Organic Life: Path to the Future

Organic Life -

Path to the Future

by Sheldon Caref

Copyright of Sheldon Caref 2016

Published by Smashwords

ISBN: 9781310021848

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Why Organic Life?

Chapter 2. Human development and Food

Chapter 3. Conventional Agriculture – Destruction for Profits

Chapter 4. Organic Agriculture - The Path to the Future

Chapter 5. Health, Disease and Cultural Mismatches

Chapter 6. Environment and the Role of Humans in Nature

Chapter 7. The Economy of the Agricultural Food System

Chapter 8. Sovereign Food and Quality of Life

Chapter 9. Rural Regeneration -A Model Beyond Sustainability

Chapter 10. What Needs to be Done? - A Proposal

Chapter 11. Politics Determines the Results

About the Author

Expression of Gratitude

References

Preface

This book has grown out of my extraordinary experience of farming in Ecuador where I learned that organic agriculture is our only option for a better world in the future. It is the only way of life that will provide us with completely nutritious food, restore our soil to health, impede global warming, ensure a normal environment and provide clean water.

There is plenty of technical knowledge to farm organically and very productively. The problem is that it is not in the hands of the shareholder, medium and large-scale farmers and the minds of consumers, universities and political leaders sufficient enough to be successful. This book is written for that purpose; to take the experience of organic farmers from all over the world, as well as the scientific knowledge of organic nutrition from leaders in the field, and bring it to you.

We need to discuss the benefits of organic agriculture, and how its implementation throughout the world will bring about such changes as: improved production, a stronger economy, better health, and perhaps most importantly, a system of agriculture that can support future generations by regenerating, and even improving the state of our environment.

We cannot continue to allow multinational companies to own the agricultural technology for our seeds, our food, our soil and water, and the condition of our health with non-nutritious foods. Ecuadorians and the world need to know the alternatives towards building a better way of life for our children and our future.

Ecuador has the potential to be a thought leader of the world if we create a model for rural regeneration and integrate that with urban living spaces. It must be based on organic agriculture and the science that supports it, microbiology of the soil. This is true of any nation that fully adopts organic agriculture as the path to the future

Although I wrote this book in Ecuador, primarily for Ecuadorians, the lessons learned in the process apply everywhere in the world. You may not have visited any countries in Latin America but you will learn something about how chemical based conventional agriculture impacts our economy, recent health issues and environmental destruction. My hope is that this book provides you with bold ideas for change, as well as the courage to carry them out.

Shelly Caref

Ecuador

Introduction

I am not an agricultural expert, but after working on a farm for almost five years I know that the best way to cultivate food production is to care for the living soil and the billions of microorganisms that live there. You do not need to be an expert at anything to know right from wrong and knowing a lot of only one area often narrowly focuses the thought processes. I questioned to the infinite with as much healthy skepticism as possible and objectively looked at what benefits people, the environment, and our future; my work has shown me that the only way that we should farm and produce food is organically; that is the only way we can build a future that is truly a good life for all.

We are faced with a looming global crisis; we find ourselves at a crossroads, teetering on the edge of total social and economic collapse. Water shortage, global warming, soil erosion, disease epidemics, political misleadership, global over production and economic slowdown are only a few of the myriad of problems that are testing the resilience of humankind. All of this is the result of the extremely narrow focus on increasing productive capacity through technology to make money.

Today, power is concentrated in the hands of global corporations whose only interests are to capitalize on the populations of the world, including that of Ecuador. They are the main perpetrators of this global crisis – they are foreign chemical and pharmaceutical companies, industrial machinery industries, and banks. By controlling our agricultural processes, they determine what we eat, how we farm, and the qualities of our health and our environment. Agriculture is the last frontier of the new imperialism; it has moved from the older established governments in the US and Europe to the multinational corporations that have now taken control of the global economy. We must all take up the battle to protect food sovereignty, if we hope to protect an Ecuadorian future.

I write this book from the perspective of a worker with the purpose of making change, not just to inform. Working class consciousness is what guides me to consider the contradictions in our society based on the needs of my fellow rural small shareholder producers and urban workers. A society based on money has its decisions made by those that have the most money. The money gives them the power to control the systems that govern all processes. The majority of money made goes to those who own the sources of production, whether farms or factories. For those of us that work every day to survive with the little money we earn, all we care about is the quality of life for our children, families and friends – true patriotism; not flag waving but human collaboration.

As a young man, I worked in Chicago factories, steel mills, and assembly plants as a machinist, millwright, and mechanic. One should never forget one’s roots, and I did not. During my middle years, I worked for large global telecommunications, computing, and electronics companies. Now I am back to working again, but to produce healthy, nutritious food. I am not as strong as I was when young, but I help out as much as I can on the farm; although I cannot truly say that I am a campesino, I understand their hard work and challenges in life.

I remember the day, quite well, when Cuba told the world of the revolution that had thrown out Batista and the exploitation from companies led by the US. My friends and I were on a Chicago street corner in 1959, shouting, Cuba Si, Yankee No. I was 13 years old then. A couple of years later, my friends and I picketed Woolworth’s Department Store for not allowing black Americans to dine with white people. I went to Mississippi to help black Americans gain the right to vote where they had been disallowed that privilege for hundreds of years. Soon thereafter I was arrested in downtown Chicago, protesting against the Vietnam War by sitting in the middle of the busiest intersection in the city. I was also a union steward at the world’s largest steel mill fighting for workers’ rights and their safety on the shop floor, and against racism. I learned a lot during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Change is a political struggle based on principles between the classes, and you can only win what you fight for; I feel the same way today about changing our method of agriculture.

I was born in Germany in 1946 of Jewish parents who were from Poland and the USSR. My father lost 140 people of his entire family in Poland. My mother lost her mother, raising her younger brothers while her father went to fight in the war; she sacrificed her precious teenage years to support them, working in a grenade factory at the age of 15. This was all due to the global economic collapse from the depression and from the creation of fascism, the end result of a failed capitalism and a political ideology used by a few countries to control the world for political and economic gain.

We face a similar crisis today as we did in 1940, but perhaps even worse. The global over production and the incredible growth in credit and debt are pushing us to another economic collapse. The same over productive forces in agriculture are driving the same impact on humans and our environment. Companies that produced materials to make the bombs and gases of destruction that killed more than eighty million people are now using the same materials in agriculture, killing consumers with food. In general, the damage is done gradually, residually in our bodies and taking its toll over the course of our lives; however, sometimes the effects are felt swiftly, after only a few years of consumption of the food. In Ecuador, 3% of all cancer cases are found in children, and this is only slightly less in the rest of the developed world. It should shock us all and force the question: why? (1)

People are suffering every day from non-infectious diseases that did not exist a few thousand years ago. These diseases kill slowly and make life miserable; they include cancers, allergies, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, autism, brain diseases (such as Parkinson’s), depression, Alzheimer’s, endocrine problems, and metabolic syndromes. Dan Lieberman, a professor from Harvard, calls them culturally mismatched diseases. They can almost all be avoided if we simply eat natural food that has no synthetic chemicals and change our lives to live more integrated with our natural environment. Unfortunately, over 95% of all food is full of these chemicals and the majority of us work in urban areas, away from nature.

My wife Nelly and I came to Ecuador to retire and live on a farm. We knew nothing about agriculture and even less about nutrition, only the little information we learned from the news or in magazines. Once we started to work on the farm, everything changed. First, Nelly got ill from the chemical powder that fell from the passion fruit that was sprayed almost every week by a worker here on the farm; she visited a doctor who suggested that we stop the spraying. At the same time, I started teaching English at a private school in Ibarra, and I discovered that one of my students was an agricultural engineer who had studied with Jairo Restrepo of Colombia and Nacho Simon of Mexico, experts on organic agriculture. She explained to us why working with the microorganisms in the soil was the only correct way to cultivate food. Within a few weeks of these early discussions with her, we stopped all use of chemicals on the farm.

We began to study and learn the technology and science of organic agriculture. Then, we got hit with a total shock as my oldest daughter Rachel developed breast cancer. I left my job, at Technical University of the North (UTN) at the time, to immediately visit with my daughter and meet the team of doctors. We met with one doctor after another, yet none could offer any explanation as to why a young, intelligent, and apparently healthy mother could get cancer. Rachel is an expert on Pilates (now certified) and yoga, and ate relatively well. The doctors spoke of statistics and genes but gave no answer as to where the disease originated from or how to prevent it.

Although her left breast had the tumorous cancer, she was advised to remove them both, and so she did. She then underwent chemical therapy and radiation therapy, anti-hormone injections (to prevent the reoccurrence of the cancer), and breast reconstruction. All of these treatments were the doctors’ recommendations based on her stage of cancer. These recommendations originate from pharmaceutical companies that produce the chemicals and from the medical industry’s therapies, with absolutely no scientific explanation of what causes cancer. It seems incredibly strange to me that they are investigating genes when humans have hardly changed structurally in thousands of years. They explain that cancer cells mutate and change their appearance and environmental influences; we understand that genes can change within a body, but the question is: why? Is it a red herring – a false path to make us think one thing while they keep selling their drugs to maintain their trillion dollar global industry? We may need doctors, medicines, and hospitals, but it is far more important that we have healthy, high-quality food to start. As my carpenter father said, if the foundation is weak, the house will always have problems.

Most medical schools do not teach nutrition, let alone organic food nutrition; if they had the proper knowledge, they would only recommend eating organic food to everyone. They don’t. They may tell you to eat more vegetables, but they do not know anything about the effects of synthetic chemicals on your body. They may tell you to not eat high amounts of sugar, but they know little about the effects of Coca Cola on your metabolic system. Even people who are lean are now having significant problems with metabolic syndrome from eating fructose sugars that are fooling the body and not delivering insulin. The biggest culprits are Coke and synthetic sugars.

Doctors learn how to dispense drugs; they are legitimate drug dealers. One of the biggest growth industries in Ecuador is the corner pharmacy. Obviously, not all drugs are bad, but it begs the question: why is the number of pharmacies in Ecuador increasing by the hundreds, with sometimes five at a single intersection? What is causing the increase in the need for drugs? Why are we getting sicker? Many research scientists say that our food is sickening us. The only constant is that universally throughout Ecuador and the world food production has changed in the last fifty years. We did not just change it – we demolished the agroecological methods used by our ancestors for hundreds of years to feed people throughout Latina America, replacing them with one based on synthetic chemicals of which we have absolutely no knowledge of what would happen when we ate what was produced. We have been eating foods grown and processed with synthetic chemicals backed by little to no research and have been getting sicker every year as a result. Now the companies that produce these chemicals tell us how safe they are, but our health tells a different story. Which would you believe?

When cancer threatened to take my daughter’s life, I decided to learn more about the subject of organic nutrition, as well as diseases from eating conventionally grown and transgenically grown food (changed DNA in the seeds). After reading many papers and books published from many universities, it became very clear that the change in how we grow food accounts for over 50% of all cancers and other non-infectious disease. This also led me to learn why my granddaughter Josie developed Type 1 Diabetes at the tender age of two. This was due to a confluence of factors consisting of a lack of sufficient nutritious organic food, environmental triggers from pesticides (which are a burden to the body’s immune system), stress, and a virus attack on her body. Children in Ecuador and around the world are now experiencing a growth in their rate of Type 1 Diabetes. The number of people with Type 1 Diabetes is going up exponentially, increasing 6% annually for children aged four and under and 4% for children aged 10-14. There is also increasing evidence linking environmental pollutants, especially pesticides, to the development of insulin resistance and Type 2 Diabetes. (2)(3)

Campesinos, rural workers, make up almost 40% of our Ecuadorian population. They live in rural communities, where a large portion of them do not have access to potable water or irrigation throughout the year. They work their small lands or on the large haciendas and plantations. The campesino is in a similar situation as are the factory workers, who are isolated from the decisions in society on what to build and who benefits from that work. Foreign companies have changed the technology of farming from the ways developed over the course of thousands of years, through the transitions from the Aztec to the Maya to the Inca to synthetic chemicals.

Just one hundred years ago, Peruvians grew their potatoes in beds that created new humus with every planting. The Incas used the Milpa system of beds that grew corn, beans, and squash in a way that was sustainable and produced highly nutritious food. Their system of agriculture was considered the most advanced and the most prolific in feeding hundreds of thousands of people. The Argentinians developed an eight-year rotation that consisted of cattle grazing for five years and then growing vegetable crops for the next three years on the same land, and it proved productive – the cattle manure fertilized the land with the decomposing green weeds to produce very rich soils.

Latin America could improve on these practices with better tools and research to create an agroecological agriculture that provides excellent nutrition and is environment friendly, but the foreign companies would not make any money this way. The campesino would benefit from a healthy life free of the diseases produced from synthetic chemicals, consumers would benefit from healthy nutritious food, and our environment would benefit from regenerating soils, non-toxic water, and no global warming.

With hoe and