Showing posts with label agribusiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agribusiness. Show all posts

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Why Rockefellers Aim at Destroying Farmers Worldwide?




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For the bet­ter part of the past cen­tury West­ern pop cul­ture has sys­tem­at­i­cally den­i­grated and deval­ued what should be the most hon­ored pro­fes­sion of all. Those who labor with the land, day-in and day-out, to deliver the food that we eat have assumed a social sta­tus too often sim­i­lar to the dirt of the soil they till. No one stops to ask a sim­ple ques­tion: What do we do when we have killed off all our farmers?

Some of the more naïve city-dwellers would retort with lit­tle reflec­tion, “But we have indus­tri­al­ized food pro­duc­tion; we don’t need man­ual farm labor today.”

Indeed, the num­bers are impressive.

Let’s take my home­land, the United States of Amer­ica. In 1950, a time of gen­eral pros­per­ity and strong eco­nomic growth, the total US pop­u­la­tion was 151,132,000 and the farm pop­u­la­tion was 25,058,000 mak­ing farm­ers just over 12% of the total labor force. There were 5,388,000 farms with an aver­age size of about 87 hectares. Forty years later, in 1990, the year the Soviet Union col­lapsed and the Cold War ended, the USA had a total pop­u­la­tion of 261,423,000 of which the farm pop­u­la­tion num­bered just under three mil­lion, 2,987,552, mak­ing farm­ers a mere 2.6% of the total labor force. The num­ber of farms had shrunk to only 2,143,150, a loss of 60%, but because of indus­trial con­cen­tra­tion, aver­age size was 187 hectares.

Rockefeller’s Agribusi­ness Revolution

What we are told, those of us whose rela­tion to meat, dairy, fruits and veg­eta­bles ends at the super­mar­ket, is that this is a great progress, the lib­er­a­tion of almost 23 mil­lion farm work­ers to get city jobs and live a bet­ter life.

It isn’t that simple.

We are not told the true effects on food qual­ity that has been cre­ated by the mech­a­niza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion of food pro­duc­tion in Amer­ica since the Har­vard Busi­ness School, on a grant from the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion, began what they termed “agribusi­ness,” the con­ver­sion of our food sup­ply into a pure for-profit ver­ti­cally inte­grated busi­ness mod­elled on the Rock­e­feller oil cartel.

The rais­ing of hogs, dairy cows, beef cat­tle, chicken all became indus­tri­al­ized grad­u­ally after the 1950’s in the USA. The baby chicks were con­fined to spaces so tiny they could barely stand. To make them get fat faster, the own­ers would pump them full of antibi­otics and feed them a diet of GMO corn and soya meal. Accord­ing to the Nat­ural Resources Defense Coun­cil, 80 per­cent of all antibi­otics sold in the United States are for use on live­stock and poul­try, not humans. The major­ity are given to ani­mals mixed in their food or water to speed growth. After all, time is money.

The tra­di­tional fam­ily farmer, of the sort my late grand­fa­ther was in North Dakota prior to the First World War, was dri­ven largely from the land by USDA Gov­ern­ment pol­icy, pol­icy that favored indus­tri­al­iza­tion regard­less of the qual­ity of food nutri­ent that resulted. Trac­tors became com­put­er­ized, mam­moth machines dri­ven by GPS. One such trac­tor could work remotely and do the work of many farm­ers of old.

The result was finan­cially fabulous….for the indus­try owners—ADM, Cargill, Mon­santo, for the pack­agers like Kraft Foods, Kel­loggs, Nes­tle, Unilever, Toepfer, Maggi. The Amer­i­can Rockefeller-Harvard “agribusi­ness” busi­ness model was glob­al­ized, begin­ning with the GATT nego­ti­a­tions of the Uruguay Round of trade lib­er­al­iza­tion in the late 1980s where the EU dropped much of its tra­di­tional pro­tec­tion of domes­tic farm­ers in favor of free trade in agri­cul­ture products.

Dur­ing the late 1980’s as the Uruguay Round of GATT trade nego­ti­a­tions was about to give US agribusi­ness giants what they wanted—freedom to rape the EU and other pro­tected agri­cul­ture mar­kets with their highly effi­cient prod­ucts, to destroy mil­lions of EU farm­ers who had farmed with a pas­sion for gen­er­a­tions, I went to Brus­sels to make a back­ground inter­view as a jour­nal­ist with a high-level EU Com­mis­sion bureau­crat respon­si­ble for agri­cul­ture. He was an appar­ently well-educated, multi-lingual bureau­crat, Danish-born as he noted. He argued in defense of free trade by declar­ing, “Why should I pay taxes from Den­mark so that Bavar­ian farm­ers on their tiny plots of land can remain in business?”

The answer, which I kept to myself then, was sim­ply because the tra­di­tional fam­ily farmer is uniquely suited to medi­ate with nature and us to pro­duce food that is healthy for humans and ani­mals to eat. No machine can replace the per­sonal ded­i­ca­tion or pas­sion that I have seen again and again in every farmer I have met who truly cares about his live­stock or crops.

Now the very same very rich and very love­less peo­ple, I call them the Amer­i­can Oli­garchs, are sys­tem­at­i­cally doing every­thing to destroy the human food qual­ity. Clearly in my view, they are doing so with a goal of mass pop­u­la­tion reduc­tion. There is no other rea­son the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion would spend hun­dreds of mil­lions of (tax exempt) dol­lars to cre­ate GMO tech­niques, to sup­port Mon­santo and other chem­i­cal giants like DuPont, clearly know­ing they are slowly poi­son­ing the pop­u­la­tion to an early death.

Depress­ing pesticides

This has been demon­strated in inde­pen­dent tests regard­ing the toxic effects on ani­mals and even human cells in an embryo. Now, inde­pen­dent even of GMO crops, new tests show that ordi­nary pes­ti­cide chem­i­cals sprayed by farm work­ers or farm­ers on crops cause neu­ro­log­i­cal damage—depression, Parkin­sons’ and even suicide—to the farm­ers or farm work­ers using the deadly chemicals.

The US National Insti­tute of Envi­ron­men­tal Health Sci­ences in their land­mark Agri­cul­tural Health Study stud­ied a group of 89,000 farm­ers and other pes­ti­cide appli­ca­tors in Iowa and North Car­olina. The mam­moth study con­cluded that, “use of two pes­ti­cide classes, fumi­gants and organochlo­rine insec­ti­cides, and seven indi­vid­ual pesticides—the fumi­gants alu­minum phos­phide and eth­yl­ene dibro­mide; the phe­noxy her­bi­cide (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxy)acetic acid (2,4,5-T); the organochlo­rine insec­ti­cide dield­rin; and the organophos­phate insec­ti­cides diazi­non, malathion, and parathion—were all pos­i­tively asso­ci­ated with depres­sion in each case group.”

The study showed that farm­ers with the high­est num­ber of life­time expo­sure days to pes­ti­cides were 50 per­cent more likely to later have a depres­sion diag­no­sis.
The research linked long-term use of pes­ti­cides to higher rates of depres­sion and sui­cide. Evi­dence also sug­gests that pes­ti­cide poi­son­ing – a heavy dose in a short amount of time – dou­bles the risk of depression.

After sup­press­ing the effects among farm fam­i­lies for years about the result­ing depres­sion and related neu­ro­log­i­cal symp­toms, farm­ers and their fam­i­lies have begun speak­ing out. Lorann Stal­lones, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist and psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at Col­orado State Uni­ver­sity says, “There’s been a shift – partly because there’s more peo­ple talk­ing about being men­tally inca­pac­i­tated.”

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Freya Kamel and her col­leagues reported that among 19,000 stud­ied, “those who used two classes of pes­ti­cides and seven indi­vid­ual pes­ti­cides were more likely to have been diag­nosed with depres­sion. Those who used organochlo­rine insec­ti­cides were up to 90 per­cent more likely to have been diag­nosed with depres­sion than those who hadn’t used them. For fumi­gants, the increased risk was up to 80 per­cent.
In France, farm­ers who used her­bi­cides were nearly twice as likely to have been treated for depres­sion as those who didn’t use her­bi­cides, accord­ing to a study pub­lished in 2013. The study of 567 French farm­ers found that the risk was even greater when the her­bi­cide appli­ca­tors had been doing it for more than 19 years.

In short, we are destroy­ing the nutri­tional value of the food we eat and slowly destroy­ing the remain­ing farm­ers respon­si­ble for cul­ti­vat­ing that. It is a recipe for the ulti­mate extinc­tion of life on the planet as we know it. No, that is not an exaggeration.

I firmly believe that hon­est, nature-conscious organic farm­ers ought to receive sig­nif­i­cant tax breaks to encour­age other farm­ers to leave the grotesque agribusi­ness model behind and return to grow­ing or rais­ing hon­est food again as they did only a few short decades ago. And severely high tax­a­tion ought to be imposed on farm­ers who use proven toxic chem­i­cals like Roundup by Mon­santo or the neon­i­coti­noids like Bayer AG’s Con­fi­dor, Gau­cho or Advo­cate, or Pon­cho, or Syngenta’s Actara, Plat­inum or Cruiser to name just the most sold.

Right now our reg­u­la­tors in the EU and USA do every­thing to dis­cour­age that, some­thing actu­ally quite stu­pid, unless, of course, some love­less, power-addicted oli­garchs sit­ting atop their moun­tain, look­ing con­temp­tu­ously down on us nor­mal folk, have decided that’s just what they desire. If so, it’s up to us to stop look­ing up to those on the moun­tain and look at what we our­selves have accepted as nor­mal, that is slowly killing us and the farm­ers who feed us. Maybe the time has come to change that unhealthy situation.