CLASS 10: FOOD AND HEALTH: LIVING WITHIN OUR BODILY ENVIRONMENT
Agribusiness & Local Food

Purpose: To understand cultural institutions central to the well being of our body and consequences of corporate influence over both our food and health that are part of the Commons.

Materials

Readings: Justice Rising, Winter 2015, Local Rules for Local Food: Communities Hold On To Food, Tradition & Democracy; Winter 2008, Health for Humans - Not Corporate Profits

Handouts: Questions, Article Rankings, Talking Points.

Paradigm: We are our bodies and we are what we eat. Nothing is more personal and deserving of responsible stewardship than our bodies. Yet corporate power dictates the food available to eat and invades how we care for our health.

Context: Life’s magic evokes awe and reverence. Farmers and healers are key factors in maximizing the wellbeing of our lives. Their function to provide nutrition and vitality emerge from our common human need to be fed and cared for. Without fulfillment of those needs, human existence would disappear. Unlike almost any other calling, farming and healing are intrinsic parts of the human experience. The essential nature of both activities makes their allocation a necessary social decision. Much like water or the environment, they are part of our public commons. The money-powered market should not control them. Corporate giants are now demanding that the work of farmers and healers maximize corporate profits rather than our nutrition and vitality.

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Farmers have always fought against the tyranny of money. When the Italian banks of the Renaissance sought to buy out the British wool market, the English landed aristocracy moved to privatize the common farmland in order raise more sheep. The peasantry depended upon the common lands for their survival. The enclosure of the commons awakened peasant farmers as a political force that threatened to lead a complete revolution during the English Civil War in the mid-1600s. The spirit of those farmers carried on into the American Revolution; Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of yeoman farmers providing for the nation’s food and public-policy making.

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With the rise of corporate power in the late 1800s, avaricious bankers and monopolistic railroads pushed those yeoman farmers toward bankruptcy and started taking their land. The Farmers Alliance, which grew out of cooperative organizations like the Grange, responded by bringing farmers together in extensive cooperative ventures to buy their necessities and distribute their products in defiance of corporate America. This led the big banks to reject the farm co-ops’ applications for financing, forcing the co-ops out of business. As the Farmers Alliance co-ops were forced into bankruptcy, pro-corporate public policies paved the way for agribusiness corporations to dominate our food supply. Instead of being concerned about our nutrition, the objective of the food industry is now to maximize the corporate bottom line.

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University of Iowa Agricultural Economics Professor John E. Ikerd outlines this progression after World War II:

• Factories that made tanks started turning out tractors.

• Factories that designed gunpowder started turning out cheap nitrogen fertilizers.

• Technologies developed for chemical warfare were redirected to agriculture pesticides. 

• Agriculture became industrialized, farms became factories.

• Evidence of corporate influence on government farm and food policy became pervasive.

• Agribusiness contributed more than $65 million to political campaigns during the 2008 election cycle.

• The Farm Bureau and ag-commodity associations are among the biggest corporate lobbyists in DC.

• The U.S. government promotes corporate consolidation of the food system.

• Politicians put the economic interests of corporate lobbyists ahead of the public interests.

• Food markets in the US have not been economically competitive for decades.

• 74% of total government agricultural payments go to the largest 10% of recipients.

• Commercial fertilizers and pesticides are a primary source of environmental degradation and toxic food.

• Giant confinement animal feeding factories foul the air and water.

• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) threaten the genetic integrity of the entire natural ecosystem.

• The percentage of food insecure people in American is higher now than in the 1960s.

• Problems of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, and food-related cancers are epidemic.

The list of problems caused by our profit-maximizing corporate food system goes on and on. One of the biggest problems is that corporate farming destroys our topsoil with the use of toxics and salt-laden fertilizers.

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 Now, a broad movement of organic and family farms is pushing back. They build new, rich topsoil. They distribute their produce via entirely new mechanisms, including farmers markets and community-supported agriculture. In Maine, Local Food Rules popularized and passed a local initiative to relieve small farmers from the burdens of corporate agribusiness regulations by pointing out that the real regulation is between the farmer and the consumer. The state of Maine has validated their ordinance.

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Corporations have also stolen the historic knowledge of farming communities around the globe and are claiming to own life itself. Historically, courts recognized life as part of the Commons. Even though individual cows could be owned, a species of cows could not be owned. The US Supreme Court first permitted the patenting of life in 1980, reversing the legal tradition that life could not be patented. Courts now allow the patenting of the basic process of life, even though applicants have nothing to do with the central factor of their patent request — the creation of life.

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These legal decisions allow Monsanto to claim ownership of genetically modified seeds even though the basic building blocks of the seeds were developed over thousands of years by indigenous agricultural communities around the world. Aided by corporate-driven public policies and trade agreements, these corporations control over 60% of the world’s seed supply.

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Small farmer groups around the world, like Via Campesina, are fighting against agribusinesses that claim they own life. They are saving and exchanging seeds that have not been given over to private ownership. This is a critical movement if control of our food supply and life in general is to remain a part of the commons.

This same debate carries over to the healthcare industry where multiple corporations are claiming ownership of our genes, although they had nothing to do with the creation of life that gives those genes the eternal economic value that the corporations are seeking. Like the historic system that provided our food, the traditional healthcare system came out of the Commons.

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From the fourth century BC, in the time of Hippocrates, came the notion that medical care must be practiced and taught freely. Doctors adhered to Hippocrates’s oath that “Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, [and] to teach this art.” This notion of freely available healthcare remained prominent until the early 1900s when the corporate-funded Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations collaborated with the American Medical Association (AMA) and its close ally, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), to create what is now known as the medical/industrial complex, made up of “an ever-growing managerial class” of corporate leaders, government allies, and corporate foundations.

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In 1910 they commissioned the Flexner Report, which promoted the intrusive and prescription-heavy medicine practiced in Germany and adopted by the AMA. This approach promoted doctors as scientists rather than healers. They then used their report to justify the initial licensing of doctors, who had to receive training at an AMA medical school.

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Any medical practitioners who did not practice the AMA’s form of medicine were discredited along with the medical practice they adhered to, such as herbalism and homeopathy, that followed a much less aggressive and less invasive medical strategy. The new monopolistic licensing regime bankrupted the medical schools that did not adhere to AMA medicine and vilified their medical philosophy in the process.

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The result was that medical schools in rural and poor communities closed down as well as most of the medical schools that admitted women. This stymied the availability of medical care in poor and rural America. Meanwhile, the incomes of the urban doctors increased substantially, especially the surgeons whose bills often made up half the cost of a procedure.

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The resulting cost increase of medical care caused a crisis as the onset of the Depression left American families unable to pay for expensive medical care. Hospital beds stood empty. That brought the original collaborators of the licensing policy back together along with the American Association of Hospitals and various government agencies to form the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care (CCMC). This entity developed the Blue Cross and Blue Shield corporations that provided a reliable funding source for the AMA medical/industrial complex.

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After World War II, President Truman pushed for a medical insurance program for all citizens that would maintain the private health care delivery system. The medical/industrial complex led by the AMA, Chamber of Commerce, and the American Hospital Association fiercely opposed the plan, calling it “socialism.”

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After the defeat of universal medical insurance, Truman wrote, “I had no patience with the reactionary, selfish people and politicians who fought year after year every proposal we made to improve the people’s health. I have had some bitter disappointments as President, but the one that has troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat the organized opposition to a national compulsory health-insurance program . . . The vast majority of the people have no such organized voice speaking for them.”

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Out of this defeat, the private health insurance industry grew through employee/employer-sponsored group insurance policies. That health insurance industry now drives public policy regarding the funding of health care and has fought bitterly to stop any single-payer health care initiatives that would return at least the funding of healthcare to the commons.

Science-based medicine has contributed many miracles to our wellbeing, but the corporate medical/industrial complex has been the real winner. On top of that, the loss of the healer has negatively impacted our vitality. Many people understand this situation and slowly, alternative healing techniques are coming back. Unfortunately, they are mainly outside the insurance funding stream. We need better public policies that promote the health of the people, not the corporations.   

Activities: After covering the above material, we often utilize outside speakers for this class. You can invite people working in the local food movement, including farmers, organizers of farmers markets, and other local food distributers to form a panel on the vitality of the local food movement in your area. Or you could invite medical practitioners to speak on the need for single-payer health care.

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You can show any of the clips on this list of videos about food, farmers, and healthcare on a range of topics, from “The Supermarket Racket” to creating a democratic conversation on food. The first one with Raj Patel on global food is fantastic. There are also videos of Vandana Shiva on the patenting of life and Fred Kirschenmann on soil, two strong voices that bring these topics to the screen. On the health front, there is a stirring talk by Bernie Sanders on our rights to healthcare, a segment by Bill Moyers on single-payer healthcare, as well as two pieces on the pharmaceutical industry.

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Here are three charts on the healthcare industry you can hand out and discuss. The first shows the dominance of the healthcare industry in lobbying our federal policy makers and the second one shows the dominance of the pharmaceutical industry lobbying effort. The third one shows how much more money people in the United States spend on healthcare in comparison to people in other western countries, despite the fact that healthcare in the US is not as available or necessarily as good as healthcare in the rest of the western world.

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In addition, here is a a Venn diagram showing the revolving door between the Federal government and both Monsanto and the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, here is a chart you can hand out to discuss the campaign contributions to members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees. Notice that the members on the House Ag Committee receive ten times as much from the Ag lobby as the average member of Congress. To fill out the picture, here is a list of the biggest Ag industry contributors that shows that two agricultural industries contributed more than half of the money to the committee members.

All of this will no doubt fill up the first part of the class. Take a break. Continue into the second half with the questions from the readings. Here are notes on the answers. Before the end of the class, also hand out the list of books for more background reading on food and health. Finally make sure to pass out the questions, article rankings, and talking points for the first class of Part 4, Corporate Global Trade vs. Popular Local Control.

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The day after the class, email the questions and reading priorities for the next class to everyone and include an article on corporate globalization.

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The day before the next class, send a reminder email that the class is coming up and again attach the questions and ranking and maybe another piece on corporate globalization.