Corporate Food & Human Backlash

September 26th, 2011
FDAinspectors
FDA, via AP

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

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Filed under Alternatives, Community, Cooperatives, Economics, Education, Family, Food Production, Food Safety, Garden, Health, Homestead, Hunger, Livestock, Monsanto, Nutritition, Pets, Rural Development, Sustainable Living, Trade | Comment (0)

Who Needs RoundUp Ready Alfalfa?

February 7th, 2011
alfalfa

The Obama administration’s director of the USDA (Tom Vilsac) approved the open marketing and planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets last week. To the widely expressed outrage and downright confusion of organic growers and consumers everywhere. Now, sugar beets are a food production crop as valuable and as intensively, unsustainably, chemically farmed as sugar cane, so one could imagine a desire for them to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (Monsanto’s RoundUp), as are many other of Monsanto’s proprietary GMO crops. So much of our junk foods and soft drinks are sweetened with GMO corn syrup, that a little GMO sugar in candy bars probably won’t bother most people. Those of us who do care can easily grow our own sugar beets and make sugar out of them, so there should still be organic sugar available.

But I admit to being stumped by the alfalfa thing. I mean, here’s a hay and fodder crop that is highly nutritious, grows thickly across America’s managed pasturelands, and is perennial – as cattle fodder or hay the ground isn’t tilled and a new crop planted in its place every year. Never heard of anybody spraying herbicides on it, as alfalfa grows thickly enough to displace even the most stubborn weeds. Except pigweed, of course, which is already glyphosate resistant via transgene contamination. So other than Monsanto being able to claim the seed is proprietary because it contains their easiest transgene complex, there simply is no reason to have RoundUp Ready alfalfa.

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Filed under Environment, Farm Policy, Food Production, GMOs, Monsanto | Comment (0)