Print this page The Moral Voice of Rural People Thursday, 08 January 2015 00:00 By  Evaggelos Vallianatos ,  SpeakOut  | Op-Ed font size     Rural Coalition Greek village, Central Greece. (Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos) The Rural Coalition is a non-profit organization in Washington, DC, assisting impoverished rural people and farmers in the United States and Mexico, especially in the United States. I went to Mexico with the Rural Coalition. This gave me an opportunity to see first hand the struggle of indigenous people defending their land from the encroachment of the agribusiness-government complex. The Rural Coalition is symbolic of one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century: the undoing of rural societies and their replacement by agribusiness machines. Animal farm, California. (Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos) The Rural Coalition thinks in terms of food self-sufficiency or, as the current fashion dictates, "food so...

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Abstract: “Sustainable” agriculture is a relative recent invention. It is a salvage operation designed to undo some of the harm of agribusiness, which nearly wiped out farming as a way of life. Sustainable agriculture tries to restore methods of farming and values that satisfy present needs for food without compromising the food for future generations. Sustainable farming, however, remains experimental and on the fringes of society and science. It includes all kinds of farming practiced by peasants, small-scale family farmers, organic farmers as well as large farmers. In what follows, I am showing, first, farming is or becomes sustainable when two things prevail: First, it is democratic, spread throughout the land in the form of family farming while the difference in size among farms is modest at best. Second, farming is sustainable when it draws its inspiration and methods not merely from the most advanced ecological science but from ancient agrarian cultures. I brief...