While some of what you and Holt-Gimenez and others say is true, it is putting it a bit too one-sidedly. I have studied this stuff and when I read the people you quote they seem to be putting forward a conspiracy theory combined with a theory of monopoly. Brad Bauerly
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First of all, thanks for reading the post. If nobody argues, I have no idea if it was even read. I write with an overly polemical style and often sound like I believe something in an unqualified manner. It comes from former days of screaming about something, while nobody listened or believed. I have particularly stubborn science friends.
(Sorry to ramble on, but this general topic interests me a lot.)
So then, maybe Holt-Gimenez sounds more conspiratorial than perhaps he is. I was proposing that H-G is something like a model, upon which to construct answers, probably on a much larger scale. For example, Oakland has a thriving produce market, run by various asian immigrant communities. The produce is `local' in the sense of nearby truck farms in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys who sell direct to the markets. These locations are at most half a day trucking distance. This is in sharp contrast to supermarket chains who get shipments from Mexico and Central America were much of the fruit and vegetables are now grown, because of course there is more profit to be made. Because there is less transportation costs and many fewer middlemen, the produce sold in Oakland's `Chinatown' is better and cheaper. I assume the same or something similar is going in SF's much more famous Chinatown. This area also used to have a thriving fish market system. But now of course the region's Pacific fisheries are dying out. What I see in the fish counter is pathetic and much obviously farmed.
Instead of conspiracy theory, what I see is money, which always involves a conspiracy to hide the processes of capitalism. There are some conspiratorial elements in the form of lobbies, deals over water use, pesticides, herbicides and a lot of behind closed doors meetings in state and local government agencies. The point to that government secrecy is seen in public attitudes that would and have rejected many of these secret deals.
When I wrote about local production, that wasn't intended to mean small is beautiful. It was intended to mean within a country or region that rejected the efforts of US corporations to move into regions and start overhauling some previously working system. Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as Mexican hot house tomatoes which are tasteless. Meanwhile, fifty years ago, produce I ate in Guadalajara was local and was the most delicious stuff I ever tasted. I was forbidden to eat it, but I did any time I could.
But all that takes place here within the US as well. Doug had another guy on his show a few months ago covering the politics and waste of corn. It was evident something was wrong with US agriculture more than forty years ago, when I went to school at Uni of Iowa. Iowa City markets were pathetic to terrible. I was living right in the middle of one the prime agricultural regions in the country and I couldn't make a good tasting meal. There was problem with the water too, that help make everything tasteless.
``In fact US and Euro Ag TNC's in he top 20 of global Ag TNC's have been declining as others from the south develop and put forward their own form of capitalist controlled agribusiness...''
Glad to hear it. The fewer the better. I got interested in this whole topic because I worked for awhile as a low tech assistant in a couple of bio-science labs at UCB. I noticed one day that everything we were doing evolved very mundane plants like wheat, barley, corn, and arabidopsis T. The latter is a little weed. It is used as a `model' plant. (Novartis was after ownership of this organism. See below)
I asked myself what the hell is this all about? These are common food plants. Why are we studying food plants? It took a year or two to figure it out. The short answer was agribusiness and genetic engineering food crops.
About a year after I left, was when Novartis made its big move into the departments and caused a giant controversy. Technically, if we had been there during the year or two Novartis made the deal, they could have claimed an interest in our work with arabidopsis. They wouldn't have bothered, but as a technical issue, if anything useful or harmful to Novartis came out of our work, they might have tried something. Who knows.
I also had a rock climbing buddy who was a bio-scientist. He started off working in UCB labs. In the early 90s he moved over to Bayer to work for them. They had just opened their Berkeley facility.
I was working right in the middle of a thriving nest of big pharma and big agribusiness and didn't know it. At a guess, I still think few people who work in this industrial complex of health, medicine, food understand how their work fits into the big picture of imperial neoliberalism.
At least the scientists over at Lawrence Livermore know they are building weapons of mass destruction. Most of the people who work in Koshland Hall don't realize they are building the neoliberal destruction of the bio-sphere.
Maybe things have changed, but fifteen years ago, social consciousness in the new bio-sciences was very low. This was in sharp contrast of only a generation before. My father-in-law (HB) was a evolutionary botanist and we used to talk endlessly about plants and society their role in the social structures of culture. He had a very high sense of the ethics of science and society and held strong opinions. His particular field was topical plants co-evolution with pollinators.
HB was made aware of the politics of colonialism when he was kicked out of Ghana for being a British `subject'. His generation from the 1930's UK science world were strong on socialism. Translation, that meant that he viewed his work as a benefit to the common man. Both he and my mother-in-law came from very poor backgrounds.
The point to all that was, I never got any feeling for such a depth of conviction from the later generations at Koshland. As a consequence they were easy pickings for the corporate minded smoothies in both the university and corporations who were managing research. HB would never have put up with the kind of compromises that became common. Thinking back about him, I am not sure he ever applied for a research grant.
He was pretty much ostracized in his last years in the late 80s at UCB. We had a conversation in the late 70s about how UCB was turning into some kind of business management place. He said, he thought the administration and some of the faculty were trying to make the department into a vocational school. We didn't have the terminology used today because we could only sense the direction and hadn't seen it yet in full bloom.
So what I am saying is that while on paper it looks like the neoliberal GMOs and food production systems might be on the wane, the whole mental world through which that was developed, doesn't seem to have suffered. I don't say that as a conspiracy theory crack pot, but because I've tried to think about the lost of a certain `moral' character about doing science. I am pretty certain HB would have been involved in some capacity with the movements to save the rain forest from agribusiness exploitation. I think he already was to some degree. He spent summers in a Costa Rican field station where those issues were already becoming a problem back in the 70s. The way the issue was framed back then, was preservation of natural forests as a national treasure, i.e. not a resource. This was done through a system of national parks and biological reserves.
CG