Growing threats to human life on earth

Alex Jones thinks GMO foods are part of a “soft kill” solution:

From Willie Nelson and Anna Lappe on Reader Supported News:

“Why we must occupy our food system

Our food is under threat. It is felt by every family farmer who has lost their land and livelihood, every parent who can’t find affordable or healthy ingredients in their neighborhood, every person worried about foodborne illnesses thanks to lobbyist-weakened food safety laws, every farmworker who faces toxic pesticides in the fields as part of a day’s work.

When our food is at risk we are all at risk.

Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a massive consolidation of our food system. Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain. Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than 90 percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto. Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

What does this matter for those of us who eat? Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, the destruction of soil fertility, the pollution of our water, and health epidemics including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even certain forms of cancer. More and more, the choices that determine the food on our shelves are made by corporations concerned less with protecting our health, our environment, or our jobs than with profit margins and executive bonuses.

This consolidation also fuels the influence of concentrated economic power in politics: Last year alone, the biggest food companies spent tens of millions lobbying on Capitol Hill with more than $37 million used in the fight against junk food marketing guidelines for kids.

On a global scale, the consolidation of our food system has meant devastation for farmers, forests and the climate. Take the controversial food additive palm oil. In the past decade, palm oil has become the most widely traded vegetable oil in the world and is now found in half of all packaged goods on U.S. grocery store shelves. But the large-scale production of palm oil – driven by agribusiness demand for the relatively cheap ingredient – has come at a cost: palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia are razing rainforests, releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases and displacing Indigenous communities….”

Get the whole story on Reader Supported News

And now a word about Walmart, from Tom Philpott, in Mother Jones:

“Is Walmart really going organic and local?

I live on an organic farm in North Carolina, so I don’t spend much time roaming my local Walmart looking for produce. But on a recent trip to Austin, Texas, I decided to stop by a busy supercenter to see how the company was going about its well-publicized push to sell more local and organic food.

The produce section sat between the in-store McDonald’s and some giant coolers packed with Hormel bologna. There were crates piled high with perfect orbs of cabbage and tomatoes, onions and melons. Elephant-ear-size collard greens sat in tight bunches; stacks of fist-size lemons beamed yellow. Plenty of fresh food, to be sure, though a few “Grown in USA” signs were the nearest thing I could find to an indication of local. Organic? A few bags of house-brand lettuce claimed that standard.

But you can’t judge Walmart on a single store. The company sells 18 percent of all the groceries bought in the United States—more than anyone else by a wide margin. And it’s not just Froot Loops and rock-hard tomatoes. Over the last decade, Walmart has emerged as a massive player in the organic-food market. By 2006, the year it made a splashy announcement about doubling its sales of organic food, it was already the nation’s No. 1 seller of organic milk. By 2007, according to the market data firm Scarborough Research, shoppers in search of organic food chose Walmart more often than any other grocery store….”

“….I asked Walmart’s Buchanan for examples of farmers from whom it buys local produce. The three she gave me—inNorth Carolina, Washington, and Arkansas—all run substantial operations, and none is organic. In fact, according to Prevor, Walmart’s organic push has mostly focused on nonproduce items like milk and baby food. Prevor told me that its buyers had tried aggressively to bring in much more organic produce, but “they just couldn’t find operations with sufficient quantity to supply them.” A company of Walmart’s size simply can’t devote resources to “chasing down small organic apple wholesalers and buying 60 cases of apples because that’s all they have.” Walmart doesn’t say how much of the produce it sells is organic, but “I’d be surprised if it’s more than 2 percent of the total produce,” Prevor said….”

Read it all in Mother Jones.

From Russ on his “Volatility” blog:

“Monsanto, GMOs and the Food Tyranny Bill

But as the piece goes on to describe, the yields of Monsanto’s Frankensoy and Frankencorn are down. They’ve had to backpedal on the price scheme. Farmers are also disgruntled over being forced to buy genes they don’t want to get the ones they do want. That’s part of this alleged antitrust investigation. (A real investigation would be a good thing. With this government, I’ll believe it when real charges are actually filed.)

Monsanto forcing farmers to buy genes they don’t want, because they’re in a position to do so, reminds me of the health racket mandate. True, it’s not yet the government mandating the purchase of something expensive and worthless. But that was also true of ”health insurance”. It’s the same logic. And if the mandate holds up in the courts, then once it has the full “constitutional” imprimatur there will be no theoretical limit to how far the corporatist mandate schemes can go. Food activists are already speculating on how future legislative appendages or bureaucratic enforcement of the Food Tyranny bill may mandate the purchase of particular seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and any other kind of “innovation” the rackets can bring to market. Where you have a government which is compliant toward the rackets and tyrannical toward the people, the tendency will be for the criminals to push the assault as far as the people will allow.

The piece refers to how a rival, Dupont’s Pioneer, has been gaining on Monsanto. But if the NYT is aware of the real significance of these numbers, they’re not letting on:

After years of rapidly losing market share in corn seeds to Monsanto, Pioneer says it has gained back 4 percentage points in the last two years, to 34 percent. Monsanto puts its market share at 36 percent in 2009 and says it has remained flat this year. In soybeans, Pioneer puts its share at 31 percent, up 7 percent over the last two years; Monsanto puts its share at 28 percent last year and said it has dropped some this year.

This is the real problem, the expanding oligopoly over our very food supply. We know these companies are malevolent in intent, while their business model is intrinsically harmful to food production and the environment. They consciously seek total monopoly over seeds, and through this monopoly, world domination of the food supply. We’d be hostage not only to their power, but to the toxicity and environmental instability of the Frankenfood “eco”system itself. This is extremely vulnerable and unresilient.

In the same way that CAFOs are going to generate lethal pandemics (it’s only a matter of time), GMOs are going to trigger mass famine once they replace enough conventional production and then catastrophically fail. The true food safety answer in both cases is clear – ban the destructive and vulnerable practice and restore the historical practice. We’ve learned enough during the industrial age that we can maintain high yields without oil, without natural gas (used mostly in synthetic fertilizer), without GMOs, without factory farming, without rentier dominance.

But as I’ve written many times (most recently here and here), help is on the way for Monsanto and the other criminal gangs. The Food Tyranny bills have been designed to suit the greed and powerlust of these rackets. Obama appointee (to the totalitarian position of unelected “Food Czar”) Michael Taylor is a former Monsanto cadre who as a lobbyist helped write these bills, and Obama now wants him to take the lead in enforcing them. That’s just the most brazen example of how Monsanto criminality and tyranny suffuse the whole legislative and executive intent and practice. (And Monsanto’s just one of the rackets involved.) We can imagine what’s intended to happen if/when the Senate passes its companion version to the vicious bill the House passed last year.

These bills have been written literally by Monsanto, and they’re for Monsanto and its fellow oligopolists. That’s why the food bill has to be rejected, and if that doesn’t work, resisted….”

Read it all on Volatility.

In another post, Russ goes on to talk about how Obamacare sets a precedent for a command economy in which:

“1. Does this mean that if Congress decides that proprietary GMOs are to be normative in the same way it has dictated for private health insurance, it can mandate purchase of these seeds by all growers? Impose penalties on heirloom seeds, or ban them? What about other agricultural inputs?”