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.