Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
“Eat less meat. In terms of land use, twenty
to one, ten to one . . . most of the food we
grow in the world is [used] to feed cattle and
pigs, etc. And you know, most of that food
actually gets . . . passed through the animal
and . . . is not only not good for you; it's an
incredibly bad use of land. . . . When I was
a graduate student at Berkeley, the second
cookbook I bought . . . was . . . called
Diet
for a Small Planet
. . . the central thesis was
you get an automatically better performance
by eating the food yourself instead of feeding
it to a cow and then eating the cow. And
it's better for you. . . . I still have it on my
cookbook shelf. Ah, that was written in the
late 60s or mid-60s. It's so true today.”
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—Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel
Laureate
In this squeeze, prices per bushel fall; and farmers then try to
survive by eking still
more
from each acre—depressing prices even
further. Overall, farm prices have fallen 80 percent in forty years;
and the inflation-adjusted world price of corn dropped by more
than half between 1980 and 2001. At the same time, the world con-
sumer food price index climbed roughly 350 percent, profiting not
farmers but traders, processors, and retailers. Because, as we've
noted, desperately poor people throughout the world lack money
to make market demand for grain, it makes “economic” sense to
feed it to confined animals to produce meat, eggs, and milk—and
now fuel—that the better-off will buy.
Thus, in global monopoly capitalism, food isn't food—a source
