Welcome to the Virtual Horticulture Enterprise Zone

Mr. Converter says that Food Security is one of the most important global issues facing humans in the next decade and will be directly affected by rising fuel prices for transportation of foods, climate change, and a USA financial meltdown. The national debt now stands at an outlandish $9.2-trillion.

It is, of course, a problem of our own making. Nonetheless, the urgency before us is to construct sustainable, energy efficient, inexpensive, safe, job creating, water conserving, food production systems as alternatives to fossil fuel dependent industrial agribusiness and the impending problems associated with global warming...in less than 10 years! — unless food is not important to you. At the same time, we need to bring under control agribusiness corporations who are attempting to control everything about food. As a nation founded on slavery, the "ownership society" has a very evil ring to it. Learn more by viewing these videos: Contaminated: The New Science of Food - GMOs — The Future of Food — Who Killed the Electric Car? or here.

The growing scarcity and increasing cost of fossil fuels will put cities and suburbs under stresses they were not designed to endure. Some communities and middle-class and poor families across the nation are already feeling the pinch. From the vantage point of food producers, the decline in peak oil will favor local, seasonal foods for their availability and pricing. Long distance sources of food will lose their competitive edge, a trend that will occur even faster when subsidies for industrial agriculture are removed.

Of course, agribusiness is planning for this eventuality by putting relentless pressure on governments in developing countries to consolidate landholdings, grow single crops, and use genetically modified seeds, thereby driving millions of people off the land into cities that are unprepared and offer little hope for their survival. 100s of millions have already been dispossessed of indigenous lands, 50 million in India alone.

Globally, food production is being rapidly replaced by commercial crops grown solely for export or for non-edible products, such as ethanol. This process not only drives the heart out of the countryside, but causes national social and economic decay wherever it occurs. As citizens of the United States, we are not immune from this process. Food producers and small farms have been replaced over the past 50 years by an intensive industry that cares little about plant or animal diversity, quality of life, or compassion in farming, but is solely interested in controlling market pricing. Bill Mollison, one of the architects of Permaculture, calls it a death system. Read more here and here.

If you do value eating, then to ensure consistent supplies of nutritious, affordable food, no charges of being "alarmist" should prevent anyone with an understanding of the impending crisis from consistently and frequently making policymakers, stakeholders, neighbors, family, friends, and colleagues aware and accountable of the need to get busy towards developing viable long-term solutions. US citizens must begin to construct a different food production paradigm, one not dependent upon corporate agriculture. Among these solutions are Horticulture Enterprise Zones, such as the one being proposed in Midtown Cleveland. Reaching our goal will require a participatory leadership paradigm.

Learn More about the innovative HEZ Initiative in Midtown Cleveland

Melvin Hendrix, founder of PermaCycle, writes on sustainability, horticulture, food security, global warming, and entrepreneurship in these pages.

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