Introducing Big Food: giant corporations that steal land from the world’s poor to profit from current massive corrupt farming subsidies and future global drought. Let’s pretend we (you and I) are multi-national global investors whose number one goal is to maximize profits by any means necessary. We’ve long ago cornered energy as Big Oil, and despite soaring fracking cancer rates, massive fish and wildlife extinction, polluted air, water and soil, and climate change damage, oil’s been the most profitable business in human history.
We monopolized pharmaceuticals, insurance, and hospitals, profiting from illness by denying claims, while over-medicating and over-charging the sick.
Our Wall Street roller coaster profits from the boom/bust cycles we control, allowing us to grab pensions and bailouts galore. Our prison industry rakes in millions thanks to the largest prison population on the planet, due to the legal system we’ve bought, from lawmaker, to enforcement, to courtroom. But we still hunger for more profits, more slop in the trough of human misery. So we use our unlimited resources to fund private studies that search for the next coming crisis we can milk. While water is becoming scarce, we can only squeeze so much from the diminishing water table, and desalination plants will soon sap those returns. But our boys in the lab have a new idea.
New long-term forecasts have predicted a perfect storm of profit: as global droughts kill farmlands, climate changes wreck crops, and mass immigration increases demand, food will become short in supply. We’re already straining to keep up with current demand, so we surveyed all areas with zero oil potential (but fresh water supply). Then we isolated those that are extremely poor or vulnerable. We will pay off corrupt governments to steal this land, kicking entire villages and communities off the land they’ve farmed for centuries. If that can’t be done, we’ll give them pennies for land they can’t afford to irrigate (due to the droughts we’ve caused). Next, we have our political puppets set up farming subsidies based on volume, allowing us to push the small local farmers out of business as we buy their land, too. Once we have total control, we can raise prices like we do on oil, while we wait for the future global food shortages that will make most populations our virtual slaves.
Think this sounds far-fetched? Like another “future apocalypse” fairy tale? It’s happening now. In Romania. In Vietnam. In Hungary and dozens of other countries. Entire villages have been made homeless, their homes burnt to make room for sugar plantations, palm oil, and biofuels, along with a bit of corn to feed our slave customers.
China is grabbing large tracts in Africa. Austrian corporations have invaded Romania, American food distributers have been manipulating and dictating produce markets in South America for over 100 years. For now, the press could just label this as standard corrupt business practices as usual, except for the burning of locals’ homes. But once real shortages happen, governments will scramble to find food suppliers for their citizens and we will hold all the marbles.
Well, you say, that sounds faraway, we don’t have that here in America. Perhaps not as violently, but Tyson and other companies have been reaping government subsidies (your tax dollars) by squeezing out small American farmers, resulting in record farm foreclosures all over the midwest.
Tyson, the largest U.S. poultry producer, uses “contract farming” to treat local chicken farmers like indentured servants. Rather than risking more acquisitions of poultry farms, Tyson brings the chicks and feed to local farmers, and writes the rules for how they can raise the product, leaving the farmer to take the blame for any recalls. Tyson uses the Walmart model, forging deals that ensure they are the only buyer in a region, then forcing farmers to meet increasingly lower price points or go under. This results in harmful additives to chicken feed, sick poultry going to market, and over- crowded coops spreading disease. Due to Tyson’s contracts, farmers must have chicken houses that cost $300,000, with no guarantee on continued sales after the current season. The average poultry farmer in this situation has $500,000 in business debt. And makes about $18,000 a year.
Meanwhile, the FDA is either unable or unwillingly to properly regulate this massive food machine, resulting in 3,000 deaths from food poisoning every year.
But back to our profit plan: as corporate conglomerate overlords, we’re destroying the planet, poisoning the people, and laughing all the way to the bank, because 99 percent of the public are too busy or too apathetic to even understand, let alone stand up to this. And don’t worry about us finding more profits down the road. Our scientists say in 3-5 decades, most major metros will likely be paying $75 per liter for clean air….and by then, we will own most of the only land left on the planet that can produce oxygen. Hope that literally takes your breath away.
Z
