{"id":1447566,"date":"2024-01-16T15:27:36","date_gmt":"2024-01-16T15:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=147446"},"modified":"2024-01-16T15:27:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T15:27:36","slug":"sickening-profits-the-global-food-systems-poisoned-food-and-toxic-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/16\/sickening-profits-the-global-food-systems-poisoned-food-and-toxic-wealth\/","title":{"rendered":"Sickening Profits: The Global Food System\u2019s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of \u2018junk\u2019 (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.<\/p>\n

Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.<\/p>\n

They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.<\/p>\n

The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.<\/p>\n

This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations\u2019 needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.<\/p>\n

In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.<\/p>\n

There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.<\/p>\n

All of this is set out in\u00a0Sickening Profits: The Global Food System\u2019s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(December 2023), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research and is a follow up to the author\u2019s book\u00a0Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2022).<\/p>\n

That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues \u2014 prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India\u200a\u2014 stated the following about the book:<\/p>\n

This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an expos\u00e9 on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2018Sickening Profits\u2019 continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?<\/p>\n

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, an influential US-based think tank, says:<\/p>\n

It takes a book to break down the dynamics that are pushing agro-chemical agriculture to farmers and consumers around the world and to reveal the strength of the diverse movement of people and organizations who stand in the way of these destructive and predatory forces.<\/p>\n

Colin Todhunter takes readers on a world tour that makes a compelling case against the fallacy of the food scarcity and Green Revolution arguments advanced by the mainstream media and international institutions on behalf of powerful financial interests such as Blackrock, Vanguard, or Gates. Todhunter makes it obvious that a key factor of world hunger and of the environmental crisis we are facing is a capitalist system that \u2018requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.\u2019<\/p>\n

Uplifting rather than depressing, after this lucid diagnosis, he highlights some of the countless people-led initiatives and movements, from Cuba, Ethiopia to India, that fight back against destruction and predation with agroecology and farmers-led practices, respectful of the people and the planet. By debunking the \u201cartificial scarcity\u201d myth that is constantly fed to us, Todhunter demonstrates that it is actually not complicated to change course. Readers will just have to join the movement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is \u201can independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists\u201d and believes in \u201copen access to truthful information and nuanced reporting\u201d. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge.\u00a0Sickening Profits: The Global Food System\u2019s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth<\/em> can be read directly on the GRG site here<\/a> and can also be accessed and downloaded as a fully formatted pdf (numbered contents\/pages etc) on the academia.edu<\/a> website here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>The post Sickening Profits: The Global Food System\u2019s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth\u00a0<\/em><\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of \u2018junk\u2019 (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post Sickening Profits: The Global Food System\u2019s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth\u00a0<\/em><\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[450,941,30,3234,51084,2088,946,308,452],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1449438,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447566\/revisions\/1449438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}