Killing In The Name: How Agri-Business Makes Its Own Rules--And How Thousands Die As A Result

Killing In The Name: How Agri-Business Makes Its Own Rules--And How Thousands Die As A Result

By Kurtis Bright

Death By Big Agriculture

Following yet another salmonella outbreak in the U.S., and in the wake of the Centers for Disease Control’s weirdly heartbreaking warning that people need to stop kissing their chickens, it is high time we take another look at the way we do big agriculture in the U.S. versus how it is done elsewhere.

For one thing, according to CDC estimates, there are around 1.2 million reported illnesses from salmonella every year in the U.S.

Some 450 of those result in death. And of those cases, around 79,000 are caused by salmonella-infected eggs, which alone account for 30 deaths.

But if we take a look at the U.K., we find a very different story: there were almost no illnesses reported associated with salmonella, and zero deaths.

How is that possible? Even if you take into account the U.K.’s population differential with the U.S., statistically you would expect more than a handful of egg-related salmonella cases.

If it weren’t for one thing: in 1997, faced with its own salmonella crisis, the U.K. government ordered that egg farmers must begin inoculating their laying hens with a salmonella vaccine. That year there some 15,000 cases of salmonella related to eggs; by 2010 that number had dropped to around 500.

So, you ask, in a country as populous and wealthy as the U.S. which faces multiple annual salmonella outbreaks, why do we not adopt the U.K.’s model and vaccinate chickens against this potentially deadly disease?

Because big agri-business doesn’t want it that way, and they make the rules now.

Case in point: in 2010 when researchers at the Food and Drug Administration saw the results of the vaccination program in the U.K., they were of course encouraged and excited. The agency was on the verge of mandating a similar program in the U.S.

However, they ran into a massive roadblock: chicken farmers.

The thing is, chicken mega-farmers like Tyson just aren’t that into you. That is to say, they're not into spending money on saving people from contracting salmonella. They would rather pay lobbyists to get them out of such trifling annoyances like preventing disease and death caused by their products and practices.

And people die as a result. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people who could just as well be your neighbors and friends lost their lives between 2010 and today due to this lack of regulation and the FDA’s deference to big agriculture business interests.

All because big agri-business has such a tight grip on our elected “representatives” and the regulations they control. When Tyson and its ilk says jump, Congress and Federal agencies say “how high?”

The example of the chicken farmers and their salmonella-tainted products is just a drop in the bucket. Look at how Monsanto and Bayer and Syngenta have managed to blanket the entire nation and a great deal of the rest of the planet in a multi-billion-ton cloud of carcinogenic glyphosate for the past 20 years. Consider the number of lives and healthy bodies that have been sacrificed, all because big agri-business controls the rules and is constantly seeking to increase its profits uber alles.

So the next time someone wants to spout the tired old line about how “government regulation is always bad,” point out that when government isn’t regulating on behalf of the people, it will by regulate on behalf of big business--often with deadly results.

###

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.

###

Prominent Scientists Say U.S. Position on GMOs Is “Horribly Exposed”

Prominent Scientists Say U.S. Position on GMOs Is “Horribly Exposed”

By Kurtis Bright

U.S. Stance On GMOs Called Out As Shoddy Science

The proposed merger of Monsanto and Bayer edges ever closer to a done deal every day. At the same time, consumer awareness grows, of just how ubiquitous and dangerous genetically modified crops and the massive doses of chemicals needed to grow them really are. Indeed, genetically modified foods, Monsanto, glyphosate, and other subjects like these are drawing unwanted scrutiny that is making some people in high places very uncomfortable.

As this process has developed, the corporations predictably have rolled out their typical denial, reassurances, and platitudes. But another entity has been complicit in the massive cover-up of the vast array of problems with GMOs: the Federal Government.

A pair of prominent researchers finally got fed up. A conference at Cornell University was the site of their defection from the mandated talking points, as they instead talked about their growing unease as study after study further breaks down the scientific basis for the U.S. approval of widely-used GMO techniques and products.

Executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project Jonathan Latham said the official U.S. position on GMOs is “horribly exposed” as a result of the latest research, stating further that contradictions even within the framework of the original research “were never resolved.”

“There was obviously a lot of political pressure and economic pressure to just sweep things under the carpet,” Latham added.

Joining Latham in his disgust with the way GMO research was conducted when biochem companies were seeking U.S. regulatory approval was Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at the Consumer’s Union. Immersed in the issue of GMOs for over 30 years at both the state and federal level, as well as in an international context, Hansen has a depth and breadth of knowledge on the subject that rivals that of anyone.

And he has sounded the alarm, saying that it’s high time for stricter regulations on GMOs.

He adds that it may already be too late.

“Most of the environmental movements of the 20th century have basically been people cleaning up disasters after the fact,” Hansen said at the Cornell event. “With pesticides and all these things that were initially considered perfectly safe, we only find out years later that they’re contaminating the environment and causing all these problems. We wanted to make sure that biotechnology was regulated properly.”

The troubling fact is, according to Hansen, most U.S. citizens don’t realize that the U.S. doesn’t hew to internationally agreed-upon safety regulations when it comes to GMO crops. The U.S. Federal Government has chosen its own strange path for its citizens, and it tracks alarmingly close to exactly what Big Agrichem wants.

“There is global agreement on required safety assessments [for food that is derived from genetically modified organisms] and yet the United States does not do them,” Hansen said. “So we are actually on the outside of the global scientific standard.”

So when you encounter concern trolls on chat boards who want to try to “educate” you about how you just don’t understand how safe GMO products really are, or how Monsanto and companies like it simply want to feed the hungry of the world, keep in mind that they are not only likely to be on the payroll of Big Agrichem or hoodwinked by those who are, they are doing so using badly flawed research and data that was gathered and processed with one goal in mind: find a way--any way--to justify the approval of widespread use and sale of GMO crops.

###

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.

###