Feeding The Future - a growing concern

With the next Federal election looming ever nearer, it would appear that the main issues at hand are inevitably the same with our major party leaders. Both say they have found the secret fiscal recipe book for sustained economic growth into serviceable debit.

Politicians are an elastically deionised bunch, often prone to severe bouts of chronic bovinae detritus and uncoordinated flip-flopping when intellectually over-extended or brought back to reality.

Unfortunately, missing from this campaign (like most) is what we mere mortals refer to as policy. There are two distinctly different types of policy, one is good governmental policy and the other is political policy, beware, they are not the same duck, they have a similar quack but you can tell them apart by the amount of guano they leave behind.

Good governmental policy is about doing what is humanly responsible for Earth and future generations with little or no motivation for political self-benefit. Political policy making is about keeping the flat bit of the tyre at the top of the wheel or in other words, defying reality.

In government, a general understanding of reality is as important today as it ever has been or ever will be. Good governmental policy should be borne of this same understanding of reality. With a world population of 6.6 billion that is destined to reach 7 billion by the year 2013, let’s take a quick look at the past in an effort to retrieve our future.

Over 5000 years ago, the Sumerians farmed a rich and fertile plain in the lower Mesopotamian region, these soils had been nourished over the eons by silt deposited from both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The ancient city of Mesopotamia was once surrounded by thousands of hectares of extremely productive and mostly irrigated farmlands. This very area is perhaps better known to the world these days as Southern Iraq.

So productive was the land, that small villages started to spring up around the city as settlers came from everywhere seeking employment and opportunity. These small villages later became larger villages and then towns and later cities as the economy started to grow.

Eventually, so many settlers came to live and work in the area that they consumed all the produce the area could physically grow. When it came time to expand the fields to increase production they no longer could, the ever expanding community had built homes and villages on the remainder of the good quality agricultural soil close to the market. This economy eventually fell over.

We all know that this is 5000 year old history and as Human Beings, we just don’t do silly things like this anymore. In Australia, some of the best agricultural soils are located along the coastal escarpments in Far North Queensland, we also have the most consistent rainfall, two critical elements in food production.

Contrary to popular belief, food does not come from ‘the shops’ and there is absolutely nothing organic about hydroponics. If we as a species keep allowing the gratuitous over-development of our good quality agricultural lands for short-term economic gain we are handing future generations of our species, a massive humanitarian crisis.