The Farmer's Lament

Below is a brilliant quote from Gatewood Galbraith, a lawyer and hemp activist from Kentucky. The quote was pulled from a hemp documentary I found on YouTube and goes to the heart of the problem of hemp prohibition in the USA.There are so many interconnected problems in the world today that could be addressed, at least in part, by the free and widespread cultivation of industrial hemp.

“100 years ago the farmer produced all of the fiber, all of the medicine, all of the fuel and all of the food that society consumes. That’s what farming is—if you raise those four basic categories, fiber, food, medicine and fuel, and you sell them in the cities as the basic necessities of life, the money flows out of the cities back to the land owner and to the producer where land is the means of the production of wealth. It’s been that way for thousands of years. Today, a hundred years later, the farmer does not produce any fiber, if they do it’s cotton which accounts for 50% of the pesticides and herbicides used in the agricultural sector. The farmer does not raise any medicine, it’s all been monopolized by the pharmaceutical companies. The farmer does not raise any fuel, it’s all been monopolized by the petrochemical companies. And if you go into a grocery store and look at the ingredients on [food] packaging, you will find out how rapidly the farmer is being displaced from their heritage of food production. It’s all been taken over by the synthetic manufacturers who, in producing these synthetic products, create the toxic waste and the hazardous by-products with which we are having such a tough time dealing. And not only that, it concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people all the time, because the means of production of wealth is no longer the land. It is now the factories and the shareholders and the people who own the controlling interest is those corporations.

Does the government have the right to tell man or woman that they can not plant a seed in God’s green earth and consume the green natural plant that comes up out of it? That seems such an inalienable right. That seems such a natural and basic way of communing with mother earth and with the natural cycle of things.”

  --  Hemp Historian and Lawyer, Gatewood Galbraith of Kentucky 

On a related note, the following quote fits nicely with the overall argument above and speaks to the looming destiny of small time farmers--and possibly to all of the citizens who are not of the economic elite in the USA today.

“In the course of the last century, they [the bankers and economic elite] have converted this nation from a nation of independent freeholders to a nation of employees. And they [the American people] are just one step away from being serfs.”

  --  Franklin Sanders, author of Tax Honesty