Self-Sufficiency The Key To Sustainable Living

Is “self sufficiency” just some outmoded ideal of the nineteen-sixties flower power days? Or does self-sufficiency offer the hope of a more sustainable world?

When we think of self-sufficiency it generally conjures up images of peasants toiling away in the garden to produce enough – just enough – to survive. We rarely associate self-sufficient living with a bountiful lifestyle, excess or even success.

On a national scale, self-sufficiency is seen as a hallmark of third world “banana republics” that haven’t yet embraced the WTO’s dream of globalism and international trade.

National self-sufficiency has been discarded. And at a personal level “who could be bothered?” Fact is self sufficiency is almost a dirty word these days.

But self-sufficiency within proper bounds is one of the few truly sustainable options for both individuals and nations if we’re to take man-made global warming or environmental care seriously.

The World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and other global power-mongers (gigantic unstoppable immortal corporations) hail international trade as the engine of global economic growth. According to these globalists, global economic growth through international free trade is the means to eliminate poverty, achieve “higher” standards of living and even prevent global warming. The latter is a simply outrageous claim as you’ll see…

The central idea of global economics is that nations can specialize in the production and export of certain goods for which they’re more climatically, technologically or natural resource suited. Nations will import what they’re not suited for and everything will be fine and dandy.
At first glance this global economic rationalism does seem rational but there’s a BIG problem that is conveniently overlooked in the pursuit of profits…

The movement of goods in international trade is responsible for around 20% of global greenhouse gas output and a huge contributor to global pollution. If that international trade were essential we may be able to live with the environmental cost or offset it in other ways but the reality is most of international trade is non-essential.

Unsustainable Non-Essential International Trade

It’s easy to understand why countries import the things they are unable to grow or manufacture. That would be essential international trade. That would make sense.

It’s not so easy to understand why a country would import things it is well able to grow or manufacture. That does not make sense. Yet what we see in the so-called developed western economies is massive imports of everything they are easily able to produce.

Most people are acutely aware of the problems …Citrus farmers in Australia are going broke while citrus products are imported from Brazil. …US and Australian manufacturing are in sharp decline because “cheaper” imports are easily shipped from the other side of the world. Fruit, cars, livestock, grains, washing machines, TV’s, shoes, meats, buttons, doodads, thingamajigs and widgets – all these and more are being shipped daily in some kind of vast shipping frenzy – to countries that can quite easily produce those goods!

Does it make sense? No. It’s nonsense and it’s unsustainable practice.

The blunt truth is that globalists are pushing international trade to unsustainable limits in search of greater profits. Not only is it costing the environment but it’s also undermining the security of individual nations as they abandon national self-sufficiency for “global integration”.

No related posts.