Ahead of the Heard
Readers will be forgiven for not having heard of a recent obscure event held in faraway Toronto. Although National Farmers Union (NFU) members might want to pay attention being their hard-earned dollars seem to be frivolously spent on green political silliness. The NFU is identified as a sponsor of an event entitled “Festival of Dangerous Ideas.” Calling it a “Festival of Fools” would be more appropriate as it brought together a rag-tag collection of green lobby whackos and ideologues, organic production blowhards and scam artists, back-to-the earth hippies, and the usual delusional green dreamers and malcontents. Most of the speakers at the event were self-appointed and self-righteous experts on food and agriculture. Bashing modern commercial agriculture was of course the theme of the meeting, along with wild conspiracies of world domination by every corporate entity, with special emphasis on the evil Monsanto.
I expect to the folks attending this event every advancement in agricultural production for the past 100 years is vile and must be banned for the sake of human civilization. There is some humour in what these folks believe, particular as most are products of the society they seem to despise. As expected genetically engineered (GE) plants, herbicides, pesticides, patented seeds and science in general were cited as the root of all evil. The event head liner was Vandana Shiva an anti-commercial agriculture activist from India. She apparently told event attendees what they wanted to hear blaming capitalism and corporate agriculture for the world’s ills. She advocated a return to some sort of subsistence agriculture based on the socialist concept of “the commons” where everything is shared. One would have thought that the disastrous communist collective farming system would be a lesson as to how that type of agriculture does not work, but apparently there are still fools out there that have little understanding about basic human nature.
Ms. Shiva stated that small diverse farms were more productive than corporate agriculture. If that were true Africa would be the world’s biggest producer and exporter of food being that continent outside of South Africa is essentially the world’s largest conglomeration of small organic farmers. Did I mention that Africa is also the largest recipient of food aid in the world, it’s one of those inconvenient truths folks like Ms. Shiva neglect to mention. Did I also mention that virtually all the food aid in the world comes from the commercial agriculture industry that these folks rail against. But I digress.
In checking some websites and news articles it would seem that Ms. Shiva is a sort of small agriculture guru having written a couple of books on the topic along with women’s issues. No doubt she is a darling of leftish, organic, anti-capitalist groups and makes a living flying around the world to delusional events like the recent Festival of Fools in Toronto. Interestingly, organizers of the event insisted on calling it the “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” even though a much more prominent and long-time event of the same name is sponsored by the Sydney opera house. Maybe fools is too kind of a word for these folks.
These types of green and organic industry booster events are nothing new; it’s no different from events held by other sectors, societies, political parties etc. They are designed to rally the troops, raise some money and to engage in much self-delusion depending on the cause of course. This Toronto Festival of Fools would see carefully selected biased speakers and ideological heroes making outrageous statements that the audience would already agree with. I expect most would be vegetarians and the banquet was intensely politically-correct - featuring organic, fair-trade, local beets and rutabagas grown by socially aware women and gender friendly peasant workers’ collectives and brought to the event by wind powered wagons.
Many of the sponsors were the usual suspects all involved in the green and organic lobbies and most very urban based with no connection to actual agriculture outside of Toronto. One does ponder why the National Farmers Union would be involved in an essentially anti-agriculture event. I expect many NFU members, especially in western Canada, would be defined as environmental enemies by the folks involved in this event. There certainly would seem to be little hope in drumming up new NFU memberships with these folks. Why any agricultural organization would want to be associated with the notorious Sierra Club one of the sponsors of the event, boggles the mind. Taking part in events like this would only serve to question the relevancy of the NFU in today’s modern agriculture industry.