Food Sovereignty Quotes

Because in [Lenin's] eyes the workers were only workers and not also customers, he believed they were already slaves under capitalism, and that one did not change their status when nationalizing all plants and shops. Socialism substitutes the sovereignty of a dictator, or committee of dictators, for the sovereignty of the consumers. Along with the economic sovereignty of the citizens disappears also their political sovereignty. To the unique production plan that annuls any planning on the part of the consumers corresponds in the constitutional sphere the one party principle that deprives the citizens of any opportunity to plan the course of public affairs. Freedom is indivisible. He who has not the faculty to choose among various brands of canned food or soap, is also deprived of the power to choose between various political parties and programs and to elect the officeholders. He is no longer a man; he becomes a pawn in the hands of the supreme social engineer. Even his freedom to rear progeny will be taken away by eugenics.

Organic agriculture = Seed Sovereignty + Biological Integrity + Food Security Whereas, Food biotechnology = Food security (at the cost of seed sovereignty and biological integrity) The choice is on us!

Shifts also result from well-organized communities creating new institutions that meet peoples’ needs as responses to the shocks and slides better than the dominant systems can, such as food sovereignty projects, collectivized housing systems, cooperative economics (time banks, worker co-ops, food shares, community-based restorative justice projects, etc.)

Seed sovereignty should not be sacrificed at the altar of food security

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

And in those same years, the farmers in the developing world would come to be encouraged to use the patented descendants of the seeds their ancestors had once freely shared. And once they did that, once they bought the new seed and stopped saving seed as they had for centuries, they not only lost the old varieties but they were trapped in a system that indentured them to the seed companies. And if they resisted buying the new seeds, even if they resisted because they were not convinced about the safety of the new seeds, they were told they were causing starvation in their countries. And if they thought to demand royalties for the germplasm their ancestors once had given freely, they were called greedy.

Despite all technical change in the advanced countries, to this day India, with a much smaller cultivated area than the US, produces annually a larger total tonnage of cereals, root crops, oil crops, sugar crops, fruits and vegetables. The precise figures are 858 million tonnes in India and 676 million tonnes in the US in 2007, the latest year for which the data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is available. As for China, its even more intensive cultivation, developed over centuries, and consequent high land productivity were legendary; Britain’s agricultural yields at that time, properly measured over the same production period, were pathetic in comparison. By 2007 China produced 1,308 million tonnes from an area substantially less than that of India and of the US.

After analyzing our current crisis and studying well-established historical precedents, I must conclude that the global bankers have only three possible cards left to play. The first is admitting culpability and working to restore the American economic engine to its free-market potential. History has taught us that the ruling class rarely admits error and never concedes power. The second is to foment so much civil unrest and fear that the general population will be clamoring for a global dictator who will provide them food, shelter, and security in exchange for their individual freedom and sovereignty. I see the emerging militancy of the labor union movement playing right into this scenario. The final play is global conflict where they can try and control the outcome by means of funding both sides.

LEAD PEOPLE TO COMMITMENT We have seen that nonbelievers in worship actually “close with Christ” in two basic ways: some may come to Christ during the service itself (1 Cor 14:24 – 25), while others must be “followed up with” by means of after-service meetings. Let’s take a closer look at both ways of leading people to commitment. It is possible to lead people to a commitment to Christ during the service. One way of inviting people to receive Christ is to make a verbal invitation as the Lord’s Supper is being distributed. At our church, we say it this way: “If you are not in a saving relationship with God through Christ today, do not take the bread and the cup, but as they come around, take Christ. Receive him in your heart as those around you receive the food. Then immediately afterward, come up and tell an officer or a pastor about what you’ve done so we can get you ready to receive the Supper the next time as a child of God.” Another way to invite commitment during the service is to give people a time of silence or a period of musical interlude after the sermon. This affords people time to think and process what they have heard and to offer themselves to God in prayer. In many situations, it is best to invite people to commitment through after-meetings. Acts 2 gives an example. Inverses 12 and 13 we are told that some folks mocked after hearing the apostles praise and preach, but others were disturbed and asked, “What does this mean?” Then, we see that Peter very specifically explained the gospel and, in response to the follow-up question “What shall we do?” (v. 37), he explained how to become a Christian. Historically, many preachers have found it effective to offer such meetings to nonbelievers and seekers immediately after evangelistic worship. Convicted seekers have just come from being in the presence of God and are often the most teachable and open at this time. To seek to “get them into a small group” or even to merely return next Sunday is asking a lot. They may also be “amazed and perplexed” (Acts 2:12), and it is best to strike while the iron is hot. This should not be understood as doubting that God is infallibly drawing people to himself (Acts 13:48; 16:14). Knowing the sovereignty of God helps us to relax as we do evangelism, knowing that conversions are not dependent on our eloquence. But it should not lead us to ignore or minimize the truth that God works through secondary causes. The Westminster Confession (5.2 – 3), for example, tells us that God routinely works through normal social and psychological processes. Therefore, inviting people into a follow-up meeting immediately after the worship service can often be more conducive to conserving the fruit of the Word. After-meetings may take the shape of one or more persons waiting at the front of the auditorium to pray with and talk with seekers who wish to make inquiries right on the spot. Another way is to host a simple Q&A session with the preacher in or near the main auditorium, following the postlude. Or offer one or two classes or small group experiences targeted to specific questions non-Christians ask about the content, relevance, and credibility of the Christian faith. Skilled lay evangelists should be present who can come alongside newcomers, answer spiritual questions, and provide guidance for their next steps.

At least there is calm at home? Hardly: food, gas, and electricity prices are at near all-time highs; a stagnant economy in “recovery” that for most people outside of Wall Street remains recessionary; government soon to be run by executive orders; the end of any idea of national sovereignty or a southern border; the Ferguson riots and racial explosions revealing an America more divided than at any time since the 1970s; the buffoonish Missouri governor Nixon playing the Katrina role of a now imprisoned Ray Nagin. The alphabet soup of unresolved IRS, VA, NSA, and AP scandals; revolutionary, extra-legal justice meted out to Rick Perry; Benghazi coming back into the news; the little reported on drip-by-drip practical dissolution of Obamacare. 1979–80 seem calm in comparison. The chaos arises from a variety of causes, but one common denominator is that President Obama has not a clue how to deal with these crises.

The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time,” Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), explains. “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.

In basic microeconomics textbooks, even when welfare gets attention, it is in the domain of efficient outcomes. Redistribution through taxes is first introduced as a big ‘no go’ domain with concepts of deadweight loss. However, inefficiency out of market behaviour and market outcomes is plainly ignored and overlooked. Approximately, $600 million daily is needed to feed every extremely poor person, yet about $2.75 billion value of food is wasted every day, according to Food and Agriculture Organization. Consequently, 9 million people die every year from hunger while one-third of all food is wasted. This gross inefficiency in economic resources is not captured or discussed. According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally, per capita food supply increased from about 2,200 kcal per day in the early 1960s to more than 2,903 kcal per day by 2014. But under capitalism, the market allocates goods including even food to only those who can pay its price. It does not make a difference whether the willingness to pay is less than the price due to ‘preference’ or due to ‘poverty’. Yet, mainstream economics claims consumer sovereignty.

I will not obey orders to disarm Americans. I will not obey orders to conduct warrantless searches. I will not obey orders to detain Americans wrongfully labeled as enemy combatants. I will not obey orders to invade a state that asserts its sovereignty. I will not obey orders to force law-abiding American citizens into detention camps. I will not obey orders to assist foreign troops on United States soil to assert control over our citizens. I will not obey orders to confiscate the property of our citizens, including their food and belongings. I will not obey orders to impose martial law. I will not obey orders to infringe upon the freedoms afforded all Americans in the Bill of Rights.

KAILASA Celebrates International Day of Charity KAILASA upholds the fundamental concepts and principles of making a Dana which is the traditional practice of ‘giving away’ or ‘donation’ without expecting any return’ as ‘philanthropy’, helping humanity to reclaim conscious sovereignty through six of its international humanitarian agencies. Members of the Sovereign Order of KAILASA form an efficient network as religious peacekeepers of International humanitarian agencies that includes supporting everything from educational needs, medical needs, food bank programs, emergency relief programs, spiritual support for the displaced living through war, conflict, or law-fare to intervention in areas hit by natural disasters, and various social services.

Under these conditions governments ceded large parts of their economic and social spending sovereignty to their donors. From this point on, choices over national development would be shaped not by national governments, but by their creditors.64

Your tiny little neighborhood may have all the comfort of modern life, but there are still countless lands across the world, that lack the very basic amenities of life - in these places, justice, peace, sleep, food, water, shelter, are still stories from the Arabian Nights. So, how can you, a creature of conscience and character sleep so sound, on your soft and cozy bed? How my friend? Throw away the sheets, get down from your pedestal of luxury and run to those lands of misery as the rising sun and give your all to instill the basic rights in their helpless existence, so that at least the unborn could be born in an environment that's more humane than savage, that's more just than immoral, that's more accepting than discriminatory, and that's more evolving than stagnant.

To put this as plainly as possible, what we're dealing with is a corporate appropriation of the world's soils. Which is occurring on two levels: the known and potential effects that chemical/biotech products have on the soil, and the question of who owns the land and therefore controls the soil and what it yields. This in the context of diminishing resources, including projected widespread food and water shortages, when all we've got is a capitalist system through which to allocate them. Something that in itself is problematic, since free-market capitalism currently construed promotes the goals of the corporations (market domination and profit) even when it violates the wishes of ordinary people and their desire for sovereignty over the food they eat and the crops they cultivate and feed to livestock.

Because of the outrageous distortion of poverty in discourse and statistics, it is advisable to drop the term altogether.  The opposite of prosperity is not poverty – it is destitution, a state of inadequate shelter, food, and clothing.  Only 0.5 – 1% of Americans live in actual destitution,[106] which is an historical achievement beyond the imagination of the most ideologically faithful socialists of the 20th century, who were choking on the dirt of Russian dekulakization and Chinese struggle sessions.  As the Chinese socialists killed off millions of their

ideological invasion of America.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt demanded many of the same compulsory liberties that the communists had in their constitutions – including entertainment, healthcare, education, jobs, housing, retirement, price controls, and food.  He called it the Second Bill of Rights, and presented it in his 1944 state of the union address.[136]  While presenting this plan to

It is impossible to fathom current Tibetan attitudes toward the Chinese government without grasping the enormity of what befell them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tibetans often speak about “when the Chinese invaded”—only to be chastised by Chinese who point out that this eastern part of the plateau had been part of the Qing dynasty’s China since the early eighteenth century. But the Qing emperors were Manchus, a northern people who were nominally Tibetan Buddhists. The Han Chinese were virtually strangers. And what difference does it make? When somebody who speaks a different language comes to your town, confiscates your home, your clothing, your shoes, and your food, destroys that which is most sacred to you, imprisons the young men in your family, and shoots those who resist, it feels like an invasion whether that person is a fellow citizen or not. Tibetans aren’t talking about the fine points of international law or the definition of sovereignty: they are speaking honestly about what they experienced.

Each no-dig hāngi we make in the oven with cabbage leaves sutures a different part of me back together. Every time we collect and cook something together with love and joy makes up for every time I ate until I was sick. We take a small moment each day to stand in my parents’ garden in the sun. To nourish ourselves, we harvest the earth and the beings that spring from it. All our small attempts to care for ourselves and each other wash away some of the shadowy figures that have followed us around for so long. I have a knife, a basket, and two legs. He kai kei aku ringa.

Input quality data, output quality performance.

Kamuela Enos of MA‘O Organic Farms comments, “To me, the GMO piece is the corporatization of food. [This is] taking away the ability of communities to articulate their own food destiny and putting it in the hands of some remote boardroom.” He further explains, “The food sovereignty piece is about creating a vibrant food system that allows us to be resilient on islands. It pushes us toward the kind of system our kūpuna were able to create uninterrupted for thousands of years.

During our interview, he chuckled and asked, “What happened to the sugar and pineapple plantations?” and then went on to forecast that the new Big Five biotech corporations will meet the same demise as the old Big Five sugar companies. When oil prices soar and it becomes too expensive to ship their chemicals and seeds in and out of Hawai‘i, they will leave because they have no vested interest here. “It's really bad, short-term economic forecasting to think they are going to be here forever.” So it will be “up to this generation to create the building blocks for a food system to grow farms, farmers, and the system of a localized food economy.

Jesus does not want us to worry about the future. God knows what we need to live. When He wants us to die, we will die. And as long as He wants us to live, we will live. He will provide us with the food, drink, jobs, housing, with everything that we need to live and glorify Him in this life until He wants us to glorify Him by dying. Worrying and fretting and obsessing about the future, even if it is a pseudo-holy worry that attempts to discern the will of God, will not add one single hour to your life, and it will certainly not add any happiness or holiness either. Worry and anxiety are not merely bad habits or idiosyncrasies. They are sinful fruits that blossom from the root of unbelief. Jesus doesn’t treat obsession with the future as a personal quirk, but as evidence of little faith (v. 30). Worry and anxiety reflect our hearts’ distrust in the goodness and sovereignty of God. Worry is a spiritual issue and must be fought with faith. We must fight to believe that God has mercy for today’s troubles and, no matter what may come tomorrow, that God will have new mercies for tomorrow’s troubles (Lamentations 3:22-23). God’s way is not to show us what tomorrow looks like or even to tell us what decisions we should make tomorrow. That’s not His way because that’s not the way of faith. God’s way is to tell us that He knows tomorrow, He cares for us, and therefore, we should not worry.

In some countries that I have visited, I saw that citizens are very rude and animalistic. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in some of these nations often reveals to be a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are simultaneously very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster; Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, undeserving of any job or even trust. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ them, marry them or befriend them. Most are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Their women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. And yet, they can also show a high predisposition for racist behaviors and ignorance in what regards the planet they live in. They are, foremost, selfish, sadistic and parasitic. These countries and their people represent the lowest level of mankind. Whenever you witness what I just described, you are experiencing a country reaching its end. Move out of it while you can, for God will set on such people Divine justice as quickly as such citizens, by their immoral behavior, approach it. Many of such countries end with the loss of their sovereignty for political reasons, invasions by foreign armies, civil wars, violent revolutions, major economical collapses leading the citizens to poverty and starvation, and much more.

Lithuanian citizens are the rudest and most animalistic I have ever seen in Europe. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are very rude, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in Lithuania is a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. These people should be ashamed to be part of Europe and be removed from the European Union. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster: Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, they deserve to be unemployed and starve to death. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ a Lithuanian, marry a Lithuanian or be friend with a Lithuanian. Lithuanias are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Lithuanian women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. Nevertheless, Lithuanians are also extremely racist and ignorant about the planet they live in. They are selfish, sadistic and parasitic. Probably the same could be said about all baltic countries, namely, Latvia, but for now, it is suffice to say this statement is an undoubted fact for the country in analysis. If Latvian and Lithuanian sovereignty ever end within this generation due to major unemployment, massacres and civil wars, and the vast majority of its people perish, I would say Divine justice has been made on both nations.

what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one’s picture on it, causing it to circulate among one’s subjects—and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again? This does seem a bit of a puzzle. But if money and markets do not emerge spontaneously, it actually makes perfect sense. Because this is the simplest and most efficient way to bring markets into being. Let us take a hypothetical example. Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem. Such a force would likely consume anything edible within ten miles of their camp in as many days; unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and animals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions.18 On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one’s entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect. This is a bit of a cartoon version, but it is very clear that markets did spring up around ancient armies; one need only take a glance at Kautilya’s Arthasasatra, the Sassanian “circle of sovereignty,” or the Chinese “Discourses on Salt and Iron” to discover that most ancient rulers spent a great deal of their time thinking about the relation between mines, soldiers, taxes, and food.