Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors’ perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.

Most farmers I know, (not all but most), see organic farming as just another way to farm, curious, perhaps a bit backward, but to most conventional farmers organic farming doesn't even register. With agribusiness however, it's another story. They're not content with just 96.5% of the food system, they want it all. Those who have their priorities confused, need to figure out who their enemies really are.

The USDA's Farm Service Agency policy is continuing to provide loans to build new specialized hog and poultry facilities at a time when overproduction in these agricultural sectors is leading to depressed prices, contract cancellations, abusive contract terms and increased corporate consolidation of the hog and poultry industries. This policy is a reversal of a directive issued on January 8, 1999, that suspended all direct and guaranteed loan financing for the construction of such facilities. The reasoning behind the suspension was the concern that FSA loans of this type could exacerbate the crisis of oversupply and depressed prices that were already affecting the hog industry. Shortly after assuming office in 2001, the Bush Administration re-instituted the loans, and so far the Obama Administration has continued to support this policy.

While the USDA's Food Distribution Programs (FDPs)have claimed to prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income populations, that goal would seem difficult to come by when the focus has been more on maintaining government ties with the big agricultural industries than it has been on actually seeking to make Americans healthier. Through its FDPs and under the label of "entitlement commodities" or "bonus commodities", the USDA has managed to redistribute more than a billion pounds of conventional surplus foods each year. Even White House Chef Sam Kass caught on to the government's long-standing loyalties a while ago.

The effects of our broken food system affect all of us, even the small percentage of Americans who choose—and can afford—to eat a healthy, safe diet. Treating chronic diseases is a major drain on our healthcare system an tax dollars, as is true in South Africa, and even equitable and accessible medical care for all will not provide a silver bullet fix to our population’s deteriorating health. If we are ever to enact lasting change on our health as a population, we all need healthy food to be accessible and affordable. Not the kind of healthy food that announces itself as such with a flashy label on a vacuum-packed wrapper, but the kind that comes from an ecologically and economically sound agricultural system, one that produces vegetables, fruits, grains, and animal products, not simply commodities to be processed into food products. We — individually and collectively — need real food to attain health.

The hearing was held to discuss a measure proposed by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee. It would ban seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from being used in animals, and would restrict other antibiotics to therapeutic and some preventive uses. The legislation is supported by the American Medical Association, among other groups, but opposed by farm organizations like the National Pork Producers Council. The farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely, but advocates are hoping to include the measure in the legislation to revamp the health care system.

Recent results published in 2008 identified 405 oceanic dead zones. The prime cause for dead zones is the use of highly soluble synthetic fertilizers, which are overused to obtain maximum yields. The government regulations on the total maximum daily load (tmdl) of synthetic nitrogen, or phosphorous fertilizer coming off of farms were established under the Clean Water Act. But those statutes are routinely not enforced. There are exceptions, but in general the regulators have been in a thirty-year coma.

An epidemic of farmers’ suicides has spread across four Indian states – Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Punjab – over the last decade. According to official data, more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997. These suicides are most frequent where farmers grow cotton, and appear directly linked to the presence of seed monopolies. For the supply of cotton seeds in India has increasingly slipped out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of global seed producers like Monsanto. These giant corporations have begun to control local seed companies through buyouts, joint ventures, and licensing arrangements, leading to seed monopolies.

Many of the detailed studies of factory farms that have been emerging in the past few years reinforce this argument. Dr Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She tells me that her detailed, on-the-ground studies led her to conclude that there is "very much" a link from factory farms to the new, more powerful forms of flu we are experiencing. "Instead of a virus only having one spin of the roulette wheel, it has thousands and thousands of spins, for no extra cost. It drives the evolution of new diseases."

Half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers' crops, scientists have warned. Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. In many countries, a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation, exacerbated by climate change, may steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing. In 2007, scientists warned that poor soil fertility meant a global food crisis was likely in the next half-century.

The problem is that agribusiness is grossly unbalanced, flooding Capitol Hill with $1 billion of lobbying efforts the last 11 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, reaping $177 billion in subsidies the last 12, according to the Environmental Working Group. There is so little accountability in farm payment programs that the Government Accountability Office reported in October that the United States Department of Agriculture paid out a total of $49 million to 2,702 potentially ineligible people whose adjusted gross income was more than $2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry.

As 2009 approaches, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops for animal feed. Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.

Agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions - largely from synthetic fertilizers and large animal operations. GHG emissions-soil carbon loss, methane, and nitrous oxide-are largely results of large-scale agricultural operations in which soil carbon is depleted, methane from large animal feedlot operations is released unchecked, and synthetic fertilizers release nitrous oxide-a gas with 300 times the warming power of CO2. The agricultural sector, including land use change for agriculture, has been estimated to make up anywhere from 28-33% of global emissions. Combined with the emissions created transporting food in our increasingly globalized food economy where the average bite to eat travels 1200 miles from field to fork, the industrial food system may be the largest single contributor to global warming.

It seems to be a widely held myth that World War II was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Cornell University Professor George F. Warren, an important adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt on rural development policy, figured out that it is agriculture that leads countries into and out of depressions. The Roosevelt Administration is the only administration that tried to do something about supporting the family farm. Our recovery started in 1942, the year the Steagall Amendment to the War Stabilization Act mandated farm parity, but the war got the credit. We then had ten years of economic stability until 1952 when the Steagall Amendment was allowed to expire.

Two nutrition experts argue that you can't take marketing campaigns at face value. Are wellness initiatives like Smart Spot just marketing ploys? Such moves by the food industry may seem to be a step in the right direction, but ultimately makers of popular junk foods have an obligation to stockholders to encourage kids to eat more—not less—of the foods that fuel their profits, says David Ludwig, a pediatrician and the co-author of a commentary published in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association that raises questions about whether big food companies can be trusted to help combat obesity. Ludwig and article co-author Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, both of whom have long histories of tracking the food industry, spoke with U.S. News and highlighted 10 things that junk food makers don't want you to know about their products and how they promote them.

For eight years, participants in the organic community-farmers, consumers, retailers, and other stakeholders-have fought the industrialization of organic milk by giant corporations and factory farms milking as many as 10,000 animals. Although the National Organic Standards Board, the expert panel set up by Congress to advise the Secretary of Agriculture, has voted to crack down on industry scofflaws five times since 2000, Bush administration officials have refused to act. "This cynical corporate takeover of organic farming, an agriculture segment that is held in high regard by consumers, resulting in a highly successful and growing market, has been aided and abetted by the gross disregard of the USDA's enforcement responsibilities," said Merrill Clark, a certified organic livestock producer and former member of the USDA's National Organic Standards Board.

A global fertiliser crisis caused by high oil prices and the US rush to biofuel crops is reducing the harvests of the world's poorest farmers and could lead to millions more people going hungry, according to the UN and global food analysts. Optimism that soaring food commodity prices could lift millions of developing country farmers out of poverty and lead to more food being grown have been dashed, says the UN. This is because small farmers either consume their own crop or have no access to global markets to take advantage of the higher food prices.

While oil companies banked huge profits, people lost their homes, jobs and farms. We have become too dependent on globalization and the big corporations that control it. Small is the future. We know indigenous farmers can produce more food using traditional farming methods. They have no need of genetically modified seed or chemicals. All they need is an end to wars and, as Frances Moore Lappe would say, "more democracy." The World Bank and the G-8 need to let them make their own decisions and feed themselves.

Bottom line is that Monsanto is under tremendous pressure for its very aggressive tactics with farmers over its weed and feed products (they spy on and then sue small farmers), its shop-worn excuses for not being upfront about labeling its genetically engineered products (if it's safe then why worry about labeling?) and of course it's perennially under fire for Posilac which Monsanto admits gives cows mastitis and may also contribute to human cancers because it increases the hormone Insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1). There's no argument that methane is a serious contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Even Estonia is taxing farmers (image at right from Cape Cod Today) for their cow's sins, and you can still download Kelly Ripa on Saturday Night Live in the Center for Cow Fart Study skit, a testament that the issue must be real.

Reggie Brown was upset. As executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, he was before a U.S. Senate committee in April to dispute charges of slavery and human trafficking leveled at tomato growers by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, what Brown called “a purported labor organization.” There’s nothing “purported” about the South Florida-based organization (ciw-online.org) other than the status of its mostly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian membership of migrants. Their employers often don’t consider them quite human. More like purported human beings. They pay them accordingly. Assuming the picker gets work during the morning auction where growers pick their field hands for the day (the same cattle-auction method showed on Edward Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” documentary 48 years ago), the picker, until recently, was making 45 cents per 32-lb bucket of tomatoes. The rate was little changed from what it was 30 years ago. Taking inflation into account, the wage was 75 percent lower than in 1978. To make Florida’s minimum wage of $6.79 an hour, the picker would have had to pick and haul 15 32-lb buckets in an hour, or 480 pounds. To make $50 for the day, he’d have to pick and haul 111 buckets, or 3,550 pounds of tomatoes. That’s 1.77 tons.