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Author Topic: Happy (belated) Food Day!
M.Gregus
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posted 17 October 2007 06:50 AM      Profile for M.Gregus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yes, I'm a day late in my wishes, but I figured better late than never! The theme for World Food Day this year is the right to food. Here's a piece that explores this theme in light of the economic imperative driving food policy.

quote:
The right to food may sound innocuous enough, but it's a direct affront to the reigning market fundamentalism both guiding and obfuscating U.S. food, farming, and international aid policies.

While we in the United States are still largely locked into this failing paradigm -- the market as sacred arbiter of economic outcomes -- people elsewhere are beginning to make the right to food real, more than fifty years after it was first codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


The Right to Food Means Freedom From Dogma


From: capital region | Registered: Oct 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 17 October 2007 04:58 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The world produces more food than ever - enough to feed twice the global population. Yet, more people than ever suffer from hunger; and their numbers are rising. Today, 854 million people, most of them women and girls, are chronically hungry, up from 800 million in 1996. Another paradox: the majority of the world’s hungry people live in rural areas, where nearly all food is grown.

World Food Day on October 16 is a good time to try and understand the conundrum of world hunger. The root of the problem is the inequitable distribution of the resources needed to either grow or buy food (also known as poverty). World Food Day is an equally good time to call out one of the main culprits of the crisis: industrial agriculture…

Visit the websites of corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, who together control 65 percent of the global grain trade, and you will read that their mission is to “feed a growing world.” The reality is starkly different. Big Farming is part of a larger corporate economic model that prioritizes profit-making over all else, even the basic right to food. Around the world, agribusiness bankrupts and displaces small farmers, and directs farmers to grow export crops instead of staple foods.

Not long ago, most farm inputs came from farmers themselves. Seeds were saved from the last harvest and fertilizer was recycled from animal and plant wastes. Farmers found innovative ways to control pests by harnessing local biodiversity, such as cultivating insect-repelling plants alongside food crops. While these techniques can produce enough food to feed the world and sustain its ecosystems, they don’t turn a profit for agribusiness. That’s why corporations developed genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, and synthetic pesticides.

These inputs are both expensive for farmers and highly damaging to the natural systems on which sustainable farming and, ultimately, all life depends. As the cost of farming has gone up, farmers’ incomes have gone down due to trade rules that favor large-scale agribusiness over small farmers. For example, the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture forbids governments in the Global South from providing farmers with low-cost seeds and other farm inputs, turning farmers into a “market” for international agribusiness.

Over the past 50 years, as much of the world’s farmland has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, millions of people have been forced to abandon their rural homes. In fact, this year, for the first time ever, the number of people living in cities around the world exceeded the number living in rural areas. Most of this urban population boom is due to rural migration….

Export agriculture is a major contributor to global warming because it requires huge inputs of petroleum: it takes 100 gallons of oil to grow just one acre of US corn. It also requires a massive global transportation infrastructure, including ports, railways, fuel pipelines, and superhighways, often built at the expense of local people and ecosystems. In many places, 40 percent of truck traffic is from hauling food over long distances. Today, food that could be grown locally is shipped, trucked, or flown half way around the planet.

Trade rules have so distorted agricultural markets that almost anywhere you go, food from the other side of the world costs less than food grown locally. So people in Kenya buy Dutch butter, while those in the Big Apple buy apples from Chile. In the US, the average bite of food travels 1,300 miles from farm to fork. The system is so wasteful that many countries import the very same foods that they export. For example, last year the US exported - and imported - 900,000 tons of beef.


Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
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posted 17 October 2007 08:02 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Hey some good reading. Thanks!

A Vision of Food Sovereignty for Venezuela

quote:
Article 305 of the new Venezuelan constitution adopted in 1999 not only guarantees food security for all, but also guarantees food security through a stable, sustainable, and largely self-sufficient domestic food system. 3 Furthermore, it promotes sustainable agriculture and rural development. In essence, this article is guaranteeing food sovereignty. This sounded impressive in writing, but I wondered what it actually meant in practice. ...
Packaging for staples such as corn meal and rice are decorated with educational messages and excerpts from the Venezuelan constitution.

[ 17 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]


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jrose
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posted 18 October 2007 11:23 AM      Profile for jrose     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Great topic! Check out some of the recent podcasts from RedEye, on rabble's podcast network. There is some GREAT stuff in relation to food insecurity and activism.

Available here!


From: Ottawa | Registered: Oct 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 18 October 2007 02:01 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists had tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a single, hi-tech variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older technique (planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the astonishment of the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of "monoculture", that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased by 94%. The farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop applying their poisons altogether, while producing 18% more rice per acre than they were growing before.

Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that yields of organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers and pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically improves. In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with manure has produced higher yields for the past 150 years than wheat grown with artificial nutrients.

Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the US reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can produce 10 times as much money per acre as big farms growing single crops. Cuba, forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted this as policy, having discovered that it improves both the productivity and the quality of its crops....

We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive than monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer anywhere, without the help of multinational companies. Though it is more productive to grow several species or several varieties of crops in one field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in order to make money, leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds. This is why they have spent the last 10 years buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has not been officially - and expensively - registered and approved.


George Monbiot

[ 28 October 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
bliter
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posted 19 October 2007 06:25 PM      Profile for bliter   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Though written from a U.S. perspective, an excellent article and following comments. This from the first link:

quote:
Sadly, here at home market dogma is so deeply entrenched that most of don't even notice when our government, beholden to the biggest players in the food industry, intervenes in the market -- not in the public's interest but on behalf of concentrated wealth: for example, the billions in farm commodity subsidies inked into the Farm Bill.

To the point of tedium, it must be asked, just who advocates on behalf of the consumer?

ps

This is being posted late in the day, but I could not help noticing, on scanning TAT, that not one Environmental Justice issue was present.


From: delta | Registered: Sep 2007  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 03 November 2007 10:07 AM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Global food crisis looms
quote:
Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years.

Last week the Kremlin forced Russian companies to freeze the price of milk, bread and other foods until January 31, for fear of a public backlash with a parliamentary election looming. "The price of goods has risen sharply and that has hit the poor particularly hard," said Oleg Savelyev, of the Levada Centre polling institute.

India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the last year, something not seen in decades of low global food commodity prices. Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food price inflation.



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 04 November 2007 07:33 AM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Anyone want some pasutured poultry?

Oh, wait, maybe I should keep them in the freezer until the price goes up to where my input costs are covered.

Or I'll just eat them. Tough call.


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Farmpunk
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posted 06 November 2007 10:11 AM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Thought about it and, yes, I am going to eat the birds myself.

From Grant Robertson and his most recent NFU commentary:

"There is an economic storm quietly gathering steam in rural Ontario. It is a storm that could leave farmers without the equity to continue, not only devastating their own personal situations but it could also mean the loss of many urban jobs too. Beef producers are seeing some of the lowest prices ever, including during the BSE issue. Pork producers who faced the crash of 98-99 are seeing prices dip even lower in real terms. It is a serious problem with real life implications for many of our farmers.

Some numbers to put the issues into perspective. In the mid-‘90s, farmers received around 60 cents a pound for an older cow and packers/retailers received around a dollar for ground beef. Now, farmers get 35 cents and packers/retailers get nearly $2.50. Put another way the ratio of the price of ground beef to cow has gone from about 3:1 to about 8:1; hamburger is now eight times the price of the cow. We’ve gone from a 5:1 steak:steer ratio to a 7:1 ratio. Today, a 5:1 ratio would mean an extra 40 cents per pound for farmers. Has this been caused by the dollar as some agri-business interests like to claim? The claim seems illogical when the facts are contemplated.

Pork is no different; the growth in profit extraction after the farm gate has grown at a steady rate as well. Since 1976 the retail price of pork chops has grown from just under $2.00 a pound to between $4 and $5. The dressed hog price farmers receive has remained in a declining ratio just like beef. When inflation is factored in these are the lowest pork prices on record. Ever."

Seems like there will be a lot of well fed former family farmers soon enough. Guess I should be looking for a job with the ministry of ag. Starving farmer consultant. Or, how I can grow food and lose my land in several easy steps while the gov spends money on shitholes like the university of western ontario's biotron.


From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 07 November 2007 09:30 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that 34 countries around the world are facing food crises, the majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the 14 poorest countries, more than 35 percent of the population goes hungry every day, even during normal times when there is no drought or famine.

The problem is worse in countries suffering military conflicts such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The close links between hunger and conflict become especially clear when food and famine are used as weapons of war.

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf says that food security is being threatened by several factors, including demands of bio-energy, climate change, low productivity and lack of market access.


Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 18 November 2007 08:22 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes....

"Overall," says Professor Nagaraj, "there exists since the mid-90s, an acute agrarian crisis. That's across the country. In the Big Four and some other states, specific factors compound the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialised agriculture. Cash crops dominate. (And to a lesser extent, coarse cereals.) Water stress has been a common feature - and problems with land and water have worsened as state investment in agriculture disappears. Cultivation costs have shot up in these high input zones, with some inputs seeing cost hikes of several hundred per cent. The lack of regulation of these and other aspects of agriculture have sharpened those problems. Meanwhile, prices have crashed, as in the case of cotton, due to massive U.S.-EU subsidies to their growers. Or due to price rigging with the tightening grip of large corporations over the trade in agricultural commodities."


Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 29 March 2008 12:51 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The price of the world's three main grains - rice, wheat and corn - have all more than doubled in the past year, affecting just about everything people eat, and fanning social unrest in some of the most unstable corners of the world.

Canadians might be forgiven for not noticing. The remarkable rise of the loonie has so far largely insulated them from the kind of rampant inflation that is hitting much of the rest of the world. Canadian prices were up 1.8 per cent in February compared with last year, less than half the U.S. inflation rate - a gap economists say is largely due to the strong dollar.

Signs of stress are emerging just about everywhere else. Food riots have erupted in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon. In Thailand, rice farmers are sleeping in their fields to prevent thieves from stealing their crops.

Numerous countries, including Argentina and Vietnam, have capped or taxed exports of key farm products in a bid to quell domestic inflation, running the risk of violating international trade rules. To ease growing shortages, the Philippine government has asked fast-food restaurants to serve less rice with meals to ease shortages.

In Egypt, the price of many basic foods has spiked as much as 50 per cent in a matter of months. In Asia, where rice is part of virtually every meal, prices are rising almost daily.

The United Nations World Food Programme warned this week it will have to ration food aid to cope with soaring grain prices unless it gets an emergency cash infusion of $500-million (U.S.) from donor countries. - Globe



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 01 April 2008 07:22 AM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.

In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson’s hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning.

Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers.


Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?
by Bridget Stutchbury, professor of biology at York University, Toronto

[ 01 April 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 04 April 2008 01:26 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Compared to all the headlines about the financial crisis, climate change and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's likely that most readers missed the recent small story tucked inside most newspapers underneath the heading, "Rice hits $760 a tonne."

For 3 billion people around the world that was the most important news report of today and will almost certainly be the most important story for years to come.

For all these people, the great majority of them poor, rice is their staple food. Just a few weeks ago, its price was one-third lower at $580 a tonne. The higher the price of rice, the less gets eaten by those now spending 50 to 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food.

As goes rice, so go many food staples. Corn prices have hit a 12-year high. In one month early this year, wheat prices jumped 90 per cent.

What's happening is the agricultural equivalent of a perfect storm. At one and the same time, demand is rising and supply is shrinking. - Richard Gwyn



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 15 April 2008 02:09 PM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Meanwhile: dead hogs for pet food. Brilliant idea!
From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
writer
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posted 15 April 2008 02:14 PM      Profile for writer     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Your link isn't working for me.
From: tentative | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 15 April 2008 02:23 PM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Shit, it's not working for me either!
Try this one:
paying to kill hogs for pet food.

From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 15 April 2008 02:32 PM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
"The animals are being destroyed at slaughter plants and on pig farms in a bid to cull the swine breeding herd by 10 per cent."

Someone call Paul Watson!

ps: "cull the swine" - sounds like someone talking about the Conservatives (or even Liberals).


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 15 April 2008 05:06 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
So hog farmers are getting nothing for their pork, but consumers continue to pay high prices at the supermarket.

Obviously a major exception to "normal" market economics at work here.


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 15 April 2008 05:19 PM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Well, kinda. I believe the farmers are getting paid to "dispose" of their hogs, so to speak. The beneficiary will be pet food compaies, likely costmetic companies (that's a guess), and apparently some 25 percent will go to food banks.

I have no explanation why the price in grocery stores hasn't changed. I mean, I do know, but I can't get my head around it. Food processors and retailers have been recording record profits of late.... Nahhh. Nothing here, folks.

I would say that there isn't a lot of market control or gov direction in place for hog farming on a certain scale. It's long been in a bust and boom cycle, with wild flucuations even within a month. The hog farmers I know who grow a great deal of their own feed are struggling, or getting out.

I consider this a nearly criminal waste of food -and at the very least a misuse of food - not to mention these animals are meant for eating by people, not pets.


From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 15 April 2008 07:56 PM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I saw this in another thread, thought it would be appropriate here:

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 15 April 2008 10:48 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Farmpunk:
I consider this a nearly criminal waste of food -and at the very least a misuse of food - not to mention these animals are meant for eating by people, not pets.
Using actual human-grade meat for pet food will be a big change for the pet-food people. No doubt they will be able to bump their prices and make a nice windfall profit, just like the meat packers and supermarkets.

They're already selling inedible parts of pigs to dog owners for more money per pound than you and I pay for pork tenderloin.


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 15 April 2008 10:57 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Boom Boom:
I saw this in another thread, thought it would be appropriate here:

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear


Excellent article, Thank you!

(Which other thread?)


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 16 April 2008 05:15 AM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
M Spector: "They're already selling inedible parts of pigs to dog owners for more money per pound than you and I pay for pork tenderloin."

Chicken guts, that I pay to "dispose of" at the gov inspected processing plant into cosmetics. That's my favourite.


From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 16 April 2008 05:48 AM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by M. Spector:
Excellent article, Thank you!

(Which other thread?)


Oh, gosh, I can't remember. I can look for it if you really want me to.


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 16 April 2008 05:53 AM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Maybe someone here has an answer at hand for this: is there a health/quality standard for pet foods, or is it simply 'anything goes'?

In the 1950s my mother brought canned cat food I think called "Puss In Boots" - it was pretty gross stuff, and the cat didn't really like it, especially the fish. We tried dried cat food, it was marginally better, and I think we ended up mixing the two. Ewwwww.


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 16 April 2008 06:08 AM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
This is from another recent babble thread, but I'm at a loss as to which one.

excerpt:

What does this have to do with you?

You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.

Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world’s largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE’s most controversial project (DP&L’s - now Monsanto’s - terminator genes) [here], the world’s largest meat producer (Tyson), the world’s largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart) [here].

The inbred-ness of Rose’s legal representation of corporations which own controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards sharing members who are also shareholders of each other’s corporations there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional shareholders of Tyson Foods, Walmart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L. All represented at Rose.

You didn’t just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart’s board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).

Food and friends, in Clinton terms: Bill’s appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson’s chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, …. Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender.

But what Bill did for Monsanto “genetic engineering” goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people’s escape from it.

and, from the "Comments" section:

#15: You’re right that we shouldn’t blame Bill’s mess on Hillary. However, her track record with Big Agriculture isn’t looking much better:

a. She appointed Joy Phillipi, former president of a the National Pork Producers Council — the main trade group representing nasty CAFO operators — as the co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary.

b. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2007-2008 election cycle, she was the #1 senate recipient of donations from all of the following industries: agribusiness, food and beverages, food processing and sales, food stores, crop production, sugar cane and sugar beets, restaurants and drinking establishments, and lobbyists

c. Her campaign recently held a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing at the Washington, DC offices of Troutman Sanders, the lobbying firm of agribusiness giant Monsanto.

The connections go on, and it’s very, very grim.


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 16 April 2008 09:35 AM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The truth about pet food
From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Boom Boom
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posted 16 April 2008 09:55 AM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Wow, M. Spector, that's a scary page.

excerpt:

Unfortunately this is far from the truth, More than 95% of pets derive their nutritional needs from a single source, processed pet foods. When people think of pet food many envision whole chicken meat, choice cuts of beef, fresh grains and all the nutrition that their dog or cat would ever need, images that pet food manufacturers promote in their advertisements and print on their food bags. What these companies do not reveal is that instead of wholesome chicken meat, they have substituted chicken heads, feet, feathers and intestines. Those choice cuts of beef are really cow brains, tongues, esophagi, fetal tissue dangerously high in hormones and even diseased and cancerous meat. Those whole grains have had the starch removed for corn starch powder and the oil extracted for corn oil or they are just hulls and other remnants from the milling process. Grains used that are truly whole have usually been deemed unfit for human consumption because of mold, contaminants, poor quality or poor handling practices, which is obvious by the fact that most pet food recalls are the result of toxic grain products such as Corn or Wheat. Pet food is one of worlds most synthetic edible products, containing virtually no whole ingredients.


From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Farmpunk
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posted 16 April 2008 01:18 PM      Profile for Farmpunk     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
That was a good article, Boomster. More of a Monsanto backgrounder but the milk stuff was relatively new. I don't drink milk, but I am beginning to be curious about the fifty pounds of cheese I eat annually...

In a strange but not unexpected twist, I like how Monsanto is fighting against labelling by using the power of the gov to enforce outside influence brand protection while at the same time jealously protected "its" technology, the same tech that's going to help the world. This, of course, happening while Canada fucks around with origin of product issues of our own. The NFU's Grant Robertson recently wrote about the labelling\product issues in Canada. Ain't pretty.

I swear here on rabble that I have never kept back any Round-up Ready beans. Ever. But I have heard they work equally as well.

I do have to admit, however, that the GMO beans are a serious time saver and work wonderfully. GMO tainted products are now in the food chain whether we like the fact or not. The only way to ensure non-GMO is to get to know a farmer who can supply consumers with trusted food security and enough product to keep up. Good luck with that search.


From: SW Ontario | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 17 April 2008 01:52 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Growing Hunger

The world food crisis continues apace:

quote:
For the three billion people who survive on less than two dollars a day, the upward spiral in global food prices has meant a struggle for the most basic of human rights - the right to eat. Rice, bread and tortillas are the staple food for this half of the world's population. In 2007, the price of grain rose by 42 per cent, and dairy products by 80 per cent, according to UN figures, and food inflation has accelerated further in recent months….

In recent weeks, mass hunger has spawned violent rioting in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Haiti.

Six straight days of rioting rocked Haiti this past week. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day and the typical adult diet consists of just 1,640 calories - 640 calories less than the average adult requirement - according to the World Food Program. Haitians have grown tired of subsisting on what has become the common diet: clay, salt and vegetable shortening. "Protesters compared the burning hunger in their stomachs to bleach or battery acid," noted the Guardian on April 9.

On April 4, thousands of angry Haitians protested in the southern city of Les Cayes, attempting to set the UN police base on fire while stealing rice from trucks. The rioting soon spread to Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands stormed the presidential palace demanding the resignation of the U.S.' hand picked president, Rene Preval. Fortunately for Preval, UN "peacekeepers" eventually managed to disburse the starving masses with tear gas and rubber bullets….

In Egypt, where protests and strikes are illegal, thousands of textile workers and supporters in Mahalla el-Kobra rioted against high food prices and low wages on April 6 and 7. Police occupied the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving plant overnight to prevent workers from going on strike as they had planned, but protesters responded by setting buildings on fire and throwing bricks at police tear-gassing them. Police repression did not succeed in frightening these protesters but rather only further fueled their anger.

Roughly forty percent of Egyptians survive on less than $2 per day, while the price of unsubsidized bread rose by 10 times in recent months and the cost of rice doubled in a single week….

Hunger is also rising in the U.S. The unregulated greed unleashed over thirty years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world's poorest countries is now exposing the class divide in the world's richest. It can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the global South….

Food inflation in the U.S. has reached a level not seen in decades, with food staples like milk rising 17 percent over the last year, rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 percent and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are expected to receive food stamps to survive this year. One in six people in West Virginia, and one in ten in Ohio and New York, are now relying on food stamps to survive. And one in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps at some time in the last year.

Food stamp "entitlements" are far from generous in the world's most affluent society, and it safe to say that most people suffering from rising food prices do not qualify for help. According to guidelines posted on the USDA's website, a family of four is eligible to receive food stamps only if their net monthly income is at or below $1,721. This same family of four is then entitled to a maximum monthly food stamp allotment of $542 - the same amount as in 1996. The average subsidy amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly and disabled food stamp recipients currently receive the minimum benefit of a mere $10 per month, according to the New York Times.

Mainstream economists have usually described the global food crisis as a food "shortage", but the shortage has been greatly exacerbated by the merciless laws of the free market. In many cases, the problem is not an immediate shortage of food but merely a shortage of the money to pay for it….

The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed the automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the world, has become one of the world's largest beef processors, demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the agribusiness sector….

Now the law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S. - triggering a manmade shortage and a rise in corn prices. Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the world's poorest people….

In recent weeks, neoliberal policymakers appear to have finally realized that widespread hunger could ignite a level of protest that threatens the ruling order worldwide….



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 16 October 2008 01:10 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
World Food Day is commemorated annually on October 16 to recognize food shortages among the poorest countries. According to the UN, hunger continues to plague the poorest people across the globe. Nearly 1 billion people remain hungry on a daily basis. Rising food shortages, climate change and high fuel costs are exacerbating the situation. Most victims of hunger live in rural areas where their main source of income is the agricultural sector. Global warming is threatening to push the number of hungry even higher in the decades to come.
From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 16 October 2008 01:19 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
One billion hungry on World Food Day

-----

Excerpt from Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, by Vandana Shiva:

quote:
Industrial agriculture has not produced more food. It has destroyed diverse sources of food, and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of specific commodities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water and toxic chemicals in the process.

It is often said that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.

Green Revolution varieties produced more grain by diverting production away from straw. This “partitioning” was achieved through dwarfing the plants, which also enabled them to withstand high doses of chemical fertilizer. However, less straw means less fodder for cattle and less organic matter for the soil to feed the millions of soil organisms that make and rejuvenate soil.

The higher yields of wheat or maize were thus achieved by stealing food from farm animals and soil organisms. Since cattle and earthworms are our partners in food production, stealing food from them makes it impossible to maintain food production over time, and means that the partial yield increases were not sustainable. The increase of yields in wheat and maize under industrial agriculture were also achieved at the cost of yields of other foods a small farm provides. Beans, legumes, fruits and vegetables all disappeared both from farms and from the calculus of yields. More grain from two or three commodities arrived on national and international markets, but less food was eaten by farm families in the Third World.

The gain in “yields” of industrially produced crops is thus based on a theft of food from other species and the rural poor in the Third World. That is why, as more grain is produced and traded globally, more people go hungry in the Third World. Global Markets record more commodities for trading because food has been stolen from nature and the poor.



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 16 October 2008 01:29 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Under the current model of capitalist food production, the ability to supply enough food to match people’s demand is increasingly under threat. If this scenario develops it will not be due to a Malthusian excess of population but to a failure of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has proven destructive to food production, giving rise to very specific destructive and unsustainable forms of economic development.

There is no doubt that it lies behind the current price upsurge, with the risk of tens of millions starving in a particularly gruesome version of the slump-boom cycle. And there is a strong likelihood that it is producing a long-term threat to world food security that will persist even if the current crisis eventually passes. The ability to develop a sustainable food production system requires democratic control by the world’s population. - Source



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged

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