Als je kijkt naar de boeren, die zijn zo internationaal als ik weet niet wat!
aldus één van de talloze gedachteloze opmerkingen van Geert Mak op zaterdag 24 mei 2014 in het televisieprogramma Nieuwsuur. In een poging de noodzaak van de Europese Unie te benadrukken speelden bij hem ineens 'de boeren' een rol, zoals tijdens zijn Abel Herzberglezing in 2013 het marktdenken een doorslaggevende rol speelde, want
de EU is een markt van bijna een half miljard mensen met de hoogste gemiddelde levensstandaard ter wereld. Alleen al voor Nederland is de Unie goed voor tweederde van onze totale export, eenvijfde van het nationale product. We hebben nu een open toegang tot die markt. Gaan we die deur echt dichtgooien?
Over welke boeren heeft opiniemaker Mak het? Eerst maar eens de EU-feiten van de afgelopen twee decennia:
Aantal boeren gaat steeds sneller dalen
GERARD REIJN − 28/08/1996.
De landbouw in Nederland gaat zeldzaam zware jaren tegemoet. De akkerbouw zal worden teruggedrongen op steeds minder grond. Akkers zullen deels worden bebouwd met kassenbedrijven en met varkensstallen, maar desondanks groeien ook de varkenshouderij en de glastuinbouw niet.
Minder boerenbedrijven door schaalvergroting. 25 september 2012.
DEN HAAG - Het aantal land- en tuinbouwbedrijven in Nederland blijft dalen. In totaal telde Nederland in april nog 68.500 boerenbedrijven. In april 2011 was dat 70.390.
Per dag verdwenen er afgelopen jaar dus bijna 5 bedrijven. Dat blijkt uit dinsdag bekend gemaakte cijfers van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS).
Schaalvergroting is de belangrijkste oorzaak dat het aantal bedrijven slinkt. De boerenbedrijven worden steeds groter. Volgens het CBS steeg het aantal grote bedrijven de afgelopen 12 jaar met 13 procent tot 8.700.
Het aantal kleine en middelgrote bedrijven daalde in die periode juist met 26.000 tot 40.000 stuks. Dat betekent een krimp van grofweg 40 procent.
Zeven boeren per dag stoppen ermee. 1 dec. 2012.
Den Haag - Steeds meer boeren houden het voor gezien. Elke dag weer trekken zeven agrariërs voorgoed de deur achter zich dicht. Sinds 2000 zijn al bijna 30.000 boerengezinnen gestopt. Dat blijkt uit cijfers van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.
Nederland telde in 2000 97.389 landbouwbedrijven. Vorig jaar was dat aantal gedaald naar iets meer dan 70.000. Dit jaar staat de teller op minder dan 69.000. Dat betekent een daling van bijna 30 procent in twaalf jaar tijd.
Eén op de twintig euro die de Europese Unie uitgeeft, wordt voor iets anders gebruikt dan waarvoor het geld is bedoeld. Zo verdwijnt bijvoorbeeld bijna drie miljard aan steun in de zakken van boeren die er iets anders mee doen dan ze beloofden…
In 2012 is 6,65 miljard euro Europees geld besteed aan zaken waarvoor het niet was bedoeld. Dat is bijna vijf procent van het totale budget van de Europese Unie.
Een voorbeeld. Een boer in Spanje toucheerde 1,4 miljoen euro Brussels geld uit de pot voor milieumaatregelen in de landbouw om een irrigatiesysteem te moderniseren. Een van de voorwaarden: het waterverbruik van drieduizend kuub per hectare per jaar moest gelijk blijven of verminderen. Het nam juist toe tot achtduizend kuub, maar het geld stroomde toch bij de boer binnen.
Deze feiten en cijfers bracht de Europese Rekenkamer afgelopen woensdag in haar jaarverslag naar buiten. De Rekenkamer waarschuwt al jaren dat de Unie de controle op haar uitgaven niet op orde heeft. Maar beter is het er bepaald niet op geworden. Het foutenpercentage van geld dat niet ging naar waar het voor bedoeld was, steeg van 3,9 procent in 2011 naar 4,8 procent in 2012.
Grootste slokop: landbouw
Bijna de helft van de dik zes miljard niet juist besteed geld ging naar landbouw en plattelandsontwikkeling.
Samen slokten deze kostenposten in 2012 in totaal 58 miljard op, 42 procent van de totale EU-begroting. Het is een bekend cijfer, maar het blijft toch ongelooflijk dat landbouw zo'n enorme hap uit het Europese budget neemt. Er gaat bijvoorbeeld vier keer minder naar werkgelegenheid en sociale zaken, in tijden van crisis toch ook niet onbelangrijk.
Een behoorlijk deel van dat geld wordt dus uitgegeven aan zaken waar het volgens de Rekenkamer helemaal niet voor bedoeld was. Maar stel dat het daar wél naartoe zou gaan, waren deze tientallen miljarden dan wel nuttig besteed? Aan die vraag zijn de Europese rekenmeesters nog niet toegekomen.
Europarlementariër Thijs Berman weet het antwoord wel. 'Het gemeenschappelijke Europese Landbouwbeleid stoelt op volstrekt niet bewezen aannames,' zegt de huidige delegatieleider van de PvdA op zijn werkkamer. 'Neem de aanname dat het essentieel is om te zorgen dat we voldoende voedsel hebben in Europa en we er dus mee door moeten gaan. Dat is een leugen. Alterra, een onderzoeksbureau van de Universiteit Wageningen, heeft onderzocht onder welke rampscenario’s de voedselzekerheid in Europa in gevaar zou komen. Watersnood, droogte, plantenziektes, politieke explosies. Geen van die scenario’s levert in de verste verte ook maar iets op dat de schappen in Europa leeg doet worden.'
Dit wat betreft de ontwikkeling in Nederland en de Europese Unie. Over boeren en schaalvergroting wereldwijd verscheen in 2000 een goed gedocumenteerde analyse van het onafhankelijke WorldWatch Institute onder de veelzeggende titel Where Have All the Farmers Gone?:
Since 1950, the number of people employed in agriculture has plummeted in all industrial nations, in some regions by more than 80 percent. Look at the numbers, and you might think farmers are being singled out by some kind of virus:
_In Japan, more than half of all farmers are over 65 years old; in the United States, farmers over 65 outnumber those under 35 by three to one. (Upon retirement or death, many will pass the farm on to children who live in the city and have no interest in farming themselves.)_ In New Zealand, officials estimate that up to 6,000 dairy farms will disappear during the next 10 to 15 years-dropping the total number by nearly 40 percent.
_ In Poland, 1.8 million farms could disappear as the country is absorbed into the European Union-dropping the total number by 90 percent.
_ In Sweden, the number of farms going out of business in the next decade is expected to reach about 50 percent.
_ In the Philippines, Oxfam estimates that over the next few years the number of farm households in the corn producing region of Mindanao could fall by some 500,000-a 50 percent loss.
_ In the United States, where the vast majority of people were farmers at the time of the American Revolution, fewer people are now full-time farmers (less than 1 percent of the population) than are full-time prisoners.
_ In the U.S. states of Nebraska and Iowa, between a fifth and a third of farmers are expected to be out of business within two years…
Hired Hands on Their Own Land
In the 18th and 19th centuries, farmers weren't so trapped. Most weren't wealthy, but they generally enjoyed stable incomes and strong community ties. Diversified farms yielded a range of raw and processed goods that the farmer could typically sell in a local market. Production costs tended to be much lower than now, as many of the needed inputs were home-grown: the farmer planted seed that he or she had saved from the previous year, the farm's cows or pigs provided fertilizer, and the diversity of crops-usually a large range of grains, tubers, vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruits for home use as well as for sale-effectively functioned as pest control.
Things have changed, especially in the past half-century, according to Iowa State agricultural economist Mike Duffy. 'The end of World War II was a watershed period,' he says. 'The widespread introduction of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, produced as part of the war effort, set in motion dramatic changes in how we farm-and a dramatic decline in the number of farmers.' In the post-war period, along with increasing mechanization, there was an increasing tendency to 'outsource' pieces of the work that the farmers had previously done themselves-from producing their own fertilizer to cleaning and packaging their harvest. That outsourcing, which may have seemed like a welcome convenience at the time, eventually boomeranged: at first it enabled the farmer to increase output, and thus profits, but when all the other farmers were doing it too, crop prices began to fall.
Before long, the processing and packaging businesses were adding more 'value' to the purchased product than the farmer, and it was those businesses that became the dominant players in the food industry. Instead of farmers outsourcing to contractors, it became a matter of large food processors buying raw materials from farmers, on the processors' terms. Today, most of the money is in the work the farmer no longer does-or even controls. In the United States, the share of the consumer's food dollar that trickles back to the farmer has plunged from nearly 40 cents in 1910 to just above 7 cents in 1997, while the shares going to input (machinery, agrochemicals, and seeds) and marketing (processing, shipping, brokerage, advertising, and retailing) firms have continued to expand. (See graph, page 18.) The typical U.S. wheat farmer, for instance, gets just 6 cents of the dollar spent on a loaf of bread-so when you buy that loaf, you're paying about as much for the wrapper as for the wheat.
Ironically, then, as U.S. farms became more mechanized and more 'productive,' a self-destructive feedback loop was set in motion: over-supply and declining crop prices cut into farmers' profits, fueling a demand for more technology aimed at making up for shrinking margins by increasing volume still more. Output increased dramatically, but expenses (for tractors, combines, fertilizer, and seed) also ballooned-while the commodity prices stagnated or declined. Even as they were looking more and more modernized, the farmers were becoming less and less the masters of their own domain.
On the typical Iowa farm, the farmer's profit margin has dropped from 35 percent in 1950 to 9 percent today. In order to generate the same income, this farm would need to be roughly four times as large today as in 1950-or the farmer would need to get a night job. And that's precisely what we've seen in most industrialized nations: fewer farmers on bigger tracts of land producing a greater share of the total food supply. The farmer with declining margins buys out his neighbor and expands or risks being cannibalized himself.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, farmers weren't so trapped. Most weren't wealthy, but they generally enjoyed stable incomes and strong community ties. Diversified farms yielded a range of raw and processed goods that the farmer could typically sell in a local market. Production costs tended to be much lower than now, as many of the needed inputs were home-grown: the farmer planted seed that he or she had saved from the previous year, the farm's cows or pigs provided fertilizer, and the diversity of crops-usually a large range of grains, tubers, vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruits for home use as well as for sale-effectively functioned as pest control.
Things have changed, especially in the past half-century, according to Iowa State agricultural economist Mike Duffy. 'The end of World War II was a watershed period,' he says. 'The widespread introduction of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, produced as part of the war effort, set in motion dramatic changes in how we farm-and a dramatic decline in the number of farmers.' In the post-war period, along with increasing mechanization, there was an increasing tendency to 'outsource' pieces of the work that the farmers had previously done themselves-from producing their own fertilizer to cleaning and packaging their harvest. That outsourcing, which may have seemed like a welcome convenience at the time, eventually boomeranged: at first it enabled the farmer to increase output, and thus profits, but when all the other farmers were doing it too, crop prices began to fall.
Before long, the processing and packaging businesses were adding more 'value' to the purchased product than the farmer, and it was those businesses that became the dominant players in the food industry. Instead of farmers outsourcing to contractors, it became a matter of large food processors buying raw materials from farmers, on the processors' terms. Today, most of the money is in the work the farmer no longer does-or even controls. In the United States, the share of the consumer's food dollar that trickles back to the farmer has plunged from nearly 40 cents in 1910 to just above 7 cents in 1997, while the shares going to input (machinery, agrochemicals, and seeds) and marketing (processing, shipping, brokerage, advertising, and retailing) firms have continued to expand. (See graph, page 18.) The typical U.S. wheat farmer, for instance, gets just 6 cents of the dollar spent on a loaf of bread-so when you buy that loaf, you're paying about as much for the wrapper as for the wheat.
Ironically, then, as U.S. farms became more mechanized and more 'productive,' a self-destructive feedback loop was set in motion: over-supply and declining crop prices cut into farmers' profits, fueling a demand for more technology aimed at making up for shrinking margins by increasing volume still more. Output increased dramatically, but expenses (for tractors, combines, fertilizer, and seed) also ballooned-while the commodity prices stagnated or declined. Even as they were looking more and more modernized, the farmers were becoming less and less the masters of their own domain.
On the typical Iowa farm, the farmer's profit margin has dropped from 35 percent in 1950 to 9 percent today. In order to generate the same income, this farm would need to be roughly four times as large today as in 1950-or the farmer would need to get a night job. And that's precisely what we've seen in most industrialized nations: fewer farmers on bigger tracts of land producing a greater share of the total food supply. The farmer with declining margins buys out his neighbor and expands or risks being cannibalized himself.
There is an alternative to this huge scaling up, which is to buck the trend and bring some of the input-supplying and post-harvest processing-and the related profits-back onto the farm. But more self-sufficient farming would be highly unpopular with the industries that now make lucrative profits from inputs and processing. And since these industries have much more political clout than the farmers do, there is little support for rescuing farmers from their increasingly servile condition-and the idea has been largely forgotten. Farmers continue to get the message that the only way to succeed is to get big.
The traditional explanation for this constant pressure to 'get big or get out' has been that it improves the efficiency of the food system-bigger farms replace smaller farms, because the bigger farms operate at lower costs. In some respects, this is quite true. Scaling up may allow a farmer to spread a tractor's cost over greater acreage, for example. Greater size also means greater leverage in purchasing inputs or negotiating loan rates-increasingly important as satellite-guided combines and other equipment make farming more and more capital-intensive. But these economies of scale typically level off. Data for a wide range of crops produced in the United States show that the lowest production costs are generally achieved on farms that are much smaller than the typical farm now is. But large farms can tolerate lower margins, so while they may not produce at lower cost, they can afford to sell their crops at lower cost, if forced to do so-as indeed they are by the food processors who buy from them. In short, to the extent that a giant farm has a financial benefit over a small one, it's a benefit that goes only to the processor-not to the farmer, the farm community, or the environment.
The traditional explanation for this constant pressure to 'get big or get out' has been that it improves the efficiency of the food system-bigger farms replace smaller farms, because the bigger farms operate at lower costs. In some respects, this is quite true. Scaling up may allow a farmer to spread a tractor's cost over greater acreage, for example. Greater size also means greater leverage in purchasing inputs or negotiating loan rates-increasingly important as satellite-guided combines and other equipment make farming more and more capital-intensive. But these economies of scale typically level off. Data for a wide range of crops produced in the United States show that the lowest production costs are generally achieved on farms that are much smaller than the typical farm now is. But large farms can tolerate lower margins, so while they may not produce at lower cost, they can afford to sell their crops at lower cost, if forced to do so-as indeed they are by the food processors who buy from them. In short, to the extent that a giant farm has a financial benefit over a small one, it's a benefit that goes only to the processor-not to the farmer, the farm community, or the environment.
This shift of the food dollar away from farmers is compounded by intense concentration in every link of the food chain-from seeds and herbicides to farm finance and retailing. In Canada, for example, just three companies control over 70 percent of fertilizer sales, five banks provide the vast majority of agricultural credit, two companies control over 70 percent of beef packing, and five companies dominate food retailing. The merger of Philip Morris and Nabisco will create an empire that collects nearly 10 cents of every dollar a U.S. consumer spends on food, according to a company spokesperson. Such high concentration can be deadly for the bottom line, allowing agribusiness firms to extract higher prices for the products farmers buy from them, while offering lower prices for the crop they buy from the farmers.
An even more worrisome form of concentration, according to Bill Heffernan, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, is the emergence of several clusters of firms that-through mergers, takeovers, and alliances with other links in the food chain-now possess 'a seamless and fully vertically integrated control of the food system from gene to supermarket shelf.' (See diagram, page 20.) Consider the recent partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, which controls seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain processing, livestock feed processing, livestock production, and slaughtering, as well as some well-known processed food brands. From the standpoint of a company like Cargill, such alliances yield tremendous control over costs and can therefore be extremely profitable.
But suppose you're the farmer. Want to buy seed to grow corn? If Cargill is the only buyer of corn in a hundred mile radius, and Cargill is only buying a particular Monsanto corn variety for its mills or elevators or feedlots, then if you don't plant Monsanto's seed you won't have a market for your corn. Need a loan to buy the seed? Go to Cargill-owned Bank of Ellsworth, but be sure to let them know which seed you'll be buying. Also mention that you'll be buying Cargill's Saskferco brand fertilizer. OK, but once the corn is grown, you don't like the idea of having to sell to Cargill at the prices it dictates? Well, maybe you'll feed the corn to your pigs, then, and sell them to the highest bidder. No problem-Cargill's Excel Corporation buys pigs, too. OK, you're moving to the city, and renouncing the farm life! No more home-made grits for breakfast, you're buying corn flakes. Well, good news: Cargill Foods supplies corn flour to the top cereal makers. You'll notice, though, that all the big brands of corn flakes seem to have pretty much the same hefty price per ounce. After all, they're all made by the agricultural oligopoly.
As these vertical food conglomerates consolidate, Heffernan warns, 'there is little room left in the global food system for independent farmers' - the farmers being increasingly left with 'take it or leave it' contracts from the remaining conglomerates. In the last two decades, for example, the share of American agricultural output produced under contract has more than tripled, from 10 percent to 35 percent-and this doesn't include the contracts that farmers must sign to plant genetically engineered seed. Such centralized control of the food system, in which farmers are in effect reduced to hired hands on their own land, reminds Heffernan of the Soviet-style state farms, but with the Big Brother role now being played by agribusiness executives. It is also reminiscent of the 'company store' which once dominated small American mining or factory towns, except that if you move out of town now, the store is still with you. The company store has gone global.
An even more worrisome form of concentration, according to Bill Heffernan, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, is the emergence of several clusters of firms that-through mergers, takeovers, and alliances with other links in the food chain-now possess 'a seamless and fully vertically integrated control of the food system from gene to supermarket shelf.' (See diagram, page 20.) Consider the recent partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, which controls seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain processing, livestock feed processing, livestock production, and slaughtering, as well as some well-known processed food brands. From the standpoint of a company like Cargill, such alliances yield tremendous control over costs and can therefore be extremely profitable.
But suppose you're the farmer. Want to buy seed to grow corn? If Cargill is the only buyer of corn in a hundred mile radius, and Cargill is only buying a particular Monsanto corn variety for its mills or elevators or feedlots, then if you don't plant Monsanto's seed you won't have a market for your corn. Need a loan to buy the seed? Go to Cargill-owned Bank of Ellsworth, but be sure to let them know which seed you'll be buying. Also mention that you'll be buying Cargill's Saskferco brand fertilizer. OK, but once the corn is grown, you don't like the idea of having to sell to Cargill at the prices it dictates? Well, maybe you'll feed the corn to your pigs, then, and sell them to the highest bidder. No problem-Cargill's Excel Corporation buys pigs, too. OK, you're moving to the city, and renouncing the farm life! No more home-made grits for breakfast, you're buying corn flakes. Well, good news: Cargill Foods supplies corn flour to the top cereal makers. You'll notice, though, that all the big brands of corn flakes seem to have pretty much the same hefty price per ounce. After all, they're all made by the agricultural oligopoly.
As these vertical food conglomerates consolidate, Heffernan warns, 'there is little room left in the global food system for independent farmers' - the farmers being increasingly left with 'take it or leave it' contracts from the remaining conglomerates. In the last two decades, for example, the share of American agricultural output produced under contract has more than tripled, from 10 percent to 35 percent-and this doesn't include the contracts that farmers must sign to plant genetically engineered seed. Such centralized control of the food system, in which farmers are in effect reduced to hired hands on their own land, reminds Heffernan of the Soviet-style state farms, but with the Big Brother role now being played by agribusiness executives. It is also reminiscent of the 'company store' which once dominated small American mining or factory towns, except that if you move out of town now, the store is still with you. The company store has gone global.
WorldWatch Institute. Where Have All the Farmers Gone? September/Oktober 2000
De sleutelbegrippen bij de schaalvergroting van de boerenbedrijven zijn: 'get big or get out, agricultural oligopoly' en 'take it or leave it.' Het resultaat van dit afgedwongen neoliberale proces zag ik een paar jaar geleden onder andere in Georgië, waar locale boeren werkloos waren geraakt, nadat ze niet in staat waren gebleken te concurreren met de zwaar gesubsidieerde EU-boeren van wie de producten in ontwikkelingslanden worden gedumpt. De EU-boeren zelf zitten met handen en voeten gebonden aan banken en de machtige agro-industrie, en functioneren inderdaad als 'Hired Hands on Their Own Land,' of zoals de Groningse dichter Peter Visser mij eind vorige eeuw zei: 'De moderne boer is zijn eigen knecht geworden.' Kortom, Mak's opmerking: 'Als je kijkt naar de boeren, die zijn zo internationaal als ik weet niet wat!' is niet alleen vrijblijvend, maar ook nog eens absoluut nietszeggend. Ze verhult van alles en verklaart niets. Desondanks zijn opiniemakers in de westerse media met dit soort soundbites buitengewoon populair. Ze vermijden de controverse en lijken toch, net als een suikerspin, heel wat te zijn, maar eenmaal tot haar essentie teruggebracht blijkt het niet meer dan wat dik makend suikergoed, aangeprezen door spindoctors. Natuurlijk zijn het handjevol overgebleven boeren in Nederland gedwongen 'internationaal als ik weet niet wat' te zijn. Dit zegt evenwel niets positiefs over de EU, zoals Mak suggereert, integendeel zelfs. Door de moderne bedrijfsvoering is de hedendaagse boer iets fundamenteels kwijt geraakt, het vermogen om naar de natuur te luisteren. Wat mij opvalt aan de moderne boeren die ik ken is dat ze de rust niet meer hebben om op te gaan in het landschap waarin ze leven, om de geest van het land en de dieren te leren kennen. Men ziet een boer nooit meer over zijn land lopen. Op zijn trekker gezeten scheurt hij van hot naar her, vaak met een koptelefoon op zijn hoofd waarmee hij naar Radio 3 luistert, waardoor hij 'zich muzikaal wonderwel ontwikkelt,' zo zei Visser mij eens met een sardonische glimlach. Peter Visser is de dichter wiens natuurlijke belevingswereld dicht tegen die van de Amerikaanse dichter Gary Snyder aanligt. In zijn essaybundel The Practice of the Wild (1990) schreef Snyder na een reis door Indianengebied in Zuid-Alaska:
I was honored the next day by an invitation to Raven House to have coffee with Austin Hammond and a circle of other Tlingit elders and to hear some long and deeply entwined discourses on the responsibilities of people to their places. As we looked out his front window to hanging glaciers on the peaks beyond the saltwater, Hammond spoke of empires and civilizations in metaphors of glaciers. He described how great alien forces — industrial civilization in this case — advance and retreat, and how settled people can wait it out.
Sometime in the mid-seventies at a conference of Native American leaders and activists in Bozeman, Montana, I heard a Crow elder say something similar: 'You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough — even white people — the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren't lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.'
Vervolgens wees Snyder op een culturele kwaal waaraan ook vele Europeanen lijden:
There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into fellow 'Native Americans.' For the non-Native-American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.
De moderne boer, degene dus die fysiek het dichtst bij het land staat, zou dit intuïtief moeten weten, maar ook hij is vervreemd geraakt van zijn omgeving, van de grond waarvan hij het moet hebben en dat hem en zijn familie voor een eeuwigheid zal overleven. Om de productie te verhogen spuit hij gif in de grond of over de aarde. Land is voor hem quota, subsidies, investeringen, output en de totale beheersing van al het levende, onder en boven de grond. Hij heeft geleerd in alles een melkkoetje te zien, het beest zelf is door al het gemanipuleer een verwrongen karikatuur geworden van wat het ooit eens was. Niets spreekt nog in zijn eigen taal met de boer. Alles is slechts een afgeleide van geld, waardoor 'Across the globe, natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods are at risk of rapid degradation, with significant further loss of biodiversity becoming increasingly likely.' In The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (2005) stelde de Amerikaanse hoogleraar die boer werd, Wendell Berry, het als volgt:
We are destroying our country — I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
En die 'onderworpenheid' is onlosmakelijk verbonden met de onverzadigbaarheid van het neoliberale kapitalisme, waarin uiteindelijk maar één norm, één waarde bestaat: het maken van maximale winsten. Wendell Berry:
It is merely a fact that he land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.
Maar dit zijn verwaarloosde elementen in Mak's pleidooi voor het nog meer versterken van het neoliberale 'Brussel.' De nadruk ligt voor hem op de EU 'markt van bijna een half miljard mensen met de hoogste gemiddelde levensstandaard ter wereld,' die 'goed [is] voor tweederde van onze totale export, eenvijfde van het nationale product.' Dat is het doorslaggevende element van Mak die zegt 'in een genadige God' te geloven, de schepper van het universum:
Dat is heel belangrijk: een milde, liefdevolle God. En dat je die genade overbrengt op je medemensen, dat je deel uitmaakt van een gemeenschap die de hele wereld omvat, dat er lijnen lopen tussen andere mensen en jou en tussen jou en God. Dat geeft soms troost, soms ordening, soms een gevoel van verantwoording. Het geeft lijn aan je handel en wandel. Als je vraagt wat mijn godsbeeld is: een vriendelijke, vaderlijke God, een milde man, die mensen doorziet in hun zwakheid.
Dit is curieus, want zoals Berry stelt: 'If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God's property and is full of His Glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?' Hoe lopen die 'lijnen' van Mak precies? Immers, Berry heeft gelijk wanneer hij schrijft: 'We citizens have a large responsibility for our delusion and our destructiveness, and I don't want to minimize that. But I don't wamt to minimize, either the large responsibility that is borne by the government.' Met het oog op Mak's klemmende oproep de militaire uitgaven te verhogen is het onmisbaar om na te denken over het volgende:
It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military services. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift , and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.
Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the 'free market' and 'free enterprise,' but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.
Oftewel, een neoliberaal systeem dat door bestseller-auteur Geert Mak wordt gepropageerd met de kreet: 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel. Geen Brussel zonder Jorwert.' Misschien wel het meest absurde is dat Geert Mak uit Jorwert naar Barthlehiem verhuisde omdat -- als ik het allemaal goed begrepen heb -- zijn buurboer te hinderlijk actief rondom Mak's villa was. Meer absurditeit later.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten