‘Guns drawn and warrants issued against volunteers and supporters of life saving healthy foods’?
Is this an example of the sort of ‘democracy’ that the US wishes to defend and promote throughout the world via the establishment of its 600-plus military bases in more than 60 Countries?
It’s truly shocking to read about the hysterical federal and police intimidation actions taken against ‘Rawsome’ in Los Angeles this June. An action that bluntly flaunts the law in order to impose the will of some corporate pirate determined to maintain a stranglehold on the food chain. This is a prime example of totalitarian state interference in the lives and activities of well meaning citizens.
Personally, I have not witnessed anything approaching this level of outright malevolence in Europe; nor have I heard of such incidences from others. However, there lurks in the background the barely hidden threat of heavy fines or even imprisonment for anyone considered to be participating in activities that might be deemed to be in breach of some EU or government ‘sanitary and hygiene’ food regulation. Plenty of farmers have already suffered under such impositions.
The ‘bacterialogical police’ are the long arm of corporate attempts to maintain dominance over the food chain. They operate at the behest of large supermarket chains that use their vast profits to lobby Brussels to introduce ever more draconian ‘standards’ upon independent family farms that fail to slot in to the monocultural centralised chain of command. Any form of ‘competition’ that might hold up attempts by big pharma and big agro to dominate the food chain – are not smiled upon. However, in Europe, ‘sophisticated propaganda’ is preferred to rule by the gun.
It may even be more effective. We have had ear tagged cattle and animal passports for more than 20 years. We have been put under the cosh of centralised bureaucracy ever since the European Union introduced “The Common Agricultural Policy” in phased instalments across Europe over the past 40 years. This has meant the virtual elimination of local abattoirs, local processing plants, agricultural supply shops, family seed businesses and countryside support organisations right across the EU. ‘Real Farms’ have disappeared at the same rate as trees in tropical rain forests and desert like monocultures have taken their place, just as the GM soy and palm oil plantations continue to replace the hacked down rain forests.
However, this seemingly relentless top-down heist to install a ‘one world food chain’ is meeting increasing resistance. Resistance from farmers and from ‘consumers’. A resistance that springs from a desire to ‘take back control’ of our basic rights to simple good food and authentic quality.
In the UK there are now more clandestine house cows than before the war. More and more people are keeping and raising domestic poultry, maintaining a pig and digging a vegetable plot. Raw milk is selling out more quickly than it can be produced and new producers are coming into the market. A little revolution is under way that threatens to open a substantial chink in the corporate and state armory.
There are entrepreneurial farmers getting together to establish a ‘grass fed’ marketing regime in response to people’s wish to purchase meat with real flavour and free range status. The word ‘local’ is getting a wider and wider airing as customers seek regional authenticity, more genuine choice and less food miles. Health concerns, brought about by obsessive ‘pharmaceutical fixes’ to all symptoms and a totally degraded food supply chain, are attracting considerably wider interest in natural remedies and organic foods. Even the British House of Parliament insists on organic food on its menu – while promoting GM research and supporting Codex attempts to close down natural remedy outlets and marginalise homeopathic medicine.
All in all, one can detect a simmering renaissance of agricultural diversity stirring amongst the stalwart monocultures of European agriculture and in the newly established smallholding revival culture. There appears to be a growing (and possibly subconscious) desire amongst many (mostly town dwellers) to get their hands in the earth. If this is so, then it is a genuine survival signal that has pushed its way to the surface in a sterilized and largely urbanised environment where living on additive loaded junk foods is part and parcel of everyday life – and a fast lane to hospitalisation.
None of this is to say that the corporate powers that dominate the food chain do not maintain their steely controls. They do. The massive profit driven budgets of the Tescos and Walmarts of this world ensure an endless stream of TV adverts that create a chloroform sense of ‘food conformity’ in the great majority; but a new awareness is growing. An awareness that stems from a rising number of independent thinking people who care about their health and that of their children.
The US is not the UK and the tide of totalitarian state intervention is less advanced in Europe than in North America. But we live in globalised world where a handful of mega corporate enterprises team up with bankers and pharmaceutical/ agribusinesses to keep their world domination agendas on track. Raw milk producers are, of course, in the front line of attack. They have had the gall to offer the public a ‘living food’ that cannot help but expose the ‘dead food’ that most rely upon. This, to the state controllers in the US at least, appears to amount to an act of terrorism, where giving people a life line to health is a dangerous and subversive activity that should be snuffed out before it gets going.
But we are an irrepressible tribe. We won’t lie down. The new resistance is growing and won’t be stopped. We are establishing the new arks that will indeed be life lines for those who wish to maintain a decent, humanistic quality of life and refuse to be pushed into the darkness of an extended slavery. Fighting back against the forces of repression is a natural reaction, it is proof that we are still human beings and not automatons.
Julian Rose
(Sir) Julian Rose is an organic farmer and founder of the Association of the UK based Unpasteurised Milk Producers and Consumers. He is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and author of the book “Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems” julianrose.info
