Someone at Oped News has been doing research for a long while and sent information:
What has been happening with food over the last 30 years:
World Bank and IMF " Structural Adjustment Programs" loans have been forcing third world countries to abandon farm support, but to accept new international patent laws, "Free trade" treaties, the international move towards HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point system) and traceability from "Farm to Fork".
[In Kansas alone, the introduction HACCP meant the loss of 72 local, independent meat processors - who had had no history of contamination - and since then the centralization to a few large meat packers has meant less inspections and more contamination.]
Their comment on this research: "When you look at the info it is obvious Corporations want to get a stranglehold on food."
Here is a short example.
Corporations are pushing a movement to making ALL seed subject to licencing and control.
Feb 2007 GRAIN press release USA: Seed companies want to ban farm-saved seeds
A new report from GRAIN reveals the new lobbying offensive from the global seed industry to make it a crime for farmers to save seeds for the next year's planting. See History
2008 "In the EU, there is now a list of 'official' vegetable varieties. Seed that is not on the list cannot be 'sold' to the 'public' To keep something on the list costs thousands of pounds each year...Hundreds of thousands of old heirloom varieties (the results of about eleven thousand years of plant breeding by our ancestors) are being lost forever, due to some rather poorly drafted EU legislation."
2008 “In a sweeping move that has garnered surprisingly little attention this week the United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership that will see regulatory standards “harmonized” and will lay the basis for a merging of the US and EU into one single market, a huge step on the path to a new globalized world order."
The BBC reported from the Summit in Washington on Monday:
Now, the soil.
Do not miss this video which is a very different kind of history.
And the question is often asked, what can you do?
One of the most threatening things happening in the world is the multinational take-over of food, which is the ultimate totalitarian control over people.
MoveOn has not yet seemed to understand that "agriculture" IS political. Get hold of MoveOn. Get them to make this priority number one because control over our food is the floor under our democracy. Jefferson was right that democracy depends on a country filled with small independent farmers.
We must stop HB 875, HB 814, SF 425 and soon, HB 759, which are the take over of all US farms in the guise of "food safety" and thus the take over of the US food supply.