Wheat Belly Total Health: The effortless grain-free health and weight-loss plan. Dr Davis William

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СКАЧАТЬ Brazil and corn from Kansas, and the consumer can’t tell the difference. Of course, you can pretend that there is some enticing appeal to your San Francisco sourdough bread or ‘authentic’ Mexican tortillas. But it’s all created from the same commodity: grains.

      Food: The Ultimate Commodity Exchange

      Beginning in the late 19th century and for many years afterward, high-volume grains – wheat, corn and rice – were handled as commodities, all under the control of relatively few individuals and private companies. In the United States, the Kansas City Board of Trade and the Chicago Board of Trade were founded to facilitate the trading of futures contracts for wheat, corn and oats in the 1870s. These were the very first products to trade on a commodities market, preceding even crude oil and iron ore.

      This was not about grain farmers labouring to grow their crops, then carting them to the mill and hoping to sell for a favourable price. This was about a financial system with rules written by a select few who were intent on trading and profiting from large transactions that are only possible with foods that can be traded as commodities on a worldwide scale. More recently, large companies that trade in grain contracts have found it even more profitable to extend their businesses outside of just paper transactions and have worked towards vertical integration, getting their hands dirty in the messy business of the grains themselves. Today, companies that trade grains are also likely to own grain storage facilities, milling operations, trucking and railroad companies, and myriad other operations involved in the production, distribution, shipping, milling and sale of grains.

      Large-scale demand, long shelf life, long-distance transportability and worldwide price differences: these are the criteria that must be met to allow a grain trader to purchase a million tonnes of hard winter wheat from a grain cooperative in Kansas and ship it by train, and then ocean tanker, to a port in Vladivostok. That wheat will serve a population that desires the product due to a poorer-than-usual yield – a situation that increased the price per bushel to a level the trader finds desirable. That single transaction can net many millions of dollars.

      Commodity traders also prefer to deal in markets that are growing, not stagnant or shrinking. Although people enlightened by books like Wheat Belly, as well as those who are jumping on the gluten-free bandwagon, have caused a drop in grain sales for food production, the net effect will likely be increased grain sales, since grains are also used to feed the livestock that will provide calories increasingly obtained from beef, pork, poultry, eggs and farmed seafood. For every tonne of grain consumed by humans in the United States, 7 tonnes are consumed by livestock.² From the perspective of the grain trade, this is called a win-win situation.

      Welcome to the world of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Continental Grain Company: multibillion-pound companies that make the grain world go round, trading, arbitraging and cashing in on the millions of tonnes of grains the world’s consumers now demand. In the world of large grain trades, not a lot has changed in the 35 years since journalist Dan Morgan, a 30-year veteran of the Washington Post, wrote his detailed exposé of the grain-trading industry, Merchants of Grain: ‘[T]here they are, in the late 1970s, one of the most remarkable phenomenons in the whole business world: the Hirsches, Borns, Louis-Dreyfuses, Andrés, Fribourgs, Cargills and MacMillans, all survivors and all still in control . . . [I]n no other major industry in the world are all the leading companies private, family-owned, family-operated concerns right down to the last few issues of voting stock.’³

      Despite the enormity of their economic sway over world markets, most of these companies were, until recently, private corporations that did not have an obligation to publicly disclose their financial dealings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. (ADM is an exception, having been publicly traded since the mid-20th century; Bunge became a publicly traded company as recently as 2001, after 183 years of operating privately.) As a result, the billions of dollars of grain trading that occurred during much of the 20th century operated largely in the shadows of business – elusive, mysterious and often represented by large paper trades made before any actual grain was shipped or changed hands.

      Although the dealings of these companies are generally outside the radar of public scrutiny, federal agencies are indeed aware. In the United States, the federal government relied on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to track the dealings of grain traders, as well as grain production and agricultural policy in places such as the former Soviet Union – issues they viewed as important to the health of US agribusiness and food security. (Due to the recent push for transparency from the federal government in the United States, such redacted reports are available for anyone to read online from the CIA’s files at http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/princeton-collection.)

      While this near monopoly on food commodities prevailed throughout the 20th century, it continues to a substantial degree in our era. The worldwide grain market is still dominated by a handful of commodity traders, all intent on gaining a larger and larger stake in the diet of the world, human or otherwise. Of course, their intent is not to cultivate locally grown vegetables or humanely raised, pasture-fed beef grazing on clover and grass, nor is it to follow sustainable practices that generate the smallest carbon footprint while making their fortunes. It is, as much as possible, to convert the diets of humans and livestock into a commodity-dominated process, with maximum reliance on products with a long shelf-life that are open to price variation worldwide. This creates the perfect situation for profiting from the inequities of an expanding marketplace. Yes: expanding profits on a massive scale underlie much of the push for increased human consumption of grains.

      Over the last nearly 20 years, we’ve also witnessed the increasing push towards genetically modified grains, which now provide the added financial advantage of patent protection: seeds must be purchased from the patent holder (Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences or Syngenta) every year, since farmers are prohibited from saving seed, as they have done every year since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. While wheat has not yet been converted to genetically modified strains, corn, rice and other crops have. But GM wheat is surely coming, public outcry be damned. The seed market now stands at around $22 billion worldwide. Agribusiness sees this as a great opportunity to cash in on the world’s diet by selling GM seed and then strictly and aggressively enforcing patents. We’ve already seen this in Monsanto’s courtroom tactics in prosecuting the ‘unauthorized’ use of GM seed that inadvertently gets mixed into a field of non-GM crops.⁴

      The enemy of large-scale, commoditized grains-as-food is small-scale, locally produced food, since such relatively tiny and disparate operations cannot be controlled by one centralized corporate entity and are beyond the financial reach of the big players. If domination of the world market for food is your goal, then the seeds of grasses are your game.

      The Blurred Line Between Government and Agribusiness

      The agribusiness multinationals of our time that control the flow of commodity crops around the world wield an astonishing amount of clout in government circles. Staggering sums are spent, year in and year out, by agribusiness companies to influence public policy in their favour. Recent efforts to oppose labelling of GM foods show us just how badly these companies want to keep the public in the dark about which foods contain GM ingredients. Opposition to Proposition 37 in California, which would have required labels on products containing GM foods, drew $45 million in financial support from Monsanto, Syngenta, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft, Nestle, the Corn Refiners Association and the American Bakers Association – a virtual Who’s Who in agribusiness and food processing. Those who opposed the bill outspent proponents (mostly supporters of organic farming) five to one, resulting in defeat of the legislation in 2012.

      One typical tactic of agribusiness over the past century has been to employ players who know how to play both sides of the game, as regulators and as the regulated. Consequently, high-level executives and attorneys have seamlessly bounced between, for instance, a post at the USDA, СКАЧАТЬ