Food production is the priority, not competition!

‘Compete’ – that weasel word – is the injunction of successive failing governments and their failed economists. Coupled with ‘choice’ it has been used to deliver our health, education, water, energy and transport into corporate hands that seek to maximise profits rather than serve the public interest – sending our financial capital and manufacturing abroad. 

Corporates have made money their favoured commodity; not content with it as a medium of exchange and a store of value, they expect it to breed.

One of the few dishonourable exceptions is the domestic arms industry which has been subsidised at enormous financial and social cost and has assisted many corrupt and cruel dictators to oppress their people.

When the dictators overstep the mark and displease our special relative their opposition is lucratively armed and enabled to overthrow them. 

Unless fairer payments are made our food will gradually be outsourced and replaced by cheap and sometimes unwholesome imports. When the process is complete the country’s security will be in ruins – and price of food will rise, like the price of energy, fuel and transport. 

All this has to be set in the context of a rising population. As Colin Hines asks in the Guardian today: 

“What guarantee can we have that a country whose North Sea revenues are on the slide and whose economy is in trouble will be able to afford, or perhaps even have access to, the food imports our present population needs, let alone also for the nearly 7 million extra UK inhabitants projected in 15 years’ time?” 

Food is of paramount importance – essential to life 

Place our MPs and their economists in the often cited desert for a day or so and offer them the choice of a pint of milk or a lorry load of money and they will choose the milk, realising that food is essential to life. 

As the vice-chairman of the West Midlands New Economics Group says, a sound economy needs to be based on food and energy security. To that end, fertile land should be conserved and no longer used prodigally for road and railway building. In addition, food producers should be far more highly valued than our inept number-jugglers and thankfully given prices which cover their costs and overheads. 

But where can we find principled decision-makers who will not succumb to the desire for money and power that makes them act like puppets in corporate hands?

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