How Food Monopoly Destroys Environment and Threatens Human Health. By Dr. It's quite simple really. If you have access to clean, nutritious food, you survive and thrive. If you don't, disease and premature death is your lot. Today, malnutrition is not a problem relegated to developing countries. Never before have affluent nations had so many malnourished yet obese people — a paradox rooted in a poor and toxic diet, churned out by industrial crop growers, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and fish farms.
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The strategy to control people by controlling the food supply, first through the conversion from many small farms to fewer, gigantic farming operations and associated price fixing schemes, and later through the creation of genetically engineered (GE) seeds, effectively destroyed family farming both in the U. S. It wasn't that long ago (2. In 2. 01. 3, the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) paid a $1. DFA conspired with a number of companies to suppress milk prices by closing bottling plants and stifling competition. Consolidation, Concentration, and Monopolization.
Today, 9. 5 percent of all grain reserves in the world are controlled by just six multinational agribusinesses. The same concentration of power can be seen all through agriculture, from beef packers (four companies) to flour milling (four companies) and pork packers (four companies). As noted by The Natural Farmer, this consolidation and concentration has occurred through horizontal integration, vertical integration, and global expansion. Along with the destruction of family farms we also lost a tremendous amount of diversity, both in terms of the types of foods grown and the flora and fauna existing in the areas surrounding the farms. All of this, and more, has occurred under the guise of improving food availability and safety. Worst of all, these corporations have become so wealthy and (as a result) politically powerful, that in order to really effect change, we must do it from the ground up, by altering our daily shopping habits.
Support House and Senate 'Meat Processing Revival' Bills. Slaughterhouse consolidation is particularly problematic for small farmers specializing in organic and pastured meats. As noted by National Public Radio (NPR) last year: 8. Government meat inspectors are required to be on the floor anytime those plants are operating. To make it easier for more homegrown meat to reach consumers, a small but vocal group of farmers and local food advocates is trying to change federal meat inspection law. Representatives Thomas Massie (R- KY) and Chellie Pingree (D- ME) introduced an identical bill, H.
R. 3. 18. 7,1. 0 in the House of Representatives last summer. I encourage you to call your senators and urge them to support the PRIME Act. You can find their contact information by clicking the button below, or by calling the Capitol Switchboard at 2. Click Here. Plant Species and Food Choices Are Dwindling As noted by Irish Times,1. Reasons why include out- of- control plant diseases and changes in climate.
But factory farming is also a significant contributing factor. In fact, factory farming in and of itself is an . Worldwide, 5. 2 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year, and many of these chemicals are either known or suspected to be harmful to human health. As noted by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR): 1. Yet, all of these endpoints have been linked to pesticide exposure. Harm also occurs because pesticides are reviewed only every 1. Recent Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) research revealed another problem with pesticide regulation: the majority of pesticide products are granted .
Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) own analysis confirmed NRDC's findings that 6. An NRDC report of this problem is currently in preparation. The failure of conditional registrations was highlighted this summer when the conditionally approved herbicide Imprelis. In March 2. 01. 5, the state Legislature passed a bill that would . Such fears are well- founded.
But farmers are not the only ones who should be concerned about industrial agribusinesses taking over. This is an issue that affects every single person who likes to eat food. Monoculture and livestock CAFOs do not make food tastier and/or more nutritious. Nor do they make it safer. On the contrary, factory farms produce inferior quality food that is far more prone to cause foodborne outbreaks and spread pandemic diseases among farm animals (and in some cases among humans too). It's important to understand that human life is interrelated with the environment, and most epidemics, such as AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, and Lyme disease, just to name a few, are a direct result of man's failure to live in harmony with nature.
By severely disrupting our environment, we create our own demise. We now know that CAFOs create a negative feedback loop where safety hazards are compounded and spread around, affecting animals, humans and the environment in equal measure. CAFOS and Processing Monopolies Promote and Cause Deadly Outbreaks The congregation of thousands or tens of thousands of animals in confined spaces is a recipe for disease, and CAFOs have become notorious for spreading pandemic diseases and causing serious food outbreaks.
Now the situation is being ratcheted up another notch, with the presence of bacteria equipped with the much- feared mcr- 1 gene — a gene that confers resistance to antibiotics of last resort. First discovered in China last year,1. Europe, Scandinavia,1. U. S. The first American report occurred in March, when the gene was found in a pork sample from a slaughterhouse in South Carolina.
In May, Escherichia coli (E. Illinois slaughterhouse, as well as in a Pennsylvania patient admitted with an E.
The latest animal case suggests the gene is already circulating through multiple routes here .. In all three cases here, the gene was carried on a plasmid, a mobile piece of DNA that easily can transfer the gene to other bacteria. That would result in a kind of super- superbug, invincible to every life- saving antibiotic available. However, in the past two decades, a number of . Part of what's causing foodborne illness rates to rise relates to the centralization of meat processing, coupled with outdated slaughterhouse inspection rules. Since 1. 90. 6, meat inspection has relied on noticing changes in the sight, smell, or feel of the meat. But foodborne microorganisms cannot be detected this way.
The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point program (HACCP) was created to identify areas in the food processing chain where contamination might take place, and based on the findings of the HACCP, procedures such as using microbiological tests at key control points have been developed. However, the program is useless unless microbial control is mandated. At present, slaughter line speeds are too fast to perform these tests, and few are willing to voluntarily comply with them as slowing down the pace cuts into profits. Cross- contamination is another serious problem largely relegated to factory farms, processing monopolies, and industrial food processing plants. Most recently, Listeria- contaminated sunflower seeds led to the recall of about 1. Brown & Haley Mountain Thins trail mix and more than 3. Trader Joe's' broccoli and kale chicken salad.
That kind of scenario simply could not happen in a small- scale, local food system, and it's precisely why — if you're concerned about food safety — your most effective strategy is to support your local farmers by buying their food and cooking from scratch, rather than buying processed fare and foods imported from all over the globe. Across the World, Farmland Ownership Is Being Gobbled up by the Few North Dakota certainly isn't the only place industrial agribusinesses seek to infiltrate and take over. GRAIN, an international non- profit organization that supports small farmers and social movements around the world, has documented more than 4. These deals cover more than 3. According to GRAIN: 2.
We say hard- core because these deals are large, long- term and determined to avoid the pitfalls that earlier deals ran into. Much of the Asian- led oil palm expansion in Africa, and the advance of pension funds and trade conglomerates to secure access to new farmlands, fall into this category. Increasingly, gaining access to farmland is part of a broader corporate strategy to profit from carbon markets, mineral resources, water resources, seeds, soil and environmental services. As land deals rise and fall, policymakers and corporate boards are hard at work trying to facilitate their success. Instead of the wild land rush of before, we now have multiple 'frameworks' and 'guidelines' on how to conduct these deals while minimizing social and environmental costs.
All of these new rules are voluntary, however, and do more to obfuscate the problem than to solve it. Many argue that the heightened political attention around land grabbing has helped bring land and agrarian reform back into public debates in parliaments and other legislative fora. But the main objective of regulatory processes is still to formalize land markets and titles, which experience tells us will lead to further concentration of land in the hands of few. For example, according to a report.
Environment America, Tyson Foods, Inc. In third place, we have the U. S. Department of Defense (Do. D), followed by Cargill and another steel manufacturer. Of the top 1. 5 polluters on this list, six are food companies, commingling with some of the largest chemical producers in the world, including Du. Pont and BASF. Even paper and gasoline producers, two industries well- known for their environmental impacts, are cleaner! International Paper and Exxon Mobil are ranked No.
Tyson's toxic emissions into our waterways. Farms are exempt from federal water- pollution regulation. This is despite agriculture being the primary reason why America's waterways fail to meet Clean Water Act standards.