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Food as Corporate WMD
November 27, 2003
Celebrating Thanksgiving 2003
By AL KREBS, The Agribusiness Examiner

Food, next to life itself, has become our greatest common denominator. Its
availability, quality, price, its reflection of the culture it feeds and its
moral and religious significance make it quite literally history's "staff of
life."
http://www.counterpunch.org/krebs11272003.html

Today, in the never-ending worldwide struggle to determine who will control
its production, quality and accessibility, food is no longer viewed first
and foremost as a sustainer of life. Rather, to those who seek to command
and control our food supply it has become instead a major source of
corporate cash flow, economic leverage, a form of currency, a tool of
international politics, an instrument of power --- a weapon!

As we in the United States prepare to celebrate yet another Thanksgiving
holiday the vast majority of our citizens are unaware that the claim that
they are the cheapest and safest fed people on earth is beginning to ring
hallow even as our government and corporate agribusiness seek to perpetuate
such myths.

As one reads the stories below it is clear that farmers as well as consumers
are paying a higher and higher exacting quantitative and qualitative
price --- although frequently hidden behind the veil of corporate
advertising and government reassurances --- for their food.

Corporate agribusiness's growth throughout the 20th century has been
predicated in large measure on political and economic power, power, as
Cornel West reminds us, measured by corporate priorities, where corporate
and banking elite's not simply having a disproportionate lot of power and
influence that is rarely part of public debate but where it can be
questioned and interrogate it in a concrete way.

For the most part farmers --- due to a desire to align themselves with the
managerial class, historical allegiances to a conservative political
tradition, and a need to survive --- have acquiesced to such political and
economic power. Consumers, meanwhile, accustomed to having ample supplies of
food, have remained generally impervious to such power as they deify farming
and the rural life while at the same time often denigrating the farmer.

Acknowledging that such political power stems from money and\or people while
at the same time recognizing that the production and manufacturing of our
food becomes more and more dominated by concentrated economic power, it is
incumbent on consumers, being in the majority, to recognize and exercise
their political power in behalf of family farm agriculture, and a
sustainable, healthy, and affordable food supply.

Thus, today eating has become a political act.

IF we are truly interested in maintaining the integrity of our food, let
alone the system that produces, processes and manufactures it, we need to
keep in our minds the key word --- as Slow Food, USA director Patrick
Martins rightfully points out in his New York Times op-ed piece ---
"traceability." In other words family farmers need to know what happens to
their raw materials after they leave the farm gate and consumers need to
understand what happens to it BOTH before and after it leaves the farm gate.

As Vicki Williams, a King Features columnist, wrote several years ago in USA
Today: ""The only time I felt truly comfortable about the food I put on my
table was when I lived on the farm and grew most of my own . . . Now, I live
in an apartment in the city, and am dependent on nameless, faceless
strangers to grow, process and ship my food. It seems as if unethical and
unsafe practices grow in direct proportion to how far we have lost the trail
of accountability. So I don't always trust them to put my family's best
interest over concern for their bottom line. I don't like feeling helpless,
as if every trip to the grocery is a crap shoot. But I really don't know who
to blame."

Not only should we be concerned about the safety and quality of the food we
eat and the economic and social well-being of the family farmers who grow
and produce our food, but attention must also be paid to those men, women
and children --- domestic and immigrants workers alike --- who labor in our
fields and orchards.

It was on Thanksgiving Day, 1960 that famed CBS News journalist Edward R.
Murrow stood in an open Florida field and opened his now famous television
documentary "Harvest of Shame" by announcing "This is CBS Reports, `Harvest
of Shame,' it has to do with the men, women and children who harvest the
crops in this country of ours, the best fed nation on earth, these are the
forgotten people, the under protected, the under educated, the under
clothed, the under fed.

"We present this report on Thanksgiving because if it were not for the labor
of the people you are going to meet, you might not starve, but your table
would not be laden with the luxuries that we have all come to regard as
essentials. We should like you to me some of your fellow citizens who
harvest the food for the best fed nation on earth . . . "

Unfortunately, the impact of "Harvest of Shame" was short lived on the
public as have been numerous other documentaries since on the plight of farm
workers. But the fact remains they still are the "forgotten people,"
particularly when we sit down for our annual holiday feasts.

So it might serve us well --- both spiritually and materially --- that when
we sit down to this year's cornucopia that in giving thanks for our
blessings we resolve in the months ahead to not only exercise some
"traceability," but concern for the labor that bestowed upon us these gifts
of the earth.

As the Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day reminded us frequently in her long and
remarkable life devoted to social and economic justice: "One day at our
Catholic Worker farm, John Filliger, talking of drying up a cow a few months
before she was about to calve, said, `the only way to do it with a good cow
like this is to milk her out on the ground. She gets so mad at the waste of
her milk that she dries right up.' That may be an old wives' tale --- or an
old farmers' tale, in this case --- but there is a lesson in it: if we waste
what we have, the sources of supply will dry up. Any long range view of the
colossal waste of the resources of the earth and human life points to an
exhaustion of our economy, not to speak of man himself."

Bon appetit!!!

Al Krebs is the editor of the indispensable Agribusiness Examiner. He can be
reached at: avkrebs@earthlink.net