Corporate foodopoly is heading us toward farmageddon

Monday, October 24, 2011 by: PF Louis
Tags: foodopoly, farmageddon, health news

(NaturalNews) The current model of modern day farming was ostensibly created to produce lots of affordable food. It has succeeded in over feeding a population with high calorie low nutrient foods while making a few multinational corporations rich. But millions still go hungry.

Those corporations - whether grain gatherers, producers of processed foods, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or GMO seeds - are constantly merging and cross cooperating to ensure their monopoly on food. We need to escape this farmopoly before it becomes farmageddon.

Large monoculture farming is unsustainable and unhealthy

As far back as 1936, a research paper commissioned by Congress in the USA, Senate Document 264 of the 74th Congress made a startling statement on the quality of food: "... 99 percent of the American people are deficient in ... minerals, and ... a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease."

The report also informed Congress: "It is not commonly realized ... that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and that in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. ... lacking minerals, the vitamins are useless."

This finding was based on farming topsoil mineral depletion. Large monoculture farming had become prominent. In the early 1950s, the great cancer healer Dr. Max Gerson announced that we are being exposed to toxins while eating foods lacking nutrition.

Big Ag was born. Pushing rapidly for more yields - using artificial fertilizers year after year without crop rotation or fallow periods (when soil is plowed but not seeded) to allow topsoil to regenerate minerals - had already created topsoil mineral depletion.

Then after WW II, the 'cides arrived: Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. And these 'cides are used in soil (sprayed on plants then soaked into the soil), seed soaking, and storage preservation. Adding GMOs exacerbates the toxic, non-nutritional commercial food chain to a point of agricultural self destruction, as several GMO farmers are now discovering the hard way.

This is the result of large monoculture factory farming with only a few large corporations in charge of food storage and distribution as well as corporate food processing.

Add large grocery retail chains to this food monopoly. It all stacks up as a huge network of centralized food cartels. Evidently, the food cartels care more about control over the world's food supply and profit than feeding the world and getting rid of hunger.

Many grains are purchased by large food processing corporations that adulterate those grains even more. Cheap food has proven to take a high price in worsening public health. But even cheap food is threatened by potential food shortages due to excess centralization and commodity traders' price manipulation.

Yes, Wall Street has gotten into the commodity trading act with derivative "bets", leading to inflated food commodity price peaks that already have jeopardized millions worldwide.

Escaping the foodopoly matrix

What's needed is gradual food distribution decentralization phased in by organic farming near enough to urban centers to feed most consumers in those local areas. Farmers need to have their rightful dignity restored and to escape their virtual serfdom from the Cargills, Monsantos, Archer Daniels Midlands, and Wall Street banksters.

Then local markets should be promoting and pushing their foods. Okay, this may not be the way to get bananas in Chicago or cherries in the winter. But at the rate the food cartel octopus is destroying the food chain, there may be a point where bananas and cherries are no longer available anywhere anytime.

A 2110 United Nations commissioned committee report, taking four years to produce by hundreds of international experts, concluded that diverse organic farming, not biotech monoculture forced on the world, is the best option for sustainable food production capable of curbing world hunger. It's easy to understand why this report has been kept from public awareness.

Sources for this article include:

UN Report favoring diverse organic farming http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/off...

"Foodies, Get Thee to Occupy Wall Street" http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/10/f...

1936 mineral deficiency report http://www.dailypaul.com/92623/1936-us-senat...

Various mega cartels that are strangling humanity http://www.activistpost.com/2010/10/7-mega-c...

The world's top ten food seed companies http://www.gmwatch.org/gm-firms/10558-the-wo...

Global Food Cartel Fast Becoming World's Supermarket http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/a...