| These institutions have codified policies designed to serve the interests of global agribusiness above all others, while actively undermining the rights of farmers and consumers, as well as the ability of nations to regulate trade across their own borders or to apply standards appropriate to their communities. Rules contained in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (of the WTO), for example, have empowered global agricultural corporations to seize much of the worlds seed supply, foods, and agricultural lands. |
Kelly Harford, M.C., C.N.C.
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 The resultant combination of agribusiness, processed food manufacturing and the fast-food industry has completely adulterated food
Although many additives are used in very small amounts, it has been estimated that the average American consumes about five pounds of food additives per year. If you include sugar - the food industry's most used additive - the number jumps to 135 pounds a year.
Prescription for Nutritional Healing
70% of all antibiotic drugs in the U.S. |
| Over the years, the ever-increasing demand for cheap, abundant food led to the development of what we know today as the food manufacturing industry and high-tech agribusiness. But the demand for cheap abundant food wasn't enough for the post-industrialized era. It demanded that food be made available fast and tasty as well; thus, the birth of the fast-food industry in the 1960's. Fueled by the entry of women into the workforce in record numbers, fast food is now one of the largest segments of the overall food industry. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
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 Corporate agribusiness Research
Project
P.O. Box 2201
Everett, WA 98203-0201
(425) 258-5345
Council for Responsible Genetics 5 Upland Road Cambridge, MA 02140 (617) 868-0870
Council of Canadians 502-521 Slater Street Ottawa, Canada K1P5H3 (613) 233-2773
Department of Environmental Studies
CSU—Sacramento 6000 J St. |
Jonny Bowden, M.A., C.N.S.
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 Our fruits have been bred and engineered for far more sweetness than the bitter little things that our Paleolithic ancestors gathered. And agribusiness, modern transportation, and processing have made these sweet fruits available year-round, not just during their traditional seasons. Add to this the high consumption of saturated fats in the presence of high carbohydrates (which is typical of the American diet), and you've set the stage for an array of health problems.
So what is the actual GO-Diet?
Number one: it's very low-carbohydrate. Drs. |
Byron J. Richards
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 It should be pointed out that the ADA receives large amounts of funding from fast-food agribusiness; as a result, they do not explain true food quality to the American public.
Eat appropriate amounts of real food with moderate sugar calories at mealtimes. Most sugar in the diet should come from fresh fruit and complex whole-grain carbohydrates. Moderation, not deprivation, is the key. If you feel deprived of the taste of sweets from these guidelines, realize you are a sweet addict and have succumbed to the marketing ploys of the vested-interest trash-food monopoly. |
| Due to the vested interests in agribusiness, the EPA cannot get these chemicals out of our food supply. Pregnant women should eat all organic food and avoid contact with any chemical cleaners or chemical pesticides during pregnancy.
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are a toxin of industrial pollution that contaminates our food supply to this day. It is rapidly absorbed into white adipose tissue and will saturate breast tissue. Not only does this increase the risk for breast cancer in women with a particular genetic susceptibility, these poisons will readily enter the milk supply of the mother. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn't compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland's oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
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| The agreement to merge included a pledge to divest about 20 percent of Monsanto's agribusiness interests, reflecting adverse publicity and consumers' rejection of the company's genetically engineered foods, particularly in Europe.
May 18, 2000: Monsanto opened a new $100 million Posilac manufacturing plant in Augusta, GA. to supplement production in the Austrian Biochemie Kundl plant. |
Byron J. Richards
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| The majority of our food supply is now produced by large agribusiness. Crops produced by this fast-food farming industry rely on sterilization of insects and weeds through significant applications of chemicals, rather than focusing on the health of the land or the biodiversity of crops. The introduction of genetically modified foods (GMO) tampers with the essence of life in an experiment with an unknown outcome and no real way to undue the damage. The FDA purposely does not require labeling of GMO food, since no one who understands the issue would ever purchase it. |
Alex Steffen
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 Corporate research into GM crops is not geared toward redesigning crops for free distribution to the world's poorer farmers but toward design-patented products that prop up agribusiness and generate wealth for a powerful few.
Nonetheless, genetic modification is not inherently evil, and when applied with wisdom, it can have positive results. An excellent example is New Rice for Africa (NERICA), a strain of rice that may succeed in bettering health in West and Central Africa, restoring agricultural sus-tainability there, and improving the economics of food importation in the regions. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 The definition of authentic farming obviously stresses local, seller-grown, fresh, organic food - concepts that are not so easy for agribusiness to adopt. This supports the health of the ecosystem, our bodies, and the local economy. Because many of us to do not have access to authentic foods in contemporary society, one solution is to grow your own. For most people at this point, it is appropriate to at least shift to buying organic food from your local health food store. |
by Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D.
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| In the early 1900s, these economic disincentives resulted in agribusiness's choice of wheat over spelt.
Spelt aficionados are, however, willing to pay a higher price, not only for the rich flavor of this nutty-tasting grain but also because of its ease of digestion and significantly better nutritional profile compared to wheat. |
Carlo Petrini
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 Nowadays, many of these wars are fought on the commercial level, with the agribusiness and food multinationals in the role that used to belong to the nation-states. It is no coincidence that the antiglobalization movement has developed strongly in connection with themes relating to agriculture and nutrition, first coming to public attention through the protests in Seattle during the WTO meeting of 1999. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| In the meantime, the agribusiness giants such as Cargill, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and others organized like them will go out of business. The food processing industry as we have known it in recent times —the giant national conglomerates that turn ConAgra and ADM's mountains of corn into taco chips and soda pop—will also wither as their financial equations and relations with suppliers fail in the face of oil market disruptions. The supply chains that Americans depend on to magically fill up the supermarkets will be challenged by the coming problems in transport. |
Nontoxic, Natural and EarthwiseDebra Lynn Dadd
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| Today only about 2 percent of our citizens are farmers, and our food is grown by "agribusiness" corporations dependent on large inputs of petrochemicals, drugs, artificial fertilizers, toxic pesticides, and water. Our food is overprocessed, artificially colored, fumigated, and shipped long distances; now it is starting to be irradiated.
Current agribusiness Practices
Most of our food supply is made up of malnourished plants fed limited nutrients from artificial fertilizers and sprayed with toxic pesticides.
In 1988, 270 billion pounds of artificial fertilizers were used in agriculture. |
Carl Jensen
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 Department of Agriculture and agribusiness corporations. We have been taught to believe that growing organically means growing small, pest-infested fruits and vegetables with brown spots. Or, as Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, said, growing organically is "a primitive method of farming scarcely befitting the needs of a modern nation."
From the Corn Belt to the valleys of California to fertile farmlands in Europe, there is proof which refutes the agribusiness myth. The secret of organic farming is that it works. |
Jeremy P. Tarcher
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 What a market Monsanto and multinational agribusiness companies seem to have sitting right before us!
As we end the meeting and gather our things, Sumel explains that the demise of cotton threatens economic collapse not just for farmers, but for the entire Punjab state. Agriculture is the base of the economy here. "The state may not even be able to pay its teachers next year," he says. Sumel reminds us that it's not just about economics. "The situation here is very volatile."
Decades ago, even officers within top U.S. |
James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch
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 Because public-sector interference (in the form of regulation and taxation) was discouraged, however, governments could not affotd to build adequate roadways to accommodate those automobiles. agribusiness The part of the economy devoted to the production, processing, and distribution of food, including the financial institutions that fund these activities. fa agribusiness emphasizes agriculture as a big business rather than as the work of small family farms.
American Stock Exchange The second latgest stock exchange in the United States, after the New York Stock Exchange. |
Nontoxic, Natural and EarthwiseDebra Lynn Dadd
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| Another problem with agribusiness methods is the use of hybrid seed (see Chapter 6). Most of the foods we eat today are not the same varieties provided by nature. They are bred for yield and uniformity of size rather than for taste or nutrition.
Food Processing and Nutrition
After agribusiness grows unhealthy, toxic plants, most of these are sent to a factory to be processed. There they are stripped of many of their nutrients, bleached, colored, flavored, preserved, and packaged with attractive labels. |
Jeremy P. Tarcher
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| But that year, a nearby agribusiness needing more space convinced the city to expropriate his land and sell it to them.
"Rene became one of the landless," Eric chimes in, reminding Anna and me of the Landless Workers' Movement members we met in Brazil.
"That was when everything changed for me," Rene explains. "I got this farm, and I started thinking differently. I'm now practicing the farming my parents rejected for the industrial model. It's my life's irony that I had to break with my family to go back to the way my parents farmed years ago. |
| Deja Vu
From our stuffed backpacks, Anna and I pull out and divide up reading materials to prepare us to speak intelligently in Delhi, not just about the Green Revolution but about the latest promise of Western agriculturalists and agribusiness: the "Gene Revolution"—the new practice of combining traits across species in ways nature never could to engineer pest-resistant and higher-yielding crops.
As we read, the corporate arguments for bioengineering are eerily familiar.
"Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them. |
| Under the military government, export agribusiness took off with a vengeance, and the distribution of land to the landless was hardly a priority.
In a country bigger than the continental United States, Brazil's problems—these obstacles to democratic change—had always seemed oversized to me, too. So when Anna and I set out to write this book, I was astonished to discover that, while I wasn't looking, something I'd least expected in this land of extremes had begun to take shape.
A growing movement was actually bucking everything I assumed to be "Brazil. |
Marion Nestle
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 Data from the Center for Responsive Politics indicate that 211 agribusiness PACs contributed $4.3 million to federal candidates in the 1999-2000 election cycle. For example, the American Meat Institute PAC contributed $56,500, PepsiCo's $66,825, ConAgra's $86,750, and the Food Marketing Institute's $133,308 to various candidates. agribusiness PAC money is remarkable for its unequal distribution among Democrats and Republicans; $1.5 million went to Democrats but $2.8 million to Republicans in that cycle. |
Jeremy P. Tarcher
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| Other agribusiness companies are pursuing this technology, too. Reading the bright green words with new understanding, Anna and I wonder aloud what Americans would think of their government's resources going into technology that increases farmers' dependency and what terminator-technology patenters would say to the farmers whom we're meeting.
As we climb still higher, a nagging thought won't leave me. Vandana, Vinod, really all Navdanya staff, said this movement was based in the villages, but what can these villagers really know about biotechnology? |
E. D. Hirsch
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| Because public-sector interference (in the form of regulation and taxation) was discouraged, however, governments could not afford to build adequate roadways to accommodate those automobiles. agribusiness The part of the economy devoted to the production, processing, and distribution of food, including the financial institutions that fund these activities. fa agribusiness emphasizes agriculture as a big business rather than as the work of small family farms.
American Stock Exchange The second largest stock exchange in the United States, after the New York Stock Exchange. |
Marion Nestle
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 It does not make any sense to exacerbate this problem with a product about which there are so many legitimate doubts, a product whose principal beneficiaries will be chemical companies and corporate agribusiness."14 That the product affects milk itself raises issues. As ethicist Arthur Caplan explained, "Is there any product in the world that has tried harder to sell itself as wholesome and pure than milk? ... It is a food for innocent, trusting children, culturally laden with symbolism. Any adulteration of milk ... is seen as taboo. |
| By February 1998, just two months after publication of the notice, 4,000 people had filed comments, many of them along the lines of "USDA should not permit corporate agribusiness lobbyists and bureaucrats in Washington to force-feed the rules to organic farmers and their customers." In response to the deluge, the USDA postponed the comment deadline and scheduled public hearings. By March, an extraordinary grassroots campaign based on the Internet, notices on milk cartons, and other low-cost efforts had elicited 15,000 comments, nearly all of them negative. |
Brian O'Leary
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 It is all possible in principle to achieve these things, but we shall have to move beyond the parochial interests of big agribusiness.
Sustaining our Forests
With such substitutes as hemp, we have a chance to make a needed industrial shift from subsidizing the systematic destruction of the treasury of the Earth's forests. Here are some relevant statistics: More than ninety per cent of the forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once, so we have lost most of our great primary forests.
Most deforestation is now happening in the tropics. |
| The authors profile Jeremy Rifkin, whose book Beyond Beef describes the "energy guzzling" cost of meat eating in the world of agribusiness. 10 "To down their 65 pounds of beef a year", said Roberts and Brandum, "North Americans have saddled themselves with a food system at the wrong end of the law of diminishing returns...Cattle trample on a land base that could produce five, 10 or 26 times more of higher quality protein, fiber and nutrients if it were devoted to grains, beans or spinach respectively... |
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