Taking a look at what man needs most in
his life, we note air to breathe, shelter to live, clothes to cover
our dignity and food and water to fuel our living.
Breathing is free. We can decide to
live on a tree or on a street for many years. Clothes, one can take
those thrown in a dumpster and survive. But with food and water, very
essential to our living. Whether one is rich or poor, we cannot
avoid eating.
Agriculture is the industry that we
have made responsible for our eating. In the olden days, food
distribution was simple. A few family members did the farming. They
brought food and everyone in the village ate. We now live in bigger
complex societies. Many want to live in cities and be able to buy
food. Leaving the responsibility of food production to very few.
In one way its a blessing. In another,
a curse. Technology has enabled a single farmer with few staff and
machinery to produce food for a hundred thousand people or even more.
Its a blessing because new industries have been created, Farming
machinery, road building and transport industry, food preservation
science, among others. Its a curse because a balance between farming
which is the most important source of human fueling has been
compromised. People have over flocked towns making a bigger
percentage of them jobless. The value of food production has been
diminished. Many would rather study law and engineering because it
earns you more respect and money than agriculture. A computer
software might cost more than a bag of rice.
The rate of joblessness in cities is
high. People go days without food. Some turn to being thieves. And
even those with jobs find even food to be expensive because of low
wages. Where have we gone wrong in our society?
Since we need food first and foremost
before anything, we need to decrease the burden of nation feeding to
a few. More people should return back to farming to the point of one
farmer producing food for a hundred people instead of one farmer for
a hundred thousand eaters. Secondly, other professions have been
highly overrated. Doctors, engineers and politicians need not earn so
much that what they make in a month can buy food for ten years. This
abnormal disparity has been greatly aided by the introduction of
paper money. Somebody produces a song to entertain people and he
takes equivalent to an eighth of what the high scale farmer produces
in that season.
What if paper/money could rot as easily
as an orange? The reality is, Human beings can live without
architecture. Our great grandfathers did not have bridges and fast
transport. Homo-erectus had no televisions. Whatever technology has
brought us cannot be as much important as food. We would perish soon
if we had fast jets, computers and state of the art medical
engineering equipment if food stops growing. Yet politicians or
community valuers have set the price of Entertainment and civil
engineering higher and out of balance from agriculture.
Communities a hundred years ago
survived happily and harmoniously with ten members doing the farming
for the hundred. Twenty of them being in charge of security. A few
house builders and repair. Women doing domestic work. Elders
educating the community. Children and the physically or mentally
unable getting free services from the community. There was balance
and there was no profession that was more important than another.
The price of agricultural products
should be low because everyone needs it, and so should be the price
of technology because we need it far much lesser than food.
