The thesis of our upcoming book is simple; there are forces at work in the global economy making both the people and the planet sick. The forces consist of 1) capitalist agribusiness, including commodity trading, factory farming and monocrop agricultural corporations such as Cargill, Bunge, and Syngenta, 2) a second group of forces, equally powerful, consisting of capitalist agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer which, together with the first group, include some of the world's largest multinational corporations, and 3) yet a third group of forces comprising the corporate-friendly governments of the US, Europe and elsewhere responsible for the global system of trade policies, tariffs and subsidies which underpin the global capitalist agribusiness and agrichemical corporations.
Sick Planet
Globally, these corporations are specialised in agribusinesses such as wheat, rice, and soya, with supporting agrichemical industries and corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer producing and marketing chemicals such as organophosphates, sodium fluoride and nerve gas, agribusiness corporations with operations covering huge land areas and producing nothing but single crops - monocrops. These corporations make the land sick, continually razing native flora and fauna, continually losing topsoil via erosion, continually polluting rivers, streams and estuaries with chemical run-off, repeatedly keeping the land bare by annual dosing with millions of tonnes of agrichemicals, hormone disrupting, xenoestrogen-based agrichemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, subsequently fertilising with energy intensive, nitrogen-based chemicals because nothing will grow in the lifeless, bare soil they've created.
Sick People
And the substances grown by these corporations are making the people sick. The sugars and phytochemicals found in the main carbohydrate products of capitalist agribusiness and agrichemicals are implicated in a wide range of non-infectious diseases, major killers such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. For example, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a large component chemical (50%) of common table sugar and a central ingredient in many soft drinks is now widely implicated in the current obesity epidemic. Unfortunately, it is still not widely known that soya contains phytoestrogens, chemicals responsible for significant numbers of infant deaths from soya infant formula, early onset puberty in girls, sometimes with five-year old youngsters growing breasts, and gender bending genital malformations in young boys. Yet soya is still marketed as a wonder health food. While these substances are often referred to as ‘food’, they are in fact quite unnatural for humans whose physiology evolved over millions of years in a completely different direction.
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