International Peace Coalition – Callicrate Speaking Notes (51:00)
April 24, 2026
For peace, we must understand the importance of agriculture and allowing people the ability to feed themselves
Decentralized, dependable, sustainable, resilient food supplies
“All new wealth comes from the soil.” – Carl Wilken, 1940s
As William Heffernan said so many times and so many years ago, “Corporations search the world for the hungriest people that will work the cheapest and sell the production into the wealthiest places.” All this extraction and corporate business interests have long been protected by our powerful U.S. military.
War, it’s destruction and extractive industrial processes divert resources for food.
Already struggling farmers are faced with increased costs, including fuel and fertilizer.
“When you stop burning the apple orchard, you do not get your apples back. The fire’s cessation is not the fruit’s return. Somewhere between those two events lies the patient, continuous, generation-long work of planting, cultivating, pruning, waiting—without which there is no orchard at all, only ashes and the memory of what once was.” – The Apple Orchard
We cannot feed ourselves. We’ve lost over half our ranchers. 9.5 million cows are gone. We are more dependent on beef imports, much from destroyed rainforest areas and ravaged places around the world.
War, and the refugees it creates, will not grow economies or our ability to feed ourselves. Manufacturing a great war machine will only drive people around the world off their lands and into deeper homelessness and poverty, concentrating more wealth at the top, consuming valuable resources, and more debt.
We should be building the local/regional food systems that COVID revealed the need for.
Bring people back to the land. Government ag and food policy should be focused on diversified family sized farms. All marginal acres should be restored to permanent cover with grazing animals providing milk and meat.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Restore soil health, human health, community well-being.
Government subsidies should be for food, not fuel, and not for cheap feed that fuels corporate profits, while consuming limited resources like water and soil, leaving rural areas unlivable.
All government food purchases should give priority to local/regional food producers and slaughter facilities, rather than below-cost-of-production imports and predatory priced meat from global food corporations.
Global trade policy should protect people, not predators. All people should be given the opportunity to feed themselves from their own lands.
We must break up the lawless corporate monopolies in all sectors of our economies.
Mike Callicrate
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