More and more people are getting the idea that there’s too much money concentrated in too few hands in our global economy, and that’s good. 

The idea that there might be just too much money in the first place is fringier, but it’s a crucial part of the puzzle. The sheer amount of capital circulating in financial markets right now – including those that increasingly shape decision-making about food and land – is stunning and alarming. As we know from our friend Marx, capitalism is all about using money to generate even more money. It’s a voracious and vicious cycle that is literally rendering the planet unstable and uninhabitable as extraction and intensification reach for new levels.

There’s a direct connection here with the counter-intuitive fact that there’s just too much food circulating in our capitalist food system. There’s no such thing as “enough” in this system – it always has to make more (higher yields, expanded markets, bigger farms and machines and stores, new technologies to keep driving the whole cycle on and on). 

That’s how we get the perplexing amounts of surplus and waste that too many good people and organizations spend too much of their time trying to rescue and redistribute without ever doing anything to shift the underlying conditions of either waste or want.

So it’s great to see this new report from Friends of the Earth calling for the “definancialization” of food and farming and for redirecting the flows of money in the system in ways that support food as a public good rather than a speculative commodity.

It’s an ambitious program, but maybe the cartoonish overreach of the billionaire class has finally illuminated the problems clearly enough that we can build more serious political muscle behind saner ways of being on the earth.

BTW I’m on the cusp of retirement and a lot of my own pension funds are definitely implicated in what Friends of the Earth call the Agribusiness Financial Complex. Not quite sure how to grapple with that one.