What to Do About Food Security in a Cadillac Desert of National Debt

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Mark Twain once said: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

This is to respond to the article (“Resident Proposes Food Co-Op to Safeguard Against Financial Crisis”, Aug. 10). Many Sun City residents I have run the co-op idea by have said, like Twain, a money/food crisis will never happen.

I will be working as a facilitator to create greater awareness of the availability of existing local food co-ops rather than create a new food cooperative. I hope to create greater awareness of our local farm cooperatives:
*Dynamite Farms, Surprise, offers produce and you-pick options,
*Duncan Family Farms, Goodyear, provides food bag drop-offs,
*Blue Sky Farms, Litchfield Park, food store.

When I worked for the largest urban water district in California, I served on a 2001 Energy Crisis Task Force to determine higher energy costs to pump water to Los Angeles. I discovered there was no energy crisis but instead a financial crisis of who would pay off $43 billion in bonds on the forced mothballing of polluting power plants to reduce smog. Long story short, water rate payers ended up paying the power plant bonds off through higher water rates justified by a fake energy crisis and fake drought to protect a fake threatened fish species in the Sacramento River Delta. That way the appearance of raising taxes to pay off debts on private stockholder-owned power plants was avoided. Put differently, profits are privatized to corporations and debts are socialized on the people under our system of crony capitalism. This explains why Mark Twain believed crises “never happened”.

Arizona is having 30% of its Colorado River water allocation cut, but likely it will be cotton-farmers who mostly absorb the water reductions. The much-demonized cotton farmers are the sponge that protects Arizona from the impacts of drought. The author of the book Cadillac Desert was blind to this and scapegoated cotton and almond farmers, some of whom were not part of the water grid.

But if the US Federal Reserve must massively print money because its $40 trillion debt bonds cannot be sold, the price of gasoline and food will rise sharply irrespective of food co-ops or water allocations. The negative effects of a reduced water allocation can be absorbed. But a money crisis cannot be so easily mitigated and could result in unthinkable massive recession, Social Security and Medicare cutbacks, a falling stock market and lowered living standards long-term.

Vast increases in food costs could be lessened by depending on local farmers who have less temperature controlled refrigerated trucking costs. Water districts in California have contracts with distant farmers to fallow their fields and send the water to urban areas during a real drought crisis. Something like that would seem to be needed with local farmers to have food supplies dedicated for Sun City. Unfortunately, reality is something we can’t wish away such as Mark Twain perceiving them as events that never happened.