From Brazil With Love

"I'm here to tell you once more that I've accepted, from the bottom of my heart, the call ...to continue the struggle for a more just and independent Brazil, where each Brazilian can eat three times a day, can have a job, education and good health," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 60, told a crowd of some 2,000 party delegates this week accepting his party's nomination yet again.

Could you ever see Stepher Harper delivering this speech? Or George W Bush? No, they would focus on clean government and wars and freedom and other relatively meaningless concepts when you're hungry. More and more Canadians and Americans are undernourished or malnourished under an economic system that doesn't provide healthy, nutritious food to its most vulnerable citizens. Children especially suffer and can never have the same start in life as their well fed counterparts.

I suspect that before long our politicians will start to speak as Lula does. Everyday we're reminded of the potency of the Canadian economy that keeps chugging out the jobs and expanding, ever expanding. Yet, why do more and more people visit food banks every day? How can they not provide for themselves in this world of plenty?

I'm tempted to draw a link with peak oil and the slow withdrawal of energy from our economic system; I wonder if the two are related. As energy becomes more and more expensive, surely the rich and middle classes, given their access to resources, will have the right of first refusal and claim as much of this skyrocketing energy as possible for themselves. The poor, growing in number, will be shut out.

This is of course a realist vision. Ideally we would do our best to reform or revolutionize, depending on your inclination, our skewed system. We should ensure that food is protected from the drastic changes in the cost of energy in the cards. Food would therefore have to be grown locally to ensure short traveling distances (facilitated by cheap oil) as well as freshness. Organic growing would be a must given that pesticides and fertilizers are often made from oil or using oil energy. Perhaps access to healthy food should be written into our beloved constitutions. At the very least, politicians should, as Lula has done, call for each and every human to have access to three square meals a day.

One thing is certain, if we continue along this realist and selfish path, misery is guaranteed.