by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
The modern food system is heavily influenced by the pursuit of profit, leading to issues such as land loss, food insecurity, illness and environmental degradation. Large investment firms and agribusinesses profit from this system, while lobbying ensures their dominance in policy-making.
The book ‘Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth‘ by Colin Todhunter delves into these issues, offering a comprehensive analysis. Prominent activist Aruna Rodrigues expressed concerns about the impact of these issues on Indian sovereignty and food security. The book highlights similar challenges in different parts of the world and raises the question of whether these trends can be reversed.
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Sickening Profits : The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth – New open-access e-book
By Colin Todhunter as published by Dissident Voice on 16 January 2024
The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of “junk” (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.
It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.
Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.
They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.
This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.
In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-covid world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.
There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.
All of this is set out in ‘Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth’ (December 2023) written by Colin Todhunter and published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research. It is a follow-up to the author’s book ‘Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order’ (2022).
That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues – prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India – stated the following about the book:
