paterna rura

beatus ille qui procul negotiis

ut prisca gens mortalium

paterna rura bobis exercet suis

solutus omni faenore

(Happy is he who, far away from business affairs,  works his ancestral land with his own oxen like generations of people long ago, free from any kind of debt)   Horace, Epodes 2, 1-4

When Horace wrote this a little more than 2000 years ago he was perhaps thinking with nostalgia and a certain amount of sentimentality of the life of a rural farmer.  His life in  the city of Rome was no doubt busy with a frantic round of work and social  commitments. In just the same way, in a week when I have found myself double-booked on three separate occasions, I am tempted to envy the simpler life of the farm workers on Jeju.  It would be wrong, however, either to glorify or to pity them.  And we cannot assume that they own the land they are working, nor that the farming equipment (whether bovine or mechanical) belongs to them, nor that they are free from debt.  Some may be happy in their lifestyles, but many are surely exploited. Those who do have their own small farms work extraordinarily hard for very little reward.  We who have comfortable lives should be prepared to pay a fair price for food and other products.  The difficulty lies in ensuring that our money goes to the people who do the work. Blog Action Day