Let us assume now that part of that money which was saved is now lent out to the farmers in the form of agricultural loans. It will be immediately consumed by the purchase of machinery, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals, whereby it is returned to the pockets of Capital; all that remains with the farmers are debts. And just as I pointed out before, these debts contribute, over a long period of time, to the plunder of agricultural products. In order to pay back their loans, the farmers must work themselves into the ground, continually offering great quantities of farm products to the city. Money is none other than a weapon for the purpose of ripping off agricultural produce. Control of Agriculture with Debts During a meeting at which was discussed the internationalization of agriculture, Ibuka Masaru, the Honorary President of Sony, said that "Agriculture has only 1/1,500th the productive power of industry." Since money as well is produced at 1,500 times the efficiency of food, it too functions according to the same logic as industry does. (For example, let us say that you borrow money from the bank. If you turn out goods at the rate of several tens a minute, you can pay back the principle with interest in only a short time. Or, if you move several thousand units of your product around in a certain way, you can always pay back the money you borrowed for capital.) But Nature moves according to very slow rhythms, and agriculture is bound by the laws of Nature; to try and make agriculture move at the fast pace of money inevitably means that agriculture will be left behind. Should one borrow money in order to get started in agriculture, one will find that, even if the interest is half what it would be for business or industry (or even if one gets someone to pay the interest for one -- for example, a subsidy), it will be quite impossible to pay back the loan by means of agricultural produce alone. The same goes for dairy farmers in Hokkaido, for those who raise cattle, for those who raise broilers and laying chickens, for citrus farmers, for mechanized farmers, and even for the American farmer, the incarnation of the large-scale modern farming method (it is said that, as of 1985, American agriculture is 54 trillion in debt). And this is not the only way money oppresses agriculture, for it has yet to rout the farmer decisively. * * * If, for example, there is a bumper crop of cabbage, the total cost of harvest, sorting, packing, shipping and kickbacks at the market is sometimes far greater than the selling price of the cabbage. The more the farmers ship, the more money they lose, and so there are times when they plow the cabbage into the fields with a bulldozer. The more the farmers work (the more food they offer the city), the more money they lose. Has there ever been such an idiotic system? And that is money economics for you -- the devilish machine (the market principle) invented by the city.