The choice confronting the Biden administration is whether to expand an immigration program prioritizing grower profits over workers’ and immigrants’ rights, or to reinforce an immigration system based on family reunification and community stability.
Under the current system, “the lungs of the Earth are being plowed up and bulldozed to plant more corn and soybeans so that more animals can be raised in confinement.” "Farmers need to follow the lead of India’s farmers and make our voices heard.”
In Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA’s results are devastating for small-scale farmers.
Agriculture policy in the original New Deal sprang from a...mix of class struggle and uneasy alliances. The Green New Deal will have...a different coalition...(to) challenge the dominant mode of agriculture and create a more just food system.
The suicide rate for US farmers is more than double that of military veterans, and according to a recent 17 state study, the suicide rate for people working in agriculture is nearly five times higher that in the general population. And that might be an underestimation. Since 2013, net farm income for US farmers has declined 50% and the 2017 median farm income is projected to be negative $1,325. Former farmer Debbie Weingarten gives an insider’s perspective on farm life.
If the analysis is correct, then it represents several kinds of potential trouble. First, it reinforces the argument for animal-to-human transmission of resistant bacteria. Second, it emphasizes that such bacteria can be picked up and transmitted even by animals that are not routinely receiving antibiotics . . . And third, it raises the question of how much more resistant bacterial traffic is out there that we are not detecting.
Food for Peace ends up looking a lot more like Food for Profit. The letter ends with one final truth, declaring that food aid programs are "some of our most effective, lowest-cost national security tools." By handicapping local food markets across the world, food aid keeps poor countries poor and compliant, and provides US-based companies with dependable markets for the dumping of surplus food commodities.
One of the great "What if?" questions of the 20th century is how America would have been different if Henry Wallace rather than Harry Truman had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Filmmaker Oliver Stone has revived this debate in his current ten-part Showtime series, "The Untold History of the United States," and his new book (written with historian Peter Kuznick) of the same name.
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