Sickening Profits — The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth
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, 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. For them, it’s a win-win situation.
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), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research (it can be read directly on the Global Research website or downloaded as a pdf) and 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 in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:
This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.”
‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?
The Centre for Research on Globalization (Global Research) is “an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists” and believes in “open access to truthful information and nuanced reporting”. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge.
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No one forces any of us to buy sodas and junk food.
cooking from scrap is possible and tasty and also much and much cheaper. I have done it for years on a very small budget.
So stop moaning about things wgere upon you still can have influence !!!
Have you looked at the package ingredients?
Everything is tainted.
cooking from scap means buying real vegetables . Meat, egg or fish. Things that are ” in season. So no grapes or strawberries in december. Will taste bad. But apples, pears and oranges.. You have to go with seasonal products if you want wholesome and cheap food. (Sure you gran could help) Never drink soda or fruit juices. Junk full sugar and chemicals. Buy bread at a bakery and preferably meat at a good butcher. Beter eat less than supermarket junk. Dry products such as pasta, lentils, rice etc. are all right and quite cheap and if you make a salad next to it, you have a tasty meal Cooking from scrap is not that difficult. You just have to start and try. Sometime it goes wrong. So what ? you have learned something. But watch out for insect flour incorporated in pizza, cookies etc. The EU agreed to it… Read more »
Thanks, but I already know all what you wrote. Big ++ for writing it though and informing others.
My point is this. The butcher sells hormone injected meat, even grass fed animals can’t escape because they eat from land that has also suffered some type of industrial poisioning.
I use Tipo 00 flour for Pizza but even that has been sprayed with PLC chemicals somewhere along the line.
yes you are right. But i am old now as i was born after WO II.
Food on ticket and full of DDT. ( DDT being a very poisonous insect killer = thanks to US chemical industry poisoning the world. Money must be made…. Ever tried to eat gold ??).
But even poisoned veg and meat are better than industrial food.
You can “clean” your body with ” zeoliet” to buy in “reform house” or order at amazon
E120 and E904 are insects ( grinded into flour) mixed with the food product.
Can be supermarket bread, pizza, pasta, ready made sauces etc.
So watch it
Just for info, that Simplicious entity has a good article posted on Hogmanay or thereabouts. “bones of tomorrow”. Was reminiscent of a few articles/tone around here lately. Worth a gauk. Otherwise, happy new one travellers x : ) we will get there. OT, yes. On T… Regarding Colin foxkiller & Briannazarene below: every informed being knows smallholding, is optimum food production, using mixed land-use mosaics. Play to your site’s strengths, don’t work it to death and keep it clean and biodiverse. . Yet all we get are more and more and more restrictions on land buying or development; unless it is BoN’s glamper-lifestyley-grant farmer guff., even in the country – that “greenbelt” shite, but if you happen to be Iberdrolla, or whatever they’re called these days. Similarly, most useless consumers couldn’t feed themselves unless it involved theft or violence, maybe even canibalism. Yes. So smallholding is very out of the… Read more »
You can buy specialist growlights allowing 24hr a day growth even in the winter months – it’s what champion show growers do for starting off their onions/leeks in late November – they keep using lights 24hrs a day until mid Feb, then 12 hrs a day until late March. By then, the sun is strong enough.
If you can generate your own energy so that it’s free, it’s workable. But it’s a quite costly way of ensuring earlier food in the spring….
Thank you Rhys.
Aye I imagine those LEDs take a toll ; )
The Big Agi-Business paradigm is but one more tentacle of the Kakistocracy (Kak); and, thus, more to do with the latter’s ultimate agenda (i.e., posthumanism) than with anything ascribed to it above (viz. article is pointing to the more ancillary after-effects of said phenomenon). It is only when the masses truly comprehend how most – if not all – of our modern-day Western societies have been transmogrified by the kak, for this agenda of post-humanism to manifest itself in today’s world, that enlightenment of what really ails our societies will be fully comprehended. That is all! RGB-Y3 out!!
My organic fruit wasn’t delivered last week due to the unholy-days. I bought some grapes from Tesco and I could not eat five before throwing them. Absolutely disgusting and tasted of chemicals. They were not grapes.
After all that we know, and that’s been said about food from PLC stores. Why the fuck are you still shopping there?
Thank you Colin
I don’t believe capitalism itself is the root cause of the unhealthy foods. (Were we to live in a true communist state, the veil of ignorance re healthy vs junk would not be any less opaque.) Excessive greed in any market system, whether free-market or otherwise, will inflict injuries, but I believe it’s just one component to a very complex equation. For example, the symbiotic relationship between Big Food and Big Pharma, where the one “feeds” the other, is certainly part of the problem. Lack of education is another, with one 30-minute class on nutrition all that’s required for a medical degree.
Spot on. And even the nutritionists have BigToxicFood sponsoring their ‘education.’
https://healthimpactnews.com/2013/are-americas-nutrition-professionals-in-the-pocket-of-big-food/
Of course Capitalism is the root cause, and not just of this one problem. See
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/its-been-twenty-years
Privatization of everything has been the elite’s goal since the Thatcher-Reagan de-evolutionary me-me-me mantra grabbed a hold on the unconscious greed of commoners thinking… me too!
Long media-cultivated colonial settler greed + selling us their FAKE technological conveniences is supposed to lobotomize us away from demanding self-governing ourselves. We have the right thru democratic consensus, to regulate the accumulation of discretionary wealth used to abduct “political power”, the authority to decide policy, and re-design a civilization that values the social needs of Humanity, not the income desires the 1%.
I thought globalist communism was the elite’s goal . . . I get mixed messages on this website.
In the UK, agricultural land has almost never been Government owned, if ever. There are pockets of land owned by government, often for research purposes, but the vast majority of farms, large and small, are- and have been owned by private entities, be they families, family trusts.
What’s new is venture capitalists and avaricious financial district spivs muscling in on land, food etc.
This isn’t privatisation, its corporatisation.
Whatever one calls it, it’s a shift ownership away from individuals or publicly owned, like post offices, parks or beaches, etc., to large scale financialized entities including rich individuals. Privatization moves ownership from the Public, society as a whole, to profiteering entities. There needs to be limits to private ownership of land for the purpose of making a profit.
I can hardly believe you have cut my first report of this historic letter from American military officers to the American people. Here it is again:
https://www.docdroid.com/zwy8Bmx/declaration-of-military-accountability-pdf
Please read “An Open Letter to the American People from Signatories of this Declaration of Military Accountability” It begins “In the course of human history it sometimes becomes necessary to admonish the lawless. . . .”
It’s reproduced here and calls for the court-martial of the military leadership. So far it’s focussed on harms to military personnel, but it’s a beginning.
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/200-servicemembers-demand-military
Loved by the people of Burkina Faso, President Sankara in the early 1980’s freed the nation from the tentacles and claws of foreign Corporations. ‘We must produce what we eat’ he declared. he implemented radical policies to stem the tide of being enslaved by foreign entities.
Outcome:
the French army was involved in organising and carrying out the assassination of President Sankara in October 1987.
this story should never leave the front page of our consciousness, as the powers that assassinated him continue their dirty deeds in all corners of the planet with immunity. these same forces (and it seems for the same reasons) assassinated Libya’s Qaddafi.
Despite all those satellites, drones, radar, etc., Boko Haram, M21, etc. continue to (a) get finance (b) appear and disappear at will. Also, the largest contingents of neo-colonialist “special forces” continue to work covertly in Africa.
Outrage and calls for justice as zoo keeper detained for inappropriate behaviour with gorilla.
http://opr.news/2717ddbc240101en_gb?link=1&client=opera
Heeheeheeheehee…looks like he’s keeping it in the family! 😱
Can’t look at article unless I get their app. Forget it.
the West is ruled by FRAUD.
There’s a lot of talk in alternative farming circles about how to go forward. Organic, Permaculture, Regenerative, Holistic, Biodynamic…These all contain some good practices but what is holding it all back (certainly in the UK) are land ownership issues. I consider myself to be a modern peasant. I am a tenant farmer, own no land and have no capital to buy any. Myself and many others want to convert more land to organic production as this is clearly the only viable future for agriculture. However, land is insanely expensive and becoming more so. Instead, I see investment “farmers”, lifestyle seekers , solar “farming”, horseyculture, “glamping”, grant “farmers” and a whole range of other activities that are not directed towards edible products.Industrial / chemical farming has been a disaster for the ecosystem and human health yet it’s corporate backers are tightening their grip on our food systems. “Regenerative” farming is a… Read more »
excellent remark.
I saw a documentary on a couple – ex-veterinarians – attempting such farming on their remote plot in Wales. There were all sorts of regulations to comply with. They managed to get the requisite approval after 2 or 3 years.
We will simply have to find a way. You could start by buying from your local ethical growers. Or if you want to grow yourself, see if you can rent a bit of land, or just be crafty about it.
Crafty is the way. Molehills are a good start ; )
Brian – if you want to do ‘organic farming’, using whatever title you deem most appropriate (I’ve used bits of ‘organic’, permaculture, biodynamic and regenerative in my allotment growing), then you have to start by finding target customer groups who will pay you a fair return for your produce. You can’t expect that to be the poorest in society initially. In every business cycle, early adoption comes from those that can afford it. To get Governments to spend money, you need serious data proving that the people who eat your products need less money spent on them in the NHS, via social care etc etc. In other words, the government are investing in you to save money elsewhere. To generate that data isn’t easy and is very amenable to ‘fiddling the figures’ as to create rigorous trials over several years is very, very hard. The way to do that would… Read more »
“We have a food industry that cares little for health, and a medical industry that cares little for nutrition”
To grow it will cost a heck of a lot more than it did say 20 years ago because of the relentless chemtrailing.
W/o truth in design and/or truth in advertising laws, one can complain all they want, while there is nothing another can do about it.
The imperative for profitability has invaded food productivity: no shit Sherlock! One earth market-totalisation turned everything into a commodity some time in the eighteenth century (if not before). Its expansion is an inherently psychiatric “pleonexia” (pathological obsession with material possession.) So get rid of the profiteering ‘agribusiness conglomerates’ and problem solved? Agribusiness accounts for but 1% of globalisation GDP – production for consumption for “Human-Being Incorporated” – and the rest accounts for everything else we do as anthropogenesis on a daily basis – for productivity and profitability – which by its owned necessity cannot ever lead to self-sufficiency or sustainability; not whilst we throw so much away – from landgrab to landfill – as an entropic gradient of cumulative ecotoxicity polluting the earth. It is an economic anthropology we inherited. Entropic-excess and pollutant-profiteering by the whole species results in “export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity” – now with added… Read more »
Mate, the reality is that some crops are more ‘profitable’ than others, but the other reality is that if humans only eat ‘profitable crops’, they have an unhealthy diet lacking in essentials. Brussels Sprouts yield far, far less than lettuce leaves. Parsnips return far less to farmers than beetroots.
Food isn’t amenable to pure capitalism because consumers don’t have a reasonable choice of ‘not participating in the market’. Everyone has to eat and so a cartel of food producers could hold the world to ransom without regulation.
As long as the ownership structure of food suppliers is highly dilute, perfect macroeconomic market conditions will prevail.
If you get four big food producers akin to ‘big supermarkets’ producing everything, you will very soon have food riots.
“As soon a we stop living off the Rest, the Rest can begin to recover. The Great Simplification is so simple to understand,”
“The Rest” (of the World) have already begun to recover: Niger, Somalia, South Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Russia, Cuba and China. That is why Mao said: “Justice comes from the barrel of a gun”. These countries have already begun to reclaim their rights.
The “collective West” is increasingly afraid to fight its former victims man to man, and now resorts to cowardly financial blackmail (“sanctions”), mercenary armies (ISIS, Azov) or bombing defenseless civilians from on high (Gaza).
It’s these same corporations who are partners of the WEF. https://www.weforum.org/partners/#search
How can anyone take them seriously. It’s like Jimmy Savile being a partner of an institute to save kids from abuse and exploitation.
This list is very troubling. Thanks for posting.
“This [profits driven] 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.” Spot on, as usual with Colin Todhunter. And he goes on to add that if their Con food makes you ill the Capitalists are ready to sell you Con medicines that will make you even more ill. In fact, they hope it will make you die, like their ultra-expensive Con-vaxx with its U$ patent Spike Protein. Outside of Todhunter’s range, there are reports that Profit-driven Housing makes people homeless. New housing is deliberately built too expensive to sell to average people, and some affordable housing is kept off the market… Read more »
‘Affordable housing’ was always built traditionally by local councils, who could raise long-term finance at cheaper rates than private corporations. The quickest way to up the amounts of affordable housing is to found political parties whose first and top priority is raising finance to build public sector rental homes for those on average wages. It’s also appropriate to ban the sale of homes to those who don’t ensure that they are occupied 80%+ of the year. Building homes as tax avoidance strategies for rich foreigners does not add value to domestic society, does it? So council planning departments should require builders to lodge a large guarantee in an escrow account to stop them selling houses to be left empty. Of course, builders install corrupt councillors to do their bidding. Nothing new there, brown envelopes have been around for generations. But if you create a large public sector housing stock, the… Read more »
Can it be stopped? Or “they” for that matter. That’s the question we all should be asking about everything at this point. I say no, not without a revolution. There are a number of variations on the definition, but I prefer, “a fundamental change in political organization especially : the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed.” Most people when they think of revolution, they think of violence or war, but I also prefer to stick with the basic premise, which doesn’t appear to REQUIRE us to grab our pitchforks and shotguns and go after the MoFo’s, which is impossible because they have all the big guns and an endless supply of the 99% who are more than willing to do the bidding of their 1% masters. But, somehow, we have to find a way to get Power to the People instead of… Read more »
“we have to find a way to get Power to the People”
As Plato said bitterly after seeing the People gathering to vote by Direct Democracy for the execution of Socrates “the wisest and best of men”, the People don’t care who runs the country so long as she has big tits. What we need is a magic lamp that glows green when it shines on a wise and good man, so we can weed out the power hungry dunderheads that infest politics.
The English constitution and bill of rights appear to be quite sufficient; all that’s needed is the will to apply them.
That’s why there is no room in London for street fighting men.
It stops as soon as we are satisfied with life. Or it stops when we have expended all the resources that would supply post-consumer, post-growth living indefinitely. We simply do not need a globalised economy to supply and provision, far more than adequately, for physiologic necessity. We ‘need’ a global economic civilisation to supply imaginary psychiatric demand and desire; much of which we discard with marginal self-gratification or utility. Revolution always failed because ‘we’ are governed by the same pathological pleonexia ‘they’ are. Thereafter: Viva la evolucion!
You need a political party that isn’t bought out by billionaires if you don’t want a violent revolution. It also requires you to identify the enforcers of psychopaths like Gates and Soros, because they have to be neutralised if a genuinely representative political vehicle is to succeed. You need to educate ‘the people’ not to invest their money with ‘the City’, rather to return to the values of building societies (where the more elderly, more cashed up, provided the finance for the younger generation to buy a home); to local/regional banks investing in local/regional small business. As long as people long to be billionaires, the real-world consequences of such a society will remain with us. There’s an enormous difference between working hard to have a comfortable, well-earned active retirement and being prepared to create an underclass of millions just so you can equate the length of your dick with the… Read more »
“By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere”
What an odd selection there! These 3 nations are totally uncomparable. Notice how China is NEVER in the spotlight, similar to the US, Canada, Switzerland or other WEF poles. Creating fear for a food crisis sounds like a Davos – Tianjin created project by the FEW. Covid & CO2 lost traction, now go for food and water. Next: Water crisis in India (only).
The languages spoken in those countries and their national dress are indeed totally dissimilar but as far as the theme of the article in question is concerned, the situation is roughly the same.
It’s a pity you comment before reading (try it some time, ahead of knee jerk commenting) because situations in other countries are also described, including Brazil, Mexico, the UK, the US, Germany etc. It’s the same old whataboutism from you. What about China – it’s getting tedious. Are your feelings hurt because you think each time India is mentioned it is an attack on your leader Modi? These articles are first and foremost about systems.
I’m still waiting for you to answer my questions – Who are you? Who is paying you to defend Western imperialism in India and how much do you receive from your NGO? You asked me similar questions two years ago. You did not like the responses because they failed to confirm your accusations. Time for you to reciprocate. Or maybe not – anonymity is a convenient cloak.
The book “Food, Dispossesion and Dependency” cannot be accessed
https://www.globalresearch.ca/food-dispossession-dependency-resisting-new-world-order/5770468
Looks like high-power, high-efficiency, low power consumption, LED grow lights make greenhouses irrelevant, so any room, anywhere in the world, any season, can be an indoor Victory Garden or Victorian Kitchen Garden, at next to no cost.
Yes, I’m considering the ballroom of my stately home for conversion into a hydroponic grow zone!
Healthy plants needs roots, lots of roots, which require soil, lots of soil. This alone stands in the way of the amount of food that can be grown, plus the sun is free as you have to dip into your wallet for start up costs.
Cannabis is only profitable victory garden for your wants.
Grow and store is the alternative.
Every little bit helps.
By any and every means.
An invisible food supply is a safe supply.
You will see.
Things are about to change.
Have changed, already.
Dramatically.
And, they’re waiting for you to discover and apply them, unconventionally.
Cheers and happy growing, wherever and however you manage to do it.
I do it all the time and quite well, its getting caught up on all the other things that take away the full time effort, for now.
is this true?
It all festered and erupted towards the end of WW 2.
The PTB saw the power and the massive sacrifice of working class people when the Russians destroyed Hitler’s global ambitions.
Communism and brutal Russian patriotism scared the shit out of the US and European oligarchs.
Monopoly Capitalschism was the ruthless response.
Brutal Russian communisn scares the shit out of me too, same with China and Cambodia, and I’m far from being a capitalist. It’s just another bankster monopoly scam. See the research of Anthony Sutton.