In agrarian nations like ours, the festival of Lughnasa offers us a moment to reflect on how the season has gone so far, and a final rest before the great work of the harvest which is now a few short days away. Lughnasa symbolises the end of the struggle of spring and summer, when few rewards were reaped, and the start of the great autumn bounty. Last year, I reflected on our agricultural achievements and our collaborations with the micronational community. This year I want to use Lughnasa to address a problem we can solve through the activities we associate with Lughnasa.

A good harvest is a joy like no other. The plentiful fruits of our land over the next two months will give us much work to do, but much wealth as well. This wealth is not a monetary one, it is both a spiritual wealth and a nutritional wealth. In today’s increasingly monetised and systematic world, we have begun to forget about the value of food and the importance of its origins. Our food supply is now very much in the control of an increasingly consolidated group of corporations. Farm sizes have increased, and this is not always a good thing, for the care for crops and the attention to the individual welfare of animals is often lost on large scale commercial farms. But by bringing more and more of our food sources back under our control, we are reversing these worrying trends

Micronations often face a major challenge in both building an economy and in being self reliant to some degree. We have often forgotten that economic sovereignty is often as important as the political sovereignty nearly all nations in our community have succeeded in achieving. We as leaders of our nations can do our bit to both bring more of our food sources under our control, and enhance our economic sovereignty. I want Lughnasa to be the time of year when the work our nations have done over the past season can be truly appreciated. I want the lessons the Confederation has learned over the past two years in our agrarian experiments to be the proof to our fellow micronations that with little space much can still be achieved. My government will strive henceforth to actively promote economic sovereignty and food security for micronations in every way we possibly can. This is our pledge, and we will do everything in our means to enact it.

Lughnasa is the harvest festival, and it would be a great pleasure for all our nations if that harvest did indeed take place within their nation’s boundary. I hope that next year more nations will join us in celebrating their own harvest, for no matter how small that harvest is, it is still the start of taking your nation’s food source back under your control.