BEFORE2030 - A LIVABLE FUTURE For people, planet, and all life
DE-COMMODIFY FOOD, EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE
“Like the other great revolutions, (agriculture and industrial), the coming sustainability revolution will also change the face of the land and the foundations of human identities, institutions and cultures.” (Book: Limits to Growth, The 30-year Update).
If we decommodify food, education and healthcare, “The relation that individuals and communities maintain with these goods and services is changed, decision-making processes are redefined, and governance reshaped.“ (From: Decommodification as a foundation for ecological economics, https://sciencedirect.com)
These three are not desire products and decoupling them from the market would surely help stabilize their availability and price. Do we want to make profit from someone’s illness? Is it not on the immoral side to pay shareholder dividends on these, especially, in many cases, because they are often subsidized up front by citizen’s taxes? Why should corporations make profits from our subsidies? Ans: Because business is business, and leads to getting money anyway possible, legitimately or in a ‘legally’ fraudulent manner in today’s market.
According to, A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045, IPES, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems: “…the locus of power in food systems and the broader global economy is shifting at dizzying speed. In 2008, the world’s most powerful corporations drilled oil wells and traded stocks. Twelve years later, the world’s five corporate titans all deal in intangible data and have a market valuation that exceeds the GDP of entire continents. ‘Multi-stakeholderism’ is everywhere as corporations – sensing the social and environmental tipping points ahead – seek to draw governments, scientists and a handful of civil society organizations into an artificial new multilateralism….(one future scenario could be:) putting food security at the mercy of digital networks and potential data glitches would worry governments and (the) food movement alike…With food seen as a strategic asset, a new wave of land, ocean, and resource grabs could get underway, and trade chokepoints (become) increasingly militarized.”
The private sector, it seems to me, detests publicly run or state-run entities. They tell us they are inefficient and that they could do it better – but history shows this is nothing but a money grab. And education tax dollars appear to be in the throes of that today.
However, clearly the volatility of the coming years, if not the present, will crash certain models and raise up new ones in the debris of past institutions. Public education appears to be in these throes right now, where will it land? Hopefully, not privatized, where shareholders take their profit and decide what our children learn, but also in a better place than it is now. (See my education suggestions in Revamp Public Education below). As for healthcare, two of my nearby hospitals closed last year, 2022. The population appears extremely sick from the consumption of ultra-processed foods and between that and the accountants running the hospitals, not health care professionals, these systems appear to be headed for collapse in the not-too-distant future. Then no private company will come near it – until it is profitable once again.
Further info:
“Like the other great revolutions, (agriculture and industrial), the coming sustainability revolution will also change the face of the land and the foundations of human identities, institutions and cultures.” (Book: Limits to Growth, The 30-year Update).
If we decommodify food, education and healthcare, “The relation that individuals and communities maintain with these goods and services is changed, decision-making processes are redefined, and governance reshaped.“ (From: Decommodification as a foundation for ecological economics, https://sciencedirect.com)
These three are not desire products and decoupling them from the market would surely help stabilize their availability and price. Do we want to make profit from someone’s illness? Is it not on the immoral side to pay shareholder dividends on these, especially, in many cases, because they are often subsidized up front by citizen’s taxes? Why should corporations make profits from our subsidies? Ans: Because business is business, and leads to getting money anyway possible, legitimately or in a ‘legally’ fraudulent manner in today’s market.
According to, A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045, IPES, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems: “…the locus of power in food systems and the broader global economy is shifting at dizzying speed. In 2008, the world’s most powerful corporations drilled oil wells and traded stocks. Twelve years later, the world’s five corporate titans all deal in intangible data and have a market valuation that exceeds the GDP of entire continents. ‘Multi-stakeholderism’ is everywhere as corporations – sensing the social and environmental tipping points ahead – seek to draw governments, scientists and a handful of civil society organizations into an artificial new multilateralism….(one future scenario could be:) putting food security at the mercy of digital networks and potential data glitches would worry governments and (the) food movement alike…With food seen as a strategic asset, a new wave of land, ocean, and resource grabs could get underway, and trade chokepoints (become) increasingly militarized.”
The private sector, it seems to me, detests publicly run or state-run entities. They tell us they are inefficient and that they could do it better – but history shows this is nothing but a money grab. And education tax dollars appear to be in the throes of that today.
However, clearly the volatility of the coming years, if not the present, will crash certain models and raise up new ones in the debris of past institutions. Public education appears to be in these throes right now, where will it land? Hopefully, not privatized, where shareholders take their profit and decide what our children learn, but also in a better place than it is now. (See my education suggestions in Revamp Public Education below). As for healthcare, two of my nearby hospitals closed last year, 2022. The population appears extremely sick from the consumption of ultra-processed foods and between that and the accountants running the hospitals, not health care professionals, these systems appear to be headed for collapse in the not-too-distant future. Then no private company will come near it – until it is profitable once again.
Further info: