Thread: Eat less meat
View Single Post
  #51 (permalink)   Report Post  
Posted to uk.business.agriculture,alt.food.vegan,alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,rec.food.veg,uk.environment.conservation,uk.rec.birdwatching,uk.rec.gardening
pearl[_1_] pearl[_1_] is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 692
Default Eat less meat

"Jim Webster" > wrote in message ...
>
> "pearl" > wrote in message
> ...
>
> > 'Today agricultural markets are dominated by the large agribusiness
> > corporations,

>
> of course it is, most US consumers live in major urban centres many hundreds
> of miles from where their food is grown. How on earth do you expect the
> small producer to supply them in an environmentally sustainable manner? Load
> his produce into paniers on the back of a mule and walk three weeks to
> market?


'Localism and Its Enemies
Posted by David Bollier on Fri, 03/07/2008 - 11:48am

One the great lessons of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma,
is that the industrial agriculture system necessarily entails all sorts of nasty
consequences: greater fuel consumption to transport food to market, crop
monocultures instead of biological diversity, pesticide-laden food instead of
organic produce, enormous lagoons of pig excrement from factory-raised
pork, etc. Yet the locally grown alternatives, which tend to be more
wholesome and ecologically friendly, have several strikes against them
from the git-go.

A Minnesota organic vegetable farmer, Jack Hedin, brought this to public
attention in a recent oped piece in the New York Times. Hedin described
how big agribusiness companies in California, Florida and Texas are using
federal regulation and subsidy programs to prevent regional farmers from
offering healthier, more ecologically benign local food. The regional farmers
want to produce more organic produce to meet growing consumer demand
for locally grown crops. But the Big Guys are using their political muscle
with the federal government to stifle this budding competition.

As Hedin puts it:

Consumers.will be dismayed to learn that the federal government
works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement
from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department
of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that
House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

The federal commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who
usually grown corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity
crops (soybeans, rice, what and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables.
Because my watermelon and tomates had been planted on "corn base"
acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance
with the commodity program.

Farmers who violate these rules not only lose their subsidy for the year for
the affected acreage, they are penalized the market value of the unapproved
crop - and may be permanently blackballed from future subsidies. What
this means is that the nation's farmers suffer if they innovate by growing
fruits and vegetables for the local market. They are discouraged from
growing local food at the very time when consumers are demanding such
produce, oil is becoming more expensive and the environment would
benefit from greater diversity of crops.

We hear a lot from free-market conservatives about "letting the market
decide and "getting government off our backs." Yet when it comes to
propping up their own market franchise, big agribusiness has no problems
at all with "government paternalism."

This story points up the need for local and regional farmers to get more
political, and to make common cause with consumers, environmentalists
and other commoners. Farmers' markets, the Slow Food movement and
the local food movement are surging these days, but they are not going
to become a bigger presence in our lives unless they can express their
interests on a bigger playing field, national politics.

http://onthecommons.org/node/1250

'My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By JACK HEDIN
Published: March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/op...in&oref=slogin

> In Europe too, major corporations dominate the food market, Asda is
> part of Walmart, Tesco is getting more and more international


'As the food system has been restructured by corporate capital, a
relatively small number of agrochemical corporations have grown
in stature by providing the agricultural inputs upon which industrial
agriculture depends. At the same time, the deregulation and
globalisation of trade has led to the global production (and
increasingly global consumption) of standardised processed foods
and meat products. This has given a small number of very powerful
food corporations (grain traders, food processors and supermarkets)
the ability to scour the world, taking advantage of differences in
safety and environmental regulation, labour costs etc, in their search
for cheap food. As a result, the power and the profits in the global
food system have shifted away from farmers to the agribusiness
corporations that produce and sell inputs to farmers and the food
corporations that process, package, and market food to consumers.

The industrial model of agriculture is now a global phenomenon, but
with varying degrees of penetration. In developing countries low input
farming methods still survive and the knowledge, skills and value to
society of these traditional farming methods are gaining wider
recognition and support.[7] In industrialised countries, a small but
increasing number of conventional farmers, and new entrants to
farming in particular, are producing food using alternative farming
systems, which aim to be not only economically, but also socially
and environmentally sustainable (see box 'Sustainable Agriculture' on
page 39).
...'
http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2631