Guest Post by
For
the better part of the past century Western pop culture has
systematically denigrated and devalued what should be the most honored
profession of all. Those who labor with the land, day-in and day-out, to
deliver the food that we eat have assumed a social status too often
similar to the dirt of the soil they till. No one stops to ask a simple
question: What do we do when we have killed off all our farmers?
Some of the more naïve city-dwellers
would retort with little reflection, “But we have industrialized food
production; we don’t need manual farm labor today.”
Indeed, the numbers are impressive.
Let’s take my homeland, the United
States of America. In 1950, a time of general prosperity and strong
economic growth, the total US population was 151,132,000 and the farm
population was 25,058,000 making farmers just over 12% of the total
labor force. There were 5,388,000 farms with an average size of about 87
hectares. Forty years later, in 1990, the year the Soviet Union
collapsed and the Cold War ended, the USA had a total population of
261,423,000 of which the farm population numbered just under three
million, 2,987,552, making farmers a mere 2.6% of the total labor force.
The number of farms had shrunk to only 2,143,150, a loss of 60%, but
because of industrial concentration, average size was 187 hectares.
Rockefeller’s Agribusiness Revolution
What we are told, those of us whose
relation to meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables ends at the supermarket,
is that this is a great progress, the liberation of almost 23 million
farm workers to get city jobs and live a better life.
It isn’t that simple.
We are not told the true effects on food
quality that has been created by the mechanization and
industrialization of food production in America since the Harvard
Business School, on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, began what
they termed “agribusiness,” the conversion of our food supply into a
pure for-profit vertically integrated business modelled on the
Rockefeller oil cartel.
The raising of hogs, dairy cows, beef
cattle, chicken all became industrialized gradually after the 1950’s in
the USA. The baby chicks were confined to spaces so tiny they could
barely stand. To make them get fat faster, the owners would pump them
full of antibiotics and feed them a diet of GMO corn and soya meal.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 80 percent of all
antibiotics sold in the United States are for use on livestock and
poultry, not humans. The majority are given to animals mixed in their
food or water to speed growth. After all, time is money.
The traditional family farmer, of the
sort my late grandfather was in North Dakota prior to the First World
War, was driven largely from the land by USDA Government policy, policy
that favored industrialization regardless of the quality of food
nutrient that resulted. Tractors became computerized, mammoth machines
driven by GPS. One such tractor could work remotely and do the work of
many farmers of old.
The result was financially fabulous….for
the industry owners—ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, for the packagers like
Kraft Foods, Kelloggs, Nestle, Unilever, Toepfer, Maggi. The American
Rockefeller-Harvard “agribusiness” business model was globalized,
beginning with the GATT negotiations of the Uruguay Round of trade
liberalization in the late 1980s where the EU dropped much of its
traditional protection of domestic farmers in favor of free trade in
agriculture products.
During the late 1980’s as the Uruguay
Round of GATT trade negotiations was about to give US agribusiness
giants what they wanted—freedom to rape the EU and other protected
agriculture markets with their highly efficient products, to destroy
millions of EU farmers who had farmed with a passion for generations, I
went to Brussels to make a background interview as a journalist with a
high-level EU Commission bureaucrat responsible for agriculture. He was
an apparently well-educated, multi-lingual bureaucrat, Danish-born as he
noted. He argued in defense of free trade by declaring, “Why should I
pay taxes from Denmark so that Bavarian farmers on their tiny plots of
land can remain in business?”
The answer, which I kept to myself then,
was simply because the traditional family farmer is uniquely suited to
mediate with nature and us to produce food that is healthy for humans
and animals to eat. No machine can replace the personal dedication or
passion that I have seen again and again in every farmer I have met who
truly cares about his livestock or crops.
Now the very same very rich and very
loveless people, I call them the American Oligarchs, are systematically
doing everything to destroy the human food quality. Clearly in my view,
they are doing so with a goal of mass population reduction. There is no
other reason the Rockefeller Foundation would spend hundreds of millions
of (tax exempt) dollars to create GMO techniques, to support Monsanto
and other chemical giants like DuPont, clearly knowing they are slowly
poisoning the population to an early death.
Depressing pesticides
This has been demonstrated in
independent tests regarding the toxic effects on animals and even human
cells in an embryo. Now, independent even of GMO crops, new tests show
that ordinary pesticide chemicals sprayed by farm workers or farmers on
crops cause neurological damage—depression, Parkinsons’ and even
suicide—to the farmers or farm workers using the deadly chemicals.
The US National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences in their landmark Agricultural Health
Study studied a group of 89,000 farmers and other pesticide applicators
in Iowa and North Carolina. The mammoth study concluded that, “use of
two pesticide classes, fumigants and organochlorine insecticides, and
seven individual pesticides—the fumigants aluminum phosphide and
ethylene dibromide; the phenoxy herbicide (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxy)acetic
acid (2,4,5-T); the organochlorine insecticide dieldrin; and the
organophosphate insecticides diazinon, malathion, and parathion—were all
positively associated with depression in each case group.”
The study showed that farmers with the
highest number of lifetime exposure days to pesticides were 50 percent
more likely to later have a depression diagnosis.
The research linked long-term use of
pesticides to higher rates of depression and suicide. Evidence also
suggests that pesticide poisoning – a heavy dose in a short amount of
time – doubles the risk of depression.
After suppressing the effects among farm
families for years about the resulting depression and related
neurological symptoms, farmers and their families have begun speaking
out. Lorann Stallones, an epidemiologist and psychology professor at
Colorado State University says, “There’s been a shift – partly because
there’s more people talking about being mentally incapacitated.”
Epidemiologist Freya Kamel and her
colleagues reported that among 19,000 studied, “those who used two
classes of pesticides and seven individual pesticides were more likely
to have been diagnosed with depression. Those who used organochlorine
insecticides were up to 90 percent more likely to have been diagnosed
with depression than those who hadn’t used them. For fumigants, the
increased risk was up to 80 percent.”
In France, farmers who used herbicides
were nearly twice as likely to have been treated for depression as those
who didn’t use herbicides, according to a study published in 2013. The
study of 567 French farmers found that the risk was even greater when
the herbicide applicators had been doing it for more than 19 years.
In short, we are destroying the
nutritional value of the food we eat and slowly destroying the remaining
farmers responsible for cultivating that. It is a recipe for the
ultimate extinction of life on the planet as we know it. No, that is not
an exaggeration.
I firmly believe that honest,
nature-conscious organic farmers ought to receive significant tax breaks
to encourage other farmers to leave the grotesque agribusiness model
behind and return to growing or raising honest food again as they did
only a few short decades ago. And severely high taxation ought to be
imposed on farmers who use proven toxic chemicals like Roundup by
Monsanto or the neonicotinoids like Bayer AG’s Confidor, Gaucho or
Advocate, or Poncho, or Syngenta’s Actara, Platinum or Cruiser to name
just the most sold.
Right now our regulators in the EU and
USA do everything to discourage that, something actually quite stupid,
unless, of course, some loveless, power-addicted oligarchs sitting atop
their mountain, looking contemptuously down on us normal folk, have
decided that’s just what they desire. If so, it’s up to us to stop
looking up to those on the mountain and look at what we ourselves have
accepted as normal, that is slowly killing us and the farmers who feed
us. Maybe the time has come to change that unhealthy situation.
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics
from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
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