Destructive Food Systems
Unfortunately, in a capitalist social structure, the objective is not necessarily to bring services and goods to the community. Capitalism has become a way of manipulating forces in society to bring about more capital. In conditions where the market has this historically unprecedented role in organizing human life and social reproduction, where people must go through the market to gain access to the most basic means of self-reproduction, the provision of all goods and services is governed by certain imperatives the imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor productivity. Under such conditions, producing use values becomes just an inconvenient medium for generating exchange value, so the primary objective of capitalist production is not the provision of goods and services at all but the self-expansion of capital. Human needs and wants are always subordinate to capital accumulation and subject to all the crises and contradictions associated with an anarchic competitive market. (Wood, 1999)
This paper elaborates on the thesis of Albritton. Our food system is environmentally destructive primarily because it uses up non-renewable resources, pollutes the planet and promotes global warming, (Albritton, 2009 210) By giving existing data from findings based in Canada, the paper hopes to convince the reader that most food systems found today are the very culprit of the mans degradation internally (to his health) and externally (to his environment). The statistics are alarming and calls for urgent re-thinking of how society produce food and nourish its citizens.
Existing Food Systems Bring About Imbalance
Albritton reports that 50 of the worlds population remains malnourished. While half of this data are obese, half in the meantime are undernourished. While economists ignore this imbalance, social scientists continue to question social structures that sustain this imbalance.
In Canada, as in other first world societys, food must remain cheap in order for people to afford it but more so, for food brands to gain more of the market share. One result of overabundance is pressure to add value to foods through processing. The producers of raw foods receive only a fraction of the price that consumers pay at the supermarket. The remaining 80 of the food dollar goes for labor, packaging and other such value-enhancing activities. (Nestle, 2007 p. 17). The tendency of brands is to use up 80 of the food cost to pay for expenses that do not bring nutritional value to the product instead, it spends more on persuasion, lobbying and advertising to increase brand profits. The recession of 2009 reported many giant industries going bankrupt due to excessive lifestyles of owners and upper management straining liquidity during tight economic situations.
Lowering down food costs have downsides and compromises. These compromises include altering ingredients, producing more to get lower retail costs, choosing cheaper human resource, and cutting down on environmental protection. Thus, the paradox of the plenty becomes evident because in as much as the rich can buy more food, they are also the victims of obesity and other health problems brought about by bad nutrition. Take the case of cereals for children in the morning. They are easy to prepare, perfect for the modern family who lives on credit, though advertised to be fortified with vitamins, is only one part of the recommended dietary nutritional pyramid that time and again advocates the wisdom in a balanced diet.
A Canadian Community Nutrition survey in 2004 noted that 59 of men and women in Canada are either overweight or obese. One of three in the US population is obese. Obesity in children is becoming a threat as well. At the third world countries, deaths due to unsanitary conditions continue to prevail. Lack of clean water or lack of water altogether is still a predominant problem in poor countries.
How resources are diminished
The problem of existing food systems continue to spiral downward as the mode of producing is dominated by exhausting non-renewable resources. Though the move to migrate to more sustainable means of energy has been an option decades ago, big oil companies continue to bleed the planet with mining. This demeanor among big multinational corporations has not helped the planet recover from their environmentally destructive methods in order to produce goods and services. Cutting down primary forests to give way to mass housing, leveling mountain ranges to build roads and bridges, destroying ecosystem to harvest oil are just some of the ways how capitalism uses of non-renewable energy sources to bring services leaving nil resource to future generations.
Al Gore wrote in his speech, human activities are needlessly causing grave and perhaps irreparable damage to the global environment. (Chafe, 1995 p.498). He has since passionately advocated the cause of the global environment. He rallies big companies to invest on green architecture, sustainable engineering, organic food production and
How it pollutes the planet
Food systems of big brands have continually been pressured to adhere to the protection of the environment. Throwing untreated chemical wastes to waterways, bombardment of synthetic inputs to raise more livestock in less time, the noise of big machines and the increase of methane input in the atmosphere are just one of the many activities of these big companies that pollute the environment. Canadian households continue to generate more solid waste, and the majority of it ends up in landfill sites. Each Canadian generated about383kilograms of solid waste on average in2002, of which about one-fifth was recycled or otherwise diverted, according to a report in the2005edition of Human Activity and the Environment, the annual compendium of information on how Canadians interact with their environment. (The Daily, 2005)
In densely populated cities, the pollution has brought about health challenges that increased the need for the medical field to combat them. This is another irony in food abundance. Scientists have found minute cure for cancer in changing peoples diets. Stress has become one of the mainstay pollutants in highly urbanized areas whether they are in the rich or poor countries. With stress, come a variety of ailments. SARS, bird flu, aids, cancer, tuberculosis and other disease had been evolving rapidly so much so that second and third generation antibiotics are merely curative rather than preventive.
Food production systems from growing to bringing food to the table definitely pollute the air, water and soil of this planet. And given that, food is still wasted due to overproduction brought about by the tenets of capitalism. It is a grim reality that humans pollute the planet for nothing. It therefore becomes a loss-loss situation.
How it hastens global warming
No one can stop global warming given that the planet came from an ice age and building towards a continuous heating up. Many impacts of global warming are already detectable. As glaciers retreat, the sea level rises, the tundra thaws, hurricanes and other extreme weather events occur more frequently, and penguins, polar bears, and other species struggle to survive (HYPERLINK httpwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.govpmcarticlesPMC2367646b41-ehp0116-000578Topping 2007).
Food production via the capitalist way has contributed to this quickening. The way food is produced for billions of people have not considered the extent of its environmental footprint. According to FAOSTAT (HYPERLINK httpwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.govpmcarticlesPMC2367646b14-ehp0116-000578FAO 2008), globally, approximately 56 billion land animals are reared and slaughtered for human consumption annually, and livestock inventories are expected to double by 2050, with most increases occurring in the developing world (HYPERLINK httpwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.govpmcarticlesPMC2367646b37-ehp0116-000578Steinfeld et al. 2006). As the numbers of farm animals reared for meat, egg, and dairy production rise, so do their GHG emissions. (FAO, 2008).
The world is now aware of the impending dangers of climate change. The KYOTO Protocol opened up many discussions on the warming of the earth in 1997 and after much debate was enforced only in 2005. The Coppenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009 was a meeting of capitalists continuing commitments to decrease carbon emissions. Unfortunately, meeting of these super powers still consumed more carbon footprint than quantifiable commitment and passion to truly reduce carbon emissions.
Resource consumption to the point of environmental destruction puts an imbalance to the ecological systems which food is yet a part of. The increase in landfill waste due to non-recycling affects the water tables the natural flow of chemical elements in the soil. In Canadian agricultural lands, methane from animal manure and fuel combustion comprise 53 of the total greenhouse gas emissions coming from agricultural activities. As the numbers of farm animals reared for meat, egg, and dairy production increase, so do emissions from their production. By 2050, global farm animal production is expected to double from present levels. The environmental impacts of animal agriculture require that governments, international organizations, producers, and consumers focus more attention on the role played by meat, egg, and dairy production. Mitigating and preventing the environmental harms caused by this sector require immediate and substantial changes in regulation, production practices, and consumption patterns. (Koneswaran, 2008)
Summary
The threat to food security due to over population is a given. With over 6.8 billion mouths to feed the planet experiences the increase in food demand given the limited arable lands. However, as Al Gore rallies the world toward food security with a social conscience, he stresses that, we must once and for all abandon the idea that economic development and environmental responsibility are incompatible. Economic development is no excuse for environmental vandalism. Rich countries cannot impose limits on poor countries nor deny them of the right to achieve wealth. (Chaffe, 1995 p. 502)
Efforts to find other ways to produce food is gaining support from communities who are aware of the ills that our present food systems are responsible of. Unfortunately, political will is still lagging behind. As the failures of our capitalist economy become ever more obvious to more people, chances are that the rivulets of transformation that exist now will flow together into powerful rivers of change and then into an international upsurge. (Albritton, 2009)
Hope should not be lost. More and more communities are becoming aware of the social responsibility of humankind to its one and only planet. Social structures that cannot evolve are eventually destroyed if not by economic forces as seen in the global recession of 2009, then by calamities caused by drastic climate change. Whether its in the household level or a country as big as China, food is a universal concept. It is only a matter of time when the scarcity of food or overabundance of food would not matter anymore because there is no healthy environment left to produce it.
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