Published: April 24, 2008 11:11 am            

Letter: Let’s cooperate, not compete, to improve U.S. food system

Originally published in the April 18, 2008, print edition.

To the Editor:

Free will is the swinging door between the opposing worlds of cooperation and competition.

If we would choose cooperation, all could live in abundance, peace and tranquility. Those who choose “me-first” compete against everyone else. The results include immorality, suicide, wealth beside extreme poverty and other hellish things.

Farmers, laborers and some others don’t set their market prices and wages — their buyers do. That creates the vast wealth gap in society. But we don’t have to accept the way-of-the-world competitive economic-political-social system and the food distribution system we inherited.

Visualize unequal wealth distribution in the United States as a three-piece pie, with one piece going to the top 1 percent, one to the next richest 9 percent and the last piece distributed very unequally among the remaining 90 percent.

This data is according to Federal Reserve and the annual Forbes 400 list. Crossroads Resource Center of Minneapolis did a study of our food distribution system of 15 counties in southeast Minnesota for the University of Minnesota.

From 1993 to 2005, on average, our region’s 16,748 farms spent a total of $2.27 billion to raise food commodities, which they sold for only $2.15 billion. This means farmers lost an average of $120 million in production costs each year (in 2005 dollars), robbing our local area of economic vigor.

Most of this underpriced food was shipped out of the area, using non-renewable fossil fuels.

The food you eat has traveled an average of 1,500 miles from its source to your mouth. Our industrial food system uses non-renewable fossil fuels to transport aging, chemically treated, nutritionally questionable, over-processed food back and forth as distant corporations profit with each move at the expense of consumer dollars, our health, our local economy, our environment and our republic.

Southeast Minnesota’s 577,000 consumers spend $1.3 billion each year buying food, mostly from out of the area.

Let’s teach competitors the happiest way of life by cooperatively building a local food system to cut down on fuel waste, improve our health and build a vigorous local economy.

Lorraine Redig
Winona

        

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