Saturday, May 29, 2010

Cannabis and the United Nations Food Security & Nutrition Forum

Forum topic: "Women in agriculture and rural development"

At the most fundamental level, to bring the greatest relief to women in agriculture, a crop is needed that grows food and fuel from the same harvest. Protein, essential fatty-acids, essential amino-acids and clean-burning biofuels are needed in abundance, from the same harvest, to make organic farming work most efficiently.

Ideally this crop would be a complete source of organic vegetable nutrition, capable of adapting to a wide variety of soil and climate conditions. The crop would have to use water efficiently, and if it detoxified contaminated soils and re-mineralize depleted soils that would add to its usefulness in providing a clean environment for raising healthy children. It would be helpful if the crop had exceptional therapeutic properties, including antibiotic, anti-viral, anti-fungal and insect repellent properties.

If the crop provided an effective treatment and more responsible social alternative to alcoholism, it would make women's lives much less violent. Industrial uses, as a raw material for making biodegradable cloth, paper and plastics would provide multiple income streams for a single harvest would allow efficient, regional resource abundance through work, rather than war.

Cannabis hemp agriculture is the single most effective, globally available and affordable shift in value that would do the most to make life for women farmers healthier and easier than it is now. If anyone participating in this forum has a more time-efficient idea for resolving imbalances that impact us all, then I'd certainly like to hear of it. Solving the protein/biofuel equation requires all solutions to be considered.

What's presently happening is that solutions have been outlawed and otherwise marginalized because problems are profitable for the politically powerful few. The environment continues to be wounded as the result of chemically-, scarcity-, war-based economics, and our chances for being effective in resolving critical imbalances are shrinking faster every day.

For impoverished women to bear the weight of inefficiency and imbalance imposed by essential resource scarcity is an insidious misogynistic dimension of human economics that particularly impacts the health and development of children. Compounded burdens are the lot of most women on this planet. Until the effects of drug policy on food security and nutrition are addressed, this fundamental disparity will persist.

The Only Benefit of Being Terminally Wounded

The silent war of values that's been quietly raging, between agriculture and chemicals, is over. Crude oil contamination of the entire ocean ought to finally convince humankind that there is no acceptable reason for using petrochemicals.

Ffuel, plastics and agricultural fertilizers can be made better, less expensively, more efficiently, and with a net environmental benefit.

"Gaiatherapeutic industries are needed immediately to begin the process of healing that needs to begin. The strategies for healing earth,air, water and atmosphere exist. What's needed immediately are "startegies."

If terminal wounding of the planet isn't sufficient to cause a radical reassessment and shift in human values and the fundamental economic base, then disappearance of a dwindling chance that our species will achieve other than violent extinction is accelerated.

How bad do things have to get before all solutions are considered and implemented?
The only benefit of the Gulf Oil Disaster is that it may be big enough and horrible enough to wake people up to the fact that there is no possibility of justifying continued use of toxic fuels when non-toxics could be easily, efficiently, regionally available.

The cost of fossil fuels energy is death for the entire planet. Reintroduce industrial hemp in 2010 or not, it's our choice.