On April 25, 2013, HOFER hosted the 2nd Back to the Source Journalists' Forum in Vienna. After a great success last year with the adventurous and committed ecologist David de Rothschild, this year I met the founder of the Alternative Nobel Prize and the World Future Council Jakob von Uexküll. His outstanding personality inspired me and the whole room.
The topic of the day was the future of all of us, which we are systematically destroying. Just as our financial system is in the process of destroying our economic future, conventional agriculture is on the verge of destroying our livelihoods.
In terms of calories, this conventional agriculture produces enough food for 14 billion people. Yet 12% of the world's population is undernourished(870 million people), 3.5 million children die of malnutrition every year and a third of the world's grain production is used to feed animals.
Climate change is increasingly seen as a recent and future cause of hunger and poverty. 1/3 of globalCO2 emissions originate from conventional agriculture. Intensive agricultural use destroys large areas of arable land. In the last 40 years, one third of the world's arable land has had to be abandoned due to soil erosion. Every year, around 20 billion more hectares become unusable for agriculture.
In addition, overexploitation of the soil leads to a lack of water storage. We are therefore promoting an agriculture that systematically wastes precious water.
Clean water is also needed to transport the pesticides out of the soil, which is then referred to as "gray water". Millions of people are poisoned by pesticides every year. Hundreds of thousands do not survive the poisoning.
Conventional agriculture is the biggest destroyer of biodiversity, the basis of life for us all. Yet this is precisely what will be so important in the future. A large gene pool makes it easier for agriculture to adapt to global environmental change. The wild forms of our crops are necessary for new varieties in order to meet our need for healthy food in the future.
Nevertheless, we continue to operate as if there were no TOMORROW.
We continue to consume and are blind to our responsibility. With our billions in taxes, we continue to subsidize a system that has no future, that is eating away at our future.
We have a world view of mechanical causality, which is nothing other than an impaired perception of reality.
Conventional agriculture is landless agriculture, a modern and at the same time old-fashioned form of colonialism that exploits and allows to be exploited, is economically speculative and will lead us all to ecological disaster.
- Let's use our tax billions not for conventional agriculture but for research, education and the promotion of innovations with which we can meet the challenges of the future.
- Let's use the billions in taxes to ensure our future viability.
Conventional agriculture will implode within a very short time. Because it is not viable on its own.
We will only have a future if we begin to realize that we are part of a deeply sensual world in which everything is interrelated, that we are rooted in a complex natural system, both ecologically, economically and socially.
Let's stop abusing, using, lying to and taking advantage of each other! Let's disclose how we work. Let's make our work transparent and comprehensible for everyone.
Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) already knew that a tyranny can only survive if anonymity and mistrust are maintained among its members. Mutual trust is to be avoided.
Only a system based on trust is a stable, sustainable system.
We will only have a future if we take responsibility for the OTHER for our living environment. No one will be able to save themselves without the other.
Only a transformed organic agriculture can guarantee food sovereignty in the future!
The awareness that each individual is responsible for what happens to others and to the environment through their consumption will bring about change.
Politics will no longer solve the problems of the future. They are too involved in serving their clientele. No salvation will come from politics.
Let's take responsibility into our own hands and set out for a respectful civil society!
So the future can trust us!
Werner Lampert (born 1946 in Vorarlberg/Austria) is one of the pioneers in the field of sustainable products and their development in Europe. The organic pioneer has been intensively involved in organic farming since the 1970s. With Back to the origin (Hofer) and Ja! Natürlich, he developed two of the most successful organic brands in the German-speaking world.
