When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

By Kurtis Bright

Investors Worth Trillions Call For Divestment From Factory Farms

A classic joke told by comedian and actor Larry Miller follows a guy as he progresses through “just having one quick drink with the boys” after work, through stages of just one more beer, to a quick shot, and finally to margaritas being mixed by a laughing Satan at a bar across the state line, asking a waitress with fresh stitches in her head to be his wife.

The final scene has the brutal sunlight of dawn streaming in “...like God’s own flashlight,” and Satan tells the hapless drunk, “Ooh, buddy you’re on your own. I gotta get some sleep before work.”

You can get something of the sense of that from a recent announcement issued by a group of 16 investment groups representing over $1.25 trillion in funds. Turns out they want to talk about divesting from the factory farm model of agriculture.

Which is something like Satan’s final parting shot to the drunk who has gone too far even for the Prince of Darkness: it’s like they’re saying, “Guys, this shit is just too evil, even for us.”

The group is organized under the name Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return and includes some 40 investors who are campaigning to raise awareness about the environmental and health risks that come with factory farming, especially animal agriculture.

Envisioned by Jeremy Coller, founder and chief investment officer of Coller Capital, the group was founded based on the fact that “...a worrying knowledge gap has emerged among investors in relation to the material investment risks and opportunities connected with intensive livestock farming and poor animal welfare standards,” according to the group’s website.

Coller has enlisted investors who collectively manage over $1.25 trillion in funds, so you can be certain that with that kind of money at stake, the rest of the investment world--as well as players in the world of agriculture--are sitting up and taking notice.

“Backed by a new briefing entitled The Future Of Food--The Investment Case For A Protein Shake Up, produced by the FAIRR Initiative and ShareAction, the investors warn of the risks associated with the growing global demand for protein and an over reliance on the unsustainable factory farming of livestock for its supply,” reads a press release from the group. “The briefing highlights the environmental, social and public health risks inherent in this model, which financial markets are not currently valuing appropriately.”

What FAIRR has accomplished as a first step toward initiating divestment in the factory model of agriculture is to contact 16 global-scale food producers, requesting that they acknowledge the risks of continuing on the current path, and calling on them to focus on investing in plant-based protein sources.

Some of the corporations they reached out to include General Mills, Nestlé, Sainsbury’s, Walmart, Kraft, Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods and Mondelez International (which is the parent company of Triscuit, Ritz, Cadbury and host of other foods).

According to the initiative’s site, “...factory farming is emerging as a high-risk production method linked with significant environmental damage and major public health issues, such as the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and outbreaks of pandemics such as avian flu.”

If even the Devil thinks it’s getting late, maybe it’s time to pay the tab and cash out your chips.

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And You Thought Glyphosate Was Bad: Big Agrichem Companies Using Quasi-Slave Labor

And You Thought Glyphosate Was Bad: Big Agrichem Companies Using Quasi-Slave Labor

By Kurtis Bright

Near-Slave Conditions Exist in the U.S. For Migrant Workers At Big Agrichem Facilities

It’s difficult to overstate the length and breadth of the list of complaints against Monsanto and others in big agrichem.

Naturally (unnaturally, actually) there are the engineered seeds, perversely designed to not self-reproduce, thus locking farmers into a vicious cycle of indebtedness.

Then of course there are the chemicals, the cancer-causing glyphosate with which they have dusted nearly the entire earth in their stultifying, poisonous embrace, with over 8.6 billion kilograms (18 billion pounds) of the stuff having been sprayed in the U.S. alone.

And then there are the as-yet unknown dangers of feeding humans and animals genetically modified foods, research for which is constantly harried and hampered by government and industry.

But it gets even worse than that. How, you may well ask? How bad could it get?

How about slave labor bad?

New reports are emerging that name Monsanto and other big agriculture giants as being behind the horrific conditions in which they and their subsidiaries force migrant laborers to work and live--on U.S. soil.

Thousands of workers labor under conditions that, according to reports are akin to modern-day slavery at camps all across the Land of the Free. Makes you wonder just what that phrase really means: free for whom?

According to an expose in the journal In These Times, state inspectors are routinely summoned to deal with complaints about such camps. And they end up writing citations a shocking 60 percent of the time they are called out.

Which is all well and good. But there’s another problem when it comes to Big Agrichem: it’s too big to jail.

Companies like Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta and others have woven such a powerful network of enablers among lazy and compliant lawmakers and regulators that even these limp warnings and demands that they comply with the law are tossed aside contemptuously.

These companies have also perfected the art of plausible deniability and distancing themselves from operations from which they profit. They hire intermediaries, third-party recruiters and “independent” landlords who are paid to run the facilities, allowing Monsanto and DuPont to pretend ignorance when it comes to mistreatment of workers.

But now the details of the travails of these migrant laborers under the dubious care of the Big Ag companies has come to light, painting a disturbing picture--and it was told in the words of the very workers who have been so mistreated.

According to In These Times, one migrant worker, 50-year-old Baltazar Arvizu said, “I’ve stayed in housing that is very similar to barns for animals. We used to live 80 in a barn. We just had two bathrooms for 80 people.”

And Arzivu’s story took place not in some sketchy border town. This is happening, right now, in modern-day Indiana. This isn’t some long ago Dust Bowl land of Tom Joad.

But the ringing echoes of The Grapes of Wrath rings throughout the stories these workers tell, even some 80 years after the Great Depression ended and labor laws were supposedly reformed.

Worker complain they are being paid less than minimum wage, and they are often forced to plunk down $300 monthly rent or more on company-provided housing in shoddy motels and disused nursing homes.

The kitchen facilities the workers were promised in one of these housing units turned out to be a converted school bus with a couple of stoves and refrigerators and no ventilation, a shabby makeshift kitchen meant to serve over 30 people.

The entire article is linked here, if you can stomach it.

And the next time some troll wants to tell you how Monsanto and others like them are actually working to feed the world’s poor, send them a copy.

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