Counter-productive efforts to control abundance and scarcity have occurred in other fields as well:
* Drug laws make medically-effective herbal preparations inaccessible to many. Ironically, herbs easily grown in backyards and community gardens, whose preparations would be illegal if prescribed by traditional healers, are often the basis for very expensive drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical firms.22 It is not a coincidence that many of these firms are owned by the same agrochemical companies which control the seed industry.
* Through misleading advertising and collusion with hospitals and medical professionals, formula milk companies have managed to undermine mothers' confidence in their own breast milk. This had led to a decline in breastfeeding in a number of Asian countries.23 As mothers try substitutes; their production of milk slows down and eventually stops, creating a vast new market for formula milk.
* A traditional Filipino song about plants around the hut (“Bahay Kubo”24), taught to every child in grade school, enumerates 18 food plants that include legumes, greens, root crops, seeds, nuts, and spices. The song omits many more. Filipinos have become so fixated on Western foods and diets that they overlook the great variety of indigenous food sources, many of which simply grow untended like weeds in their backyards. The monoculture mindset treats these food sources as weeds that must be suppressed. Razed by farm mechanization and the use of herbicides, most of them have now disappeared from people's backyards, from their diets, and from their consciousness, creating real food scarcity and malnutrition.
* Organic products are scarce and expensive because a system biased towards chemicals imposes on organic producers the burden of proof: detailed record-keeping, testing, inspection, certification and labelling. What if producers of chemically-treated crops and foods, not organic producers, were instead required by law, in accordance with the “polluter pays” principle, to keep-detailed records of chemical treatments; get their products regularly inspected and tested by accredited laboratories for minimum residue levels; undergo third-party certification; and follow mandatory labelling requirements to identify which chemicals and by what amounts their food products have been exposed to? If this were so, the price tags of both organic and chemically-treated foods would change dramatically in favor of organics.
* A low-power radio station that can serve a large community or a small town now costs only about as much as laptop. Yet, such stations continue to be a rarity, because most governments make it nearly impossible to meet all the legal requirements to operate one. As communications expert and president of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters Steve Buckley writes, “it is the policy, legal and regulatory framework that remains the single most persistent obstacle” to such stations.25
* Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to charge exhorbitant rates for static Internet Protocol (IP) numbers, arguing that they are running out of these numbers. Yet, by simply upgrading to IP Version 6 (IPV6), every person on Earth can be assigned hundreds of IP numbers each, with a lot more to spare.
* The sun cannot be hidden, suppressed, illegalized or otherwise made scarce. Instead, this universal source of absolute abundance has been largely ignored -- intentionally, it has been argued26 -- as energy industries focused on energy sources easier to privatize and to control, like fossil and nuclear fuels.
These examples suggest that the phenomenon of abundance in the natural world and in human societies should not be taken for granted. We need to study it, learn its dynamics, and tap it for the human good.
