David Pimentel, professor of ecology at Cornell University and a globally recognized expert on food systems and energy, has argued that if the entire world adopted the American food system, all known sources of fossil fuel would be exhausted in seven years.

Even in the US, capitalism has not entirely subsumed the whole food system, and while there are few places in the world untouched by capital-ism, its degree of hegemony may vary a great deal. Still, up to the present, capitalism has been the single strongest force shaping the global food system, and much of that shaping power has flowed outward from the US.

Warren Buffet, among the top five richest men in the world, once said: ‘I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty. One could say that the same for sugar. It is very cheap and it produces a craving, and in the case of Pepsi and Coca-Cola there is often strong brand loyalty too—a sure formula for fabulous profits in the food industry.
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This is certainly the case with soft drinks, as it is also for most breakfast cereals. For example, the grain in a 12 ounce box of cereal that sells for $3.50 may only cost 25 cents.
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on average the potato farmer gets 2 cents out of an order of fries that sells for $1.50.

Salt itself is not fattening, but it does increase thirst, which in the US is very often slaked by high calorie soft drinks or beer. Further, salt contributes to high blood pressure, a major risk factor in heart disease and strokes. It has been estimated that reducing salt consumption by half in the US would prevent 150,000 deaths a year.

French fries drenched in fat and salt constitute 25 percent of all vegetables consumed in the US

The United Nations International Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets international food norms, is heavily influenced by the food industry. This influence was demonstrated at its November 2006 meeting where it was proposed to lower the limit of sugar in baby foods from the existing 30 percent to 10 percent. The proposal was defeated by the combined forces of the European and American sugar industries. In a similar case, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) proposed, in their 2003 report, Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases, a guideline, widely supported by nutritionists, that recommended that added sugars should not exceed 10 percent of daily calorie intake. This was too much for the US sugar industry to swallow, and they threatened to lobby Congress to cut off its $400,000 annual funding of the WHO and FAO if they did not remove the offending norm from their report. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising, if nevertheless still shameful, that the UN bodies gave in.

According to Patti Rundall, policy director of Baby Milk Action Group, ‘A bottle-fed baby consumes 30,000 more calories over its first eight months than a breast-fed one. That’s the calorie equivalent of 120 average size chocolate bars. ‘Several research studies have shown correlations between bottle-feeding and subsequent, which is what would be expected given the early age at which tastes may be formed.
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The soy lobby in the US has convinced the government to buy its soy formula and give it away to mothers on welfare—despite the fact that giving a baby soy formula with its powerful oestrogen is equivalent to an adult woman taking 5 birth control pills a day.

Agriculture remains the main source of income for 2.5 billion people, 96 percent of them living in developing countries. In the late 1970s the World Bank and International Monetary Fund developed increasingly invasive structural adjustment policies (SAPs) which set conditions for developing countries to get further loans, or get better repayment schedules for existing loans, in response to the capitalist-generated ‘debt crisis’. Many of these countries were forced to develop export-oriented cash crops to pay off debts. With many tropical countries expanding their export crops (such as tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, flowers, peanuts, cotton, and cocoa) at the same time, the resulting glut on the market produced falling prices. Given that agriculture is the weightiest sector in the economies of over 80 developing countries, the result was devastating. According to Peter Robbins, ‘The collapse of tropical commodity prices represents the most formidable obstacle to efforts to lift huge numbers of people out of poverty and yet, mysteriously, the problem has received almost no attention from the world’s mainstream media’. 44 For example, by 2002 coffee prices were 14 percent of their already low 1980 price, while cocoa had fallen to 19 percent and cotton to 21 percent. Is it really so surprising that a class-biased media would neglect such phenomena?
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Developing countries cannot compete with crops grown in the US or Europe because they are so highly subsidized. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the US has had a similar impact on Mexico as SAPs and the ‘green revolution’ have had in other parts of the world. During the first ten years of the agreement, 1.7 million Mexicans were displaced from agriculture largely as a result of highly subsidised US food commodities (especially corn) flooding into Mexico. 47 Because US corn farmers receive on average half of their income in subsidies, they can sell their corn on the international market under the cost of production and still make a profit. For instance, in 2002 US corn cost $2.66 a bushel to produce and was sold on the international market for $1.74 a bushel. 48 Many of the Mexican farmers displaced by the dumping of cheap US corn into the Mexican market crossed the border to the US. Before the NAFTA 7 percent of the 900,000 migrant farmworkers in the US were undocumented. Ten years later 50 percent of the 2 million migrant farmworkers in the US were undocumented.

Suicide is the leading cause of death amongst US farmers, three times higher than for the population as a whole.

Current trends indicate that soon one billion people in the world will suffer impaired mental development because of malnutrition.

The UN estimates that 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day, while 2.8 billion, or 40 percent of the world’s population, live on less than $2 a day. 57 When food prices spike, as they did in the first half of 2008, the survival of many of these 2.8 billion people is jeopardised, as many of them were already spending 90 percent or more of their income on food. The deepening global depression has since reduced all commodity prices, including food, but the price of food has still gone up 28 percent since 2006. 58 Though many prices may fluctuate in the short term, there are several reasons why the price of food is bound to go up in the long run unless some radical changes are made.

• Fertile land that could grow food crops is being utilized for non-food crops, including tobacco, agro-fuels, illegal drugs, and trees for pulp and paper.
• Fertile land is being lost to suburban sprawl, golf courses, roads, parking lots, and mega shopping malls.
• Land is being degraded by industrial farming techniques.
• Global warming will sharply decrease crop yields due to higher temperatures and extreme weather.
• The globalisation of a meat-based diet will divert food grains to animals.
• Speculators, seeing all of these pressures on the global food supply, will bid up the price of basic grains on commodity futures markets.

All of this adds up to rising food prices and increasing hunger for nearly half of the world’s population. It is unlikely that the poor farmers who produce the food will benefit much from higher prices, since they will mostly be skimmed off by the transnational corporations that control the international trade and processing.