barriers. This, in exchange for vast loans designed to ‘Westernise’ native agricultural practices whose origins and current practices are about providing food sovereignty to their people – and not providing western supermarkets with mass produced green beans.

The ‘Codex Alimentarius’ arm of the WTO is now working in tandem with the US pharmaceutical companies to destroy not only organic food and farming, but natural medicine as well. All herbal, naturpath and homeopathic practices are being told that they will have to to be registered under the same costly terms as commercial pharmaceutical companies by 2010/12, or be forced to close.

Our ‘freedom of choice’ is being curtailed at a rapidly gathering pace. Once the food chain has become dominated – and quite literally ‘owned’ – by the corporate conglomerate, it will be too late to protest. It is for this reason that “Changing Course for Life” is calling for us to “take control of our lives before we become unrecallably controlled.” This can done by shifting our allegiances away from the supermarkets: the mass global food purveyors of unashamed ‘consumerism’ – and returning to more human , local and regional, small to medium-scale decentralised models of genuinely sustainable production and consumption.

Its a challenge we cannot shirk if we want to retain the ability to feed and house ourselves in the not too distant future. But its not just a countryside challenge. City dwellers take heart; in Cuba 8% of the total urban land area is cultivated by 18,000 gardeners and is thus helping to supply urban generated food for many thousands of families. Greening the city is not just a nicety, it is an essential component in the strategy of ‘taking control’ recommended in my book as a sine qua non for forging a new renaissance of enduring community living; in defiance – if necessary – of the bureaucratic rule book and state interference. Such an event is, in fact, already beginning to manifest itself in many urban centres throughout Europe and beyond.

The stage is now set for a radical, and distinctly pragmatic, reappraisal of our long overrated consumerist life styles. The catalyst of such a change will be the no longer tolerable forces of politico-corporate oppression, coupled with a resource and climate crisis that demands a very different approach to the way we currently manage our planet and ourselves.

In “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” the reader will be able to find a thought provoking resolution to these crucial issues that confront us in all the main avenues of contemporary life. It is a call to action, providing answers at a time when mainstream politics has no answers. If we really want to escape the clutches of Codex and the advancing ‘One World Government’, we have no option but to invent and build the new society.

“There is no magic pill to cure our planet or its people. However the more aware we become about the deep seated ills afflicting all realms of planetary life, the more ready we will be to shift the angle of our current trajectory, and embark on the new course. A course that leads beyond the ensuing chaos and into the new order which it is our absolute prerogative to set in motion.”

“Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” by Julian Rose. New European Publishing Company. Paperback. Price 10 pounds. See www.changingcourseforlife.info

I thank you for the opportunity of speaking on this special occasion.

There could hardly be a more important issue confronting not just farmers, but the whole of society, than the subject of this meeting: how to grow adequate food and produce adequate energy without the aid of rapidly diminishing and highly polluting fossil fuels. And the reason why it is so important is because: this is not a concern for the future – it is the reality at this very moment. The transition from a 250 year old fossil fuel powered society to a genuinely sustainable renewable energy fuelled society is to be achieved in less than 25 years – if we are to avoid an ultimate meltdown of most of what sustains our present planetary ecology. That is not my prognosis but the increasingly broadcast view of the majority of professional climatologists from all around the world.

The task involved in meeting this deadline would be considerably easier if we had started in earnest some 30 to 40 years ago – but we didn’t. And we still haven’t today. The juggernaut is barely even applying the brakes and is happily cruising through the red lights, building an impression of absolute immunity to nature’s warning cries. The tractors and combine harvesters, even on England’s green and pleasant lands are still getting bigger and the use of oil-based synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is not diminishing. More roads and airport runways are planned and more hypermarkets are queuing to convert green pastures into concrete Warehouses for factory farmed foods. And if this isn’t enough we have leaders hell bent on adding genetically modified foods and nuclear power stations to the apocalyptic corporate soup.

To this we can now add the planned introduction of “The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill” through which this government wants to allow the creation of genetically modified human embryos – a technology that will ignore all ethical considerations and lead – for the first time – to the legal creation of patented genetically modified babies.

I hope those of us in this room are under no illusions about what goes on in these hallowed halls for the majority of the year. The Houses of Parliament have become a very prestigious auction house, where the welfare of humanity is auctioned off for the price of maintaining the corporate-led status quo, and the organophosphate treated wool is pulled over the eyes of the expectant electorate – many of whom still believe that governments are supposed to be interested in their future.

Global warming and industrial agriculture coupled with untempered mining of fossil fuels, is a combination that leads directly to ‘mutually assured destruction’. Ecological farming of food and energy and their localised distribution, is a combination that leads directly to ‘mutually assured creation’. It is that simple!

So will this House now pass an act to put this resolution into action? All those in favour? Against? Abstentions? Now then, the first thing we will need is independent and caring farmers, saving and growing their own seeds and selling the resultant foods locally. They will only be able to do this if they are supported by local consumer groups who work out a contractual agreement with such farmers to grow foods for them on an annual basis (Yes, this is the way). This is the only genuinely manageable route to food and energy sovereignty and a long term foundation for well-maintained soil fertility, clean air and a humanitarian culture of town and country. Neither farmers nor consumers can survive unless each helps the other to achieve their basic needs; and this must first happen at the local and regional level. It must be a mutual- self-help-community- inspired action. It is here that we find the seeds of hope, that can lead on to the celebration of a shared harvest feast that we are all, perhaps unconsciously, longing for.

To set this process in motion, we have to do two things: we have to first ban the genetically modified seeds of despair that enslave farmers and destroy the diversity of the gene pool which is the source of life and our common inheritance; then we have to adhere to something I have called the ‘Proximity Principle’. Quite simply this means acquiring the majority of our ecologically managed food, fuel and fibre products from the areas of land that immediately surround the townships and villages that form the main population centres across the country. It is a plan so simple that most adults can’t understand it! But here is a clue: let us say that 1 acre of land can provide for 1 person’s basic food needs. Then we can extrapolate that a market town with a population of 10,000 would need 10,000 acres of land to feed it. Well, the Proximity Principle informs us that the cheapest, quickest and most environmentally and humanly benign way of achieving this town and country mutual support symbiosis is for the farms that immediately surround the town to be the suppliers of the town’s needs. This formula can then be repeated throughout the towns and villages of England and the world, so that only when an overall surplus of food or energy is left over after firstly fulfilling the immediate needs of each region, should this surplus be available for export into the nearest region or other country which is suffering an under supply. So where there is a short-fall of local food, energy or fibres this is to be met by the nearest region which carries a surplus of these. We have first to fulfil our own needs with the land resource we have at our disposal, and cease relying on a cut-throat aggressive and inhuman oil fired global economy to provide for our basic needs.

It is the antithesis of the hypermarket-led global food business which is now as popular with organic growers as with conventional growers – and is the single most destructive factor in food and farming’s contribution to climate change and a generally burnt-out world.

Adherence to the Proximity Principle will revolutionise our relationship with the land and those who farm it, providing fresh, flavourful and nutritious local food to all who need it, and increasingly, supplies of local renewable energy as well – finally ensuring that farmers have a guaranteed all year round market - on their doorstep. It is the first stepping stone in assuring the food sovereignty that is our democratic right, and is a task which lies at the heart of the ISIS report Food Futures Now.

In this way the seeds of despair will be transformed into the seeds of hope.

Julian Rose