- Chapter 12 - - Revive Family Farming and Feed the World - June 1992 marked an historic point in U.S. food and farm policy, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that federal food stocks were too low to continue domestic food relief at the high level demanded. This announcement came at a time when an estimated 40 million Americans are dependent on some form of supplementary food--the WIC (Womens, Infants and Childrens Program,) TEFAP (Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program) for the elderly, the young, and others. One in 10 Americans, or 25 million people, were getting food stamps as of mid-summer 1992. August 1992's Hurricane Andrew pushed that number even higher. The response of the USDA? Spokesmen told House Agriculture Committee hearings in July that, hungry people are not the concern of the USDA. The ``surplus'' food is gone, and that is ``good'' for the American farmer. In fact, thousands of American family farmers are likewise being ruined by the policies of the USDA, and the food cartel companies that have come to run the USDA. - No Food for the Hungry - In mid-June 1991, the USDA suspended distribution of relief foods from its central warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia, cutting off thousands of households from needed staple foods--wheat flour, canned vegetables and fruits, oils, rice, and other basics. As of July 1, the government stopped all flows of surplus federal stocks of wheat flour given as ``bonus'' grants to U.S. schools, hospitals, and feeding programs for the poor. As of a year earlier, the USDA began phasing out bonus dairy foodstuffs. The same policy has been put into effect internationally: no food for the hungry. While agriculture output potential has been systematically obstructed in recent decades by International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies, the United States, and other potential food donor nations, have decreased, not increased their relief food shipments. In the mid-1980s, international grain relief was about 14 millions of tons annually. For 1992, it may be less than 10 millions of tons. Yet the need is far greater. Africa is facing food shortages on the level of genocide. In 1992, Africa was hit by the ``Drought of the Century,'' and by the calamitous effects of decades of colonialism and neo-colonialism under the IMF. Russia and the former Soviet Bloc are likewise reeling under IMF ``shock therapy'' economics. In 1988, LaRouche warned that this situation was imminent, and called for a ``Food for Peace'' orientation to mobilize for emergency food relief, and all out food production. This approach was particularly called for in 1988, since in that summer, a ``Killer Drought'' hit the U.S. cornbelt, and production fell by half. LaRouche, at the time of the 1988 Democratic Party Convention in Atlanta, initiated the call for the founding of emergency food mobilization organization. In September 1988, the Food for Peace effort of the Schiller Institute was founded at a conference of 400 people in Chicago. Since that time, as food output potential has fallen worldwide, the Food for Peace organization has grown to force of collaborators that span the globe. The summary points of the program that LaRouche had fought for are immediately below, followed by excerpts from his October 1988, ``Food for Peace'' strategy proposal given in Berlin. - What Is Required - The food and farm program advocated by LaRouche includes the following essential points: {1. Emergency action against famine.} Mobilize for domestic food relief and against famine in Africa and other points of need. Collaborate with other nations, to vastly increase world food output, in particular protein-dense foods--meat, milk, eggs. More area planted, higher inputs per unit area, more energy per acre and per farm worker. Provide advanced food processing and preservation, especially food irradiation, to provide lifesaving relief, and improved diets as rapidly as possible. {2. No more foreclosures.} Implement a freeze and rescheduling of farm debt. Stay foreclosures on family farms, along with all home mortgages and essential businesses, health care, and other vital services. {3. Low-interest production credits.} Make available low-interest credits for food and fiber production and family farm capital improvements. {4. Constitutionalize the Federal Reserve System. } Nationalize the Federal Reserve System, bringing it once again under control of the Congress as specified in the Constituion, in order to resume control over national monetary and credit policy and resume production levels--agriculture, industry and infrastructure and essential services, to the needed per household volumes. Initiate the needed infrastructure construction and repair projects to provie 3 million jobs directly, and another 3 millions indirectly. {5. Dump GATT, NAFTA, U.S.-Canada FTA and all other ``free trade'' impoverishment schemes.} No free trade usury. Bust up the food cartel companies' worldwide control over farm production, prices, food processing, shipping and sales. {6. Ensure parity prices to producers. } Enforce 100 percent parity farm price leveles in the United States, and support the same policy for all nations. {7. Set aside is genocide.} End the programs to prevent food output on potentially productive farmland. Offer inducements for land repair and improvement. {8.} Emergency action against famine. Mobilize--collaborate with other nations, to vastly increase world food output, in particular protein-dense foods--meat, milk, eggs. More planting, more inputs, more energy per acre and per farm worker. Provide emergency shipments to Africa and all points of need to stop the starvation now on the level of genocide. {9.} End environmentalist madness. Back real science. End the Environmental Protection Agency bans on the safe use of chemicals, in particular DDT. Back fullscale research into such areas as genetic engineering to potentially enhance photosynthesis, and in ``cold fusion'' and related phenomena (sonoluminescence, superconductivity, anomolous behavior in water, etc.,) in order to further breakthroughs in basic nuclear science, and future applications for energy, agriculture and medicine. Extend the NASA research into CELSS (controlled environment agriculture systems--hydroponics, aeroponics, and other high input-high output systems) throughout the land-grant university research systems. {10.} Build infrastructure. Initiate the water, power and transport projects to bring supply lebels up to requirements for growth. In particular: The North American Water and Power Alliance; nuclear pwoer for plentiful, inexpensive electricity and saltwater desalination; high speed rail lines and magnetically levitated trains. {11.} Emergency financial relief to family farms. Free farmers from the usurious Federal Reserve policies, in which the Farmers Home Administration, the Production Credit Associations, Federal Land Banks and private lenders have been denying farmers the means to produce, and dispossessing them of their farms on a mass scale. Investigate and prosecute those individuals and entities--such as the giant Dutch-based Rabo bank, that have used the government-backed farm loan guarantees to profit off the ruination of family farms. {12.} Trust bust the food cartel companies. Initiate anti-trust and prosecution actions aimed at dismembering the select few food cartel companies now dominating food production, trade and government policy at the USDA and other agencies. Top of the list are: Cargill Inc., ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland/Toepfer, Grand Metropolitan, Garnac/Andre, Continental, Labatts, Louis Dreyfus, IBP, Tysons, Bunge and similar monopolies. - LaRouche Presents Food for Peace Strategy - On October 12, 1988, Lyndon LaRouche, running as an independent presidential candidate against George Bush and Michael Dukakis, delivered a now-famous speech at Berlin, Germany's Kempinski-Bristol Hotel. LaRouche, accompanied by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, forecast the reunification of Germany and the political crisis which was to sweep the Soviet empire only months later, and called for the creation of an international Food for Peace organization as the leading edge of America's foreign policy. Excerpts of LaRouche's presentation follow: I see a possibility, that the process of reunification could develop as de Gaulle proposed. I base this possibility upon the reality of a terrible worldwide food crisis which has erupted during the past several months, and will dominate the world's politics for at least two years to come. The economy of the Soviet bloc is a terrible, and worsening failure. In Western European culture, we have demonstrated that the successes of nations of big industries depend upon the technologically progressive independent farmer, and what you call in Germany the {Mittelstand} (Germany's small and medium-sized entrepreneurs). Soviet culture in its present form is not capable of applying this lesson. Despite all attempts at structural reforms, and despite any amount of credits supplied from the West, the Soviet bloc economy as a whole has reached the critical point, that, in its present form, it will continue to slide downhill from here on, even if the present worldwide food crisis had not erupted. I do not foresee the possibility of genuine peace between the United States and Soviet Union earlier than thirty or forty years still to come. The best we can do in the name of peace, is to avoid a new general war between the powers. This war-avoidance must be based partly on our armed strength, and our political will. It must be based also, on rebuilding the strength of our economies. At the same time that we discourage Moscow from dangerous military and similar adventures, we must heed the lesson taught us by a great military scientist nearly four centuries ago, Niccolo Macchiavelli: we must also provide an adversary with a safe route of escape. We must rebuild our economies to the level at which we can provide the nations of the Soviet bloc an escape from the terrible effects of their economic suffering. I give a concrete example. Recently, in response to the food crisis, I sponsored the formation of an international association, called Food For Peace. This association has just recently held its founding conference in Chicago Sept. 3-4, and since then has been growing rapidly inside the United States and in other nations represented by delegates attending that conference. One of the points I have stressed, in supporting this Food For Peace effort, is that the Soviet bloc will require the import of about 80 million tons of grain next year, as a bare minimum for the pressing needs of its population. China is experiencing a terrible food crisis, too. As of now, the food reserves are exhausted. There are no more food reserves in the United States, and the actions of the European Commission in Brussels have brought the food reserves of Western Europe to very low levels. Next year, the United States and Western Europe will be cut off from the large and growing amount of food imports during recent years, because of the collapse of food production in developing nations throughout most of the world. During 1988, the world will have produced between 1.6 and 1.7 billion tons of grains, already a disastrous shortage. To ensure conditions of political, and strategic stability during 1989 and 1990, we shall require approximately 2.4 to 2.5 billion tons of grain each year. At those levels, we would be able to meet minimal Soviet needs; without something approaching those levels, we could not. If the nations of the West would adopt an emergency agricultural policy, those nations, working together, could ensure that we reach the level of food supply corresponding to about 2.4 billion tons of grains. It would be a major effort, and would mean scrapping the present agricultural policies of many governments and supranational institutions, but it could be accomplished. If we are serious about avoiding the danger of war during the coming two years, we will do just that. By adopting these kinds of policies, in food supplies and other crucial economic matters, the West can foster the kind of conditions under which the desirable approach to reunification of Germany can proceed on the basis a majority of Germans on both sides of the Wall desire it should. I propose that the next government of the United States should adopt that as part of its foreign policy toward Central Europe. Rebuild the Economies Of Eastern Europe I shall propose the following concrete perspective to my government. We say to Moscow: We will help you. We shall act to establish Food for Peace agreements among the international community, with the included goal that neither the people of the Soviet bloc nor developing nations shall go hungry. In response to our good faith in doing that for you, let us do something which will set an example of what can be done to help solve the economic crisis throughout the Soviet bloc generally. Let us say that the United States and Western Europe will cooperate to accomplish the successful rebuilding of the economy of Poland. There will be no interference in the political system of government, but only a kind of Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Poland's industry and agriculture. If Germany agrees to this, let a process aimed at the reunification of the economies of Germany begin, and let this be the {punctum saliens} for Western cooperation in assisting the rebuilding of the economy of Poland. We, in the United States and Germany, should say to the Soviet bloc, let us show what we can do for the peoples of Eastern Europe, by this test, which costs you really nothing. Then, you judge by the results, whether this is a lesson you wish to try in other cases.... I recall the famous case of a certain German gentleman of the Weimar period. This gentleman was persuaded that a second world war was inevitable. He searched the world for a place to which he might move his family, to be out of the areas in which the next war would be fought. So, when the war erupted, he and his family were living in the remote Solomon Islands, on the island of Guadalcanal. In this period of crisis, there is no place in which any man or woman can safely hide in a crisis-ridden world without food. One can not duck politics, with the idea of taking care of one's career and family, until this storm blows over. There is no place, for any man or woman to hide. There is no room for today's political pragmatists in the leadership of governments now. If we are to survive, we must make boldly imaginative decisions, on the condition that they are good choices, as well as bold ones. type for captions, graphics: Figure 1: Cholera at U.S. Borders Figure 2: Zones of Contaminated Water in the Rio Grande Hydrologic Region Figure 3: Mexico's Maquiladoras Figure 4: Maquiladoras Grow, Mexicans Starve Figure 5: Mexico's Cumulative Interest Payments, Foreign and Domestic ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com