Behind the Green Door
Will Verboven - Monday,9 October 2006
WESTERN Standard
The recent coronation of Elizabeth May, former director of the Sierra Club of Canada, as the new leader of the Green party of Canada seems, for environmental zealots, a marriage made in heaven. It was a smart move by the party, since May had turned the Sierra Club into a well-oiled fundraising machine through effective use of fear-mongering propaganda campaigns. For Canada's agriculture industry, however, May's election has all the promise of a marriage from hell. For the policies of both the Sierra Club and the Green party have a similar goal: the destruction of agriculture as we know it.
Apparently, both hanker for the simpler days of Old MacDonald's farm, when there was no intensive agriculture, and no pesticides, antibiotics or genetically modified plants--a bucolic pre-progress paradise. That attitude should come as no surprise, since both organizations are supported by aging urban baby boomers and city kids, neither of whom have the slightest notion of how food is actually produced.
The Sierra Club proclaims boldly, "As food is a major contributor to human health, agriculture can be a threat." Really? That "threat" has supplied the most abundant and safest food supply the world has ever enjoyed. It's such a threat that it not only contributes to a longer life expectancy here, but helps feed many of the organic farmers in Africa, whose all-natural production practices don't even provide enough organic food to feed themselves.
To deal with the threat of agriculture, the Sierra Club advocates "[e]ncouraging individuals to buy locally, to buy organic products, to avoid farmed fish and meat raised in factory farms, and to limit the distance from farm to fork." I suspect it'll take more than encouragement to get Canadian consumers to stick to locally grown vegetables and fruit in the dead of winter.
The utopian organic agriculture envisioned by the Greens and the Sierra Club did once exist in Canada, around the year 1900. Back then, it took half the population to feed the other half. So if we're going to be an organic nation once again, about half of us had better start heading for the countryside. I doubt most Sierra Club ideologues are prepared to make a life on the farm, hoeing organic rows.
Presumably, May will be bringing to her new role as Green party leader the Sierra Club's perspective on agriculture. That should be a natural move, since Green party policy is every bit as twisted. Here's a gem from their party policy on agriculture: "Our biosecurity is threatened directly by agribusiness, as factory farms and poultry production crowd bovine and poultry into inhumane and unhygienic conditions, creating the conditions for the spread of mad cow disease and the avian bird flu."
For the record, all of our cases of so-called mad cow disease have involved mature cows, none of which lived a single day in an alleged factory farm. Meanwhile, avian flu is spread by wild waterfowl infecting domestic poultry being raised outdoors; they'd be safer in pens. But in Al Gore's immortal words, these are merely the "inconvenient truths" of environmentalism.
Perhaps that's being too harsh on May's budding leadership. There's one Green party policy that would delight almost everyone in agriculture, could she deliver it: "The Green Party seeks to restructure our agricultural markets to sustain farming families in a domestic food economy and provide families with a fair share of the consumer food dollar." It's a wonderful wish. But it may not go over that well with Canadian consumers and taxpayers, since it will require either billions in subsidies to farmers, the closure of the border to cheap imports, or high tariffs, price controls and quotas.
It's hard to know what the Greens would do if they ever got into power (they've managed only to join governing coalitions in Europe), but perhaps those in the agriculture business who don't co-operate with them might end up with their land seized and collectivized by organic peasant farmers with a social conscience. Businesses might even have to be nationalized to ensure that uneconomic organic principles were maintained. May and her party could lead us into the organic agricultural paradise. Good luck to her.
Will Verboven - Monday,9 October 2006
WESTERN Standard
The recent coronation of Elizabeth May, former director of the Sierra Club of Canada, as the new leader of the Green party of Canada seems, for environmental zealots, a marriage made in heaven. It was a smart move by the party, since May had turned the Sierra Club into a well-oiled fundraising machine through effective use of fear-mongering propaganda campaigns. For Canada's agriculture industry, however, May's election has all the promise of a marriage from hell. For the policies of both the Sierra Club and the Green party have a similar goal: the destruction of agriculture as we know it.
Apparently, both hanker for the simpler days of Old MacDonald's farm, when there was no intensive agriculture, and no pesticides, antibiotics or genetically modified plants--a bucolic pre-progress paradise. That attitude should come as no surprise, since both organizations are supported by aging urban baby boomers and city kids, neither of whom have the slightest notion of how food is actually produced.
The Sierra Club proclaims boldly, "As food is a major contributor to human health, agriculture can be a threat." Really? That "threat" has supplied the most abundant and safest food supply the world has ever enjoyed. It's such a threat that it not only contributes to a longer life expectancy here, but helps feed many of the organic farmers in Africa, whose all-natural production practices don't even provide enough organic food to feed themselves.
To deal with the threat of agriculture, the Sierra Club advocates "[e]ncouraging individuals to buy locally, to buy organic products, to avoid farmed fish and meat raised in factory farms, and to limit the distance from farm to fork." I suspect it'll take more than encouragement to get Canadian consumers to stick to locally grown vegetables and fruit in the dead of winter.
The utopian organic agriculture envisioned by the Greens and the Sierra Club did once exist in Canada, around the year 1900. Back then, it took half the population to feed the other half. So if we're going to be an organic nation once again, about half of us had better start heading for the countryside. I doubt most Sierra Club ideologues are prepared to make a life on the farm, hoeing organic rows.
Presumably, May will be bringing to her new role as Green party leader the Sierra Club's perspective on agriculture. That should be a natural move, since Green party policy is every bit as twisted. Here's a gem from their party policy on agriculture: "Our biosecurity is threatened directly by agribusiness, as factory farms and poultry production crowd bovine and poultry into inhumane and unhygienic conditions, creating the conditions for the spread of mad cow disease and the avian bird flu."
For the record, all of our cases of so-called mad cow disease have involved mature cows, none of which lived a single day in an alleged factory farm. Meanwhile, avian flu is spread by wild waterfowl infecting domestic poultry being raised outdoors; they'd be safer in pens. But in Al Gore's immortal words, these are merely the "inconvenient truths" of environmentalism.
Perhaps that's being too harsh on May's budding leadership. There's one Green party policy that would delight almost everyone in agriculture, could she deliver it: "The Green Party seeks to restructure our agricultural markets to sustain farming families in a domestic food economy and provide families with a fair share of the consumer food dollar." It's a wonderful wish. But it may not go over that well with Canadian consumers and taxpayers, since it will require either billions in subsidies to farmers, the closure of the border to cheap imports, or high tariffs, price controls and quotas.
It's hard to know what the Greens would do if they ever got into power (they've managed only to join governing coalitions in Europe), but perhaps those in the agriculture business who don't co-operate with them might end up with their land seized and collectivized by organic peasant farmers with a social conscience. Businesses might even have to be nationalized to ensure that uneconomic organic principles were maintained. May and her party could lead us into the organic agricultural paradise. Good luck to her.
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