Arthur Shaw on Copionics

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AS: This can be recovered. There are known extraction processes, yes. We have a figure of one-half million square miles of cultivated land in the world which is devoted to wheat and soybeans and oats and so forth. We know that there are 5.5 million square miles of acreage suitable for immediate cultivation. That is to say, with the appropriate water, the right kind of soil and so on. So there is a reserve of 11 times what we presently use as cultivated land. Moreover, we are increasingly familiar with hybrid seeds that are five-fold productive - wheat, corn, rice and others - which, alone, can be a total solution to man's hunger.

Plowboy: Why is this not distributed? Why aren't corporations doing something about it?

AS: There's no profit in it. If people can't pay, then the exchange doesn't happen.

Plowboy: Do they know about it?

AS: They know that there's sufficiency or they certainly should know. This is their responsibility if they are in government, in the agri-food business, etc. These are items of knowledge that are available to anyone. The politicians certainly should know.

Again, it comes back to our constraint: There is an economic premise of scarcity and, somehow, that premise of scarcity has governed our decisions. This isthe way it is! And once the premise is accepted, all of the laws of economics automatically evolve - The Law of Supply and Demand, The Law of the Least Useful Unit - all things we learn at school and accept and nod our heads to.

This is the shape of the world. This is the existing situation and we accept it. We're conditioned to this and not only in school. I mean, this is the way our parents react because they accept this. No one denies this total commandment. We are all 'hooked' on scarcity . . .

There's a definition of the Law of Supply and Demand that I think I should give. One economist, Samuelson, puts it, "When the rich man's dog gets the milk that the poor man's child needs to avoid rickets, is the system working badly? No. It is working as it is designed to do - putting goods in the hands of those with the most money or dollar votes."

This may sound reprehensible. Actually, it is colloquially well put and it represents the accepted economics - the exchange situation - in our world. We have given up.

Since we all accept the false premise - there's not enough - since our world is so governed, the gaps increase between nations, as they do between races and peoples. And, of course, the gap between generations and minds seems equally to conform. It is this gap, with its many faces, that is our threat today. Because it is this gap expressed in environmental destruction, expressed in war and violence, which represents the many faces of our fixed system.

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