Last night I had the chance to watch The Future of Food, a documentary surveying the genetically modified foods that have entered our grocery store shelves over the past decade. Over the hour-and-a-half film, I gained a lot of insight in to what goes on behind the curtain of the agricultural economy and how the farmers' ideals got mangled in the mess of corporate greed and government regulated development of crops. While this is only my first look into the issue, I feel convinced from the facts presented through evidence. It's hard to say I'm being "one-sided" when you start to see the inner workings of the process.
I'll start with a quote from one of the farmer's interviewed,
"The average citizen doesn't really understand both the momentum and the extent to which consolidation is taking place in our whole food and agriculture system. Just to give you a couple of examples:
- 80% of our beef products now are being processed by just 4 companies
- In seed companies, the vast majority of the seed that farmers plant now comes from just 4 clusters of companies
- What's even more worrisome now is that in the last decade, that same kind of concentration is taking place in the retail sector.
And Heffernan now projects that in the next 10 years, all of the food in the retail level (in the world) will be controlled by 6 retail firms, only 1 of which will be American, and that's Walmart.
These companies are out to seek profit. They don't consider nutritional and economic benefits in the long run. One of the largest producers of genetically modified seed, Monsanto, stands behind their main argument of "feeding the world" -- with a constantly growing population, we need the means to produce food at higher volumes. Makes sense, right? (Check it out,
here.) Keep in mind, these are the same people that have patented a "terminator gene" in seeds that destroys itself so it cannot be harvested again.
Looking into it further, and as expressed by the documentary, the 800 million people who are starving around the world every day used to be farmers who could not afford to plant these subsidized crops. They were kicked off their subsistence farms and forced to migrate. "When we subsidize our crops in the United States, we're undercutting the market in underdeveloped countries."
Organic shopping is on the rise and is a great shopping alternative. By supporting organic food we're starting a cycle that relies less on internationally imported products and the assurance that what we ingest is healthy and not touched by the hands of corporations trying to steal from the cookie jar. We have options as consumers -- I think something we often take for granted. Many are concerned with being able to shop organic. It's a big issue, and one brought up in this
social experiment. I feel if money wasn't the issue, we could all shop organically. That's what concerns the big corporations -- losing money, rather than concentrating their efforts on protecting the well being of future generations.
It's definitely made me think twice about my next trip to the grocery store.
