Here is a copy of a speech that was given Booth the HTC last weekend. I enjoyed the speech and asked if I could post a copy on my blog. Enjoy.
HTC OPENING CEREMONY ADDRESS – Rod Booth, October 11, 2008
INTRODUCTION:
a) Welcome to the 36th annual Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration of the Asian Rural Institute. We’ve been doing this every year since 1973 when this place was founded. My name is Rod Booth, currently a volunteer here at ARI.
b) My 1st HTC was 15 years ago in 1993. I think we have some people here whose first HTC was 35 years ago! Who here was at the first? … How many have been to 10 or more? ….For how many is this their first? …. We welcome you all, and hope you will have a great day of new experiences, entertainment, and bargains!
c) Giving thanks for the harvest, as we’ve just done here, is as old as human civilization itself.
d) If I was home in Canada this weekend we would have the family together: there would be roast turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie. Our church would be decorated with vegetables and stocks of corn, pumpkins and squash – probably a few cans from the supermarket, which is where a lot of kids now think food comes from! My Sikh neighbours will be filling the air with aroma of curry and sound of bangrha music as they celebrate Baisakhi.
e) We had that Deuteronomy reading. For our Jewish neighbors this weekend is Sukkot, their harvest tradition. You saw all the different countries represented here in our ARI community. We are a multi-cultural, multi-faith community of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto – all of which have their own variations of harvest celebration. As you probably have your own family and faith traditions.
f) What joins us today is our common understanding of the critical link between FOOD and LIFE. Here at ARI we actually call our farm work Food-Life, and in this celebration we come to celebrate that link and express our gratitude for another year of harvest.
1) THAT ALL MAY EAT AND BE FILLED
a) In 2007 ARI hosted a symposium called “Peace From the Soil”. It looked at the problem of violence and war in our world and concluded: “Peace begins within and peace is possible when there is food on the table. Peace within a human being, peace of mind, and peace within a community, all require that basic needs are met so that there is security of life and livelihood, and the opportunity for physical, mental and spiritual health.
b) I’d say out of a lifetime in broadcast journalism, in refugee camps and marginalized communities in over 70 different countries, that peace is possible ONLY when there is food on the table. Which I think is the point of that familiar Bible story which was read for us, Jesus’ Feeding of the 5000.
c) If I had a text today if would be that one little line: “they all ate and were filled”. Biblical Scholars vary in their interpretations of that story: the conservatives say it happened exactly as it says – a miracle of reproduction; liberals refer to the little boy who gave his all (2 loaves, 5 fishes) and so shamed everyone else into opening their bag lunches - a miracle of sharing if you like! The disciples wanted to send the people away, Jesus wasn’t having any part of it; for him, in God’s world, ALL people deserve to be fed.
2) SO HOW ARE WE DOING ON THAT SCORE?
a) Not so Good. In 1996 the world’s governments pledged to reduce the level of world hunger by 50% by the year 2015. Well we’re more than half way there, and the numbers have gone UP, not DOWN. More of the world’s people are hungry in 2008 than was the case in 1996.
b) 12.6% of the people living on this earth, 854 million of them, suffer from malnutrition – 30 million of them die of it each year.
c) We added another 50 million to that total in 2007 alone when the price of the three basic food staples, rice, wheat and corn, all doubled - pricing those foods out of range for millions of the world’s peoples.
d) In Mexico, where tortillas are a staple of life, people are going hungry because their corn is being sent instead to America to make fuel for automobiles!
3) AN UNSUSTAINABLE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM
The bottom line is that we have evolved a world food system based on the consumption of two non-renewable resources:
a) The first one is oil – which has also managed to double in price within the last year. Dean Freudenberger who addressed our AFARI annual meeting last June warned that the vise-grip connection between agricultural productivity and fossil fuels is a ticking time- bomb. “Whether its the fuel that runs the tractor, powers the irrigation systems, dries the grains, ships to markets, or manufactures the fertilizers (which incidentally have tripled in price in one year) – modern Westernized agriculture is resting upon a base of cheap, available fossil fuel. It’s not a question of “if” but “when” this fuel becomes so expensive that the entire system will implode”. There is reason to think that “when” has already arrived.
b) But the second non-renewable resource which we are consuming is less obvious – it is the world’s supply of arable soil … that essential ingredient in which we grow all the food for man and beast alike.
c) More than half the earth’s surface (7/10) is covered by water, only 3/10 is dry land.
One of those10ths is too hot, a second is too cold, leaving only 1/10th of the earth’s surface that is arable for range lands or cropping. How do you feed 7 - heading on 10 - billion people on that?
d) And there are three critical things we’re doing to that arable 10%:
1) - We’re paving it over. My country is no different from yours. 50 years ago Tokyo to Yokhama was a mix of villages, towns and farms. Today it is one endless city … all who live there dependant on someone else, somewhere else, providing them with food. - Japan now imports more than half its food needs.
- China is buying up farmland in Africa which it will crop to feed its people. Not good news for Africa’s already undernourished millions.
- In my country greedy developers work with equally short-sighted politicians to remove ever more land from the Agricultural Reserve.
2) - We’re abusing it through mono-cropping. 150 years ago when my mother’s grand- parents sod-busted the Kansas prairie, the buffalo grass root system went down 16 inches in the ground – holding water, nutrients, everything needed to sustain life. They made their first house out of those sod bricks. Then they and everyone else plowed it up to plant wheat. Then came drought, then winds, and that good fertile soil literally blew away.
- Even today for every bushel of grain the US Midwest produces, it looses two bushels of top soil. Every 20 minutes the equivalent of 50 train-cars full of top soil washes down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico.
3) - We’re killing it with chemicals. In Thailand last month I visited one of our ARI grads who after he inherited his father’s commercially-farmed paddy field, it took him 10 years of composting and vermiculture to reclaim the land sufficiently to grow anything on it.
I - In Kenya I visited an ARI-trained farmer who was doing integrated organic agriculture. All around him his neighbors had bought into the government/fertilizer company mono- cropping program growing corn. The price of corn fell, they could no longer afford the company’s seeds or its fertilizers, and their reliance on pesticides and herbicides had killed many of their soil’s essential micro-organisms.
4) CARING FOR GOD’S CREATION
a) One of the things you learn here at ARI, with its emphasis on organic, integrated agriculture, is the incredible interconnectedness of the whole of nature – of which we humans are but a part.
b) I think we’ve missed the point of that Psalm we read earlier in this service: how we’ve been given dominion over the works of God’s hands. We’ve tended to think that means the world is ours to dominate and control. We’re having to realize that the real issue is our responsibility for being good stewards of God’s creation. We’ve been given our skills and ability to CARE FOR the Creation, not to destroy it.
6) CONCLUSION
a) It’s because ARI believes that, teaches that, lives that, that I and the others who volunteer to be part of this community do so happily and willingly.
- It’s why a staff who work long hours for modest pay, continue to do so faithfully.
- Its why participants from all over Asia, Africa and the Pacific, come each year – leaving behind for 9 months family, loved ones, jobs – working and learning so they can take home skills that will help their own people to better, more fulfilling lives.
b) And its because of that that so many of you come year after year to participate in this Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration and to lend your support to the work of ARI, helping to make this a world in which we can truly “live together”.
c) God be with us in our rejoicing, and may we be with Him in caring for the world he has entrusted into our keeping.
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