From Copenhagen to India, Restoring the Link Between Farmer and Consumer and Challenging the Corporate Hijack of Global Food and Agriculture
RINF.com
Jan 15, 2016
“Food systems have been reduced to a model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers. It is a model designed to generate profits… Instead of being dedicated to the production of food … it focuses increasingly on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds or commodity plantations… it has caused the enormous loss of agricultural holdings and the people who make their living from those holdings… it promotes a diet which is harmful to health and which contains insufficient fruit, vegetables and cereals.”
The above quote comes from the final declaration of the Nyeleni Europe food sovereignty forum in 2011. Nyeleni Europe represents community-supported agriculture collectives, organic farmer unions, local food cooperatives, seed swapping organisations, food activists, farmers’ markets and community gardens. The organisation forms part of the global resistance to the corporate hijack of food and agriculture that has resulted in bad food, poor health, environmental degradation and the marginalisation and displacement of small farmers along with the destruction of local (and global) food sovereignty and security.
The global agritech/agribusiness sector is poisoning people and the environment with its pesticides, herbicides, GMOs and various other chemical inputs. The Rockefeller clan exported the petrochemical intensive ‘green revolution’ around the world with the aim of ripping up indigenous agriculture to cement its hegemony over global agriculture and to help the US create food deficit regions and thus use agriculture as a tool of foreign policy.
Last year, 31 pesticides with a value running into billions of pounds could have been banned in the EU because of potential health risks if a blocked EU paper on hormone-mimicking chemicals had been acted upon. The global agrichemicals lobby is responsible for preventing public protection from chronic diseases and environmental damage. Certain industries are raking in massive profits to the detriment of the public’s health and the environment.
Also last year, a study by the University of Koblenz-Landau explained that no field data-based evaluation of the regulatory acceptable concentrations (RACs) and therefore of the overall protectiveness of EU pesticide regulations exists. The researchers found that 44.7 percent of the 1,566 cases of measured insecticide concentrations in EU surface waters exceeded their respective RACs. The findings challenged the efficacy of the regulatory environmental risk assessment conducted for pesticide authorisation and concluded that effective mitigation measures are urgently needed to reduce the risks arising from agricultural insecticide use.
The Rest…HERE
