A New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, published Wednesday, starts like this:
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy – all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
Here in Hawai‘i, we need to rethink our own structure so we will be able to effectively deal with tomorrow’s problems. Some of our most pressing problems have to do with agriculture and energy. They are inextricably intertwined.
Fossil fuel energy has allowed agriculture to feed the world’s people. In a world of declining fossil fuel energy, we must reorganize so that our agricultural systems maximize our available resources.
This also means that we need to incentive farmers to utilize renewable energy sources. For example, it is not wise these days to subsidize value-added processing plants that depend on fossil fuel energy. When energy prices rise again, as we all know they will, those processing plants will end up as skeletons bleaching in the sun.
We know that to become food secure, farmers need to be able to make a living. It is not rocket science: “If the farmer makes money, the farmer will farm.”
Instead of relying on imported foreign labor to produce our food, we need to think about relocating our farms to where the labor supply is located. This means we need to disburse our food production so that it’s all throughout the state.
Utilizing new, renewable energy sources to generate power can catch the next generations’ imagination and convince them to farm. It’s much more interesting than watching tomato plants grow.
Read the rest of the New York Times article here.