Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
Human activity led to the conditions which allowed the new coronavirus to spread from wildlife to people, a group of biodiversity experts wrote Monday, and humans alone can change the world's economic system to prevent even deadlier pandemics from causing further destruction.
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President Donald Trump’s executive order this week requiring American meatpacking plants to stay open during the coronavirus pandemic is raising new questions about massive U.S. meat exports, particularly the export of pork to China.
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According to Johns Hopkins University, as of today, COVID-19 has infected more than 3 million people and killed at least 210,000 worldwide.
Those are big numbers, considering the fact that six short months ago, few members of the general public had ever heard of the coronavirus. And almost no one was
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Many people who've never stepped into a soybean or corn field are familiar with pesticides like the cancer-linked glyphosate in Roundup and drift-prone dicamba. But chances are slim that anyone outside the pesticide and farming industries has heard a whisper about isoxaflutole, which earlier this month the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had approved for use on as much as 90 million acres of genetically engineered soybeans in 25 states throughout the Midwest.
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Congress is doing what it said couldn't be done: Passing a $10-trillion Green-New-Deal-scale economic stimulus, the biggest in American history.
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Corporate lobbyists have no shame. Neither does Congress. Or the Trump administration.
They’re using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to shovel taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers and
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I’m going to tell you the single worst story I’ve heard in these past few horrid months, a story that combines naked greed, political influence peddling, a willingness to endanger innocent human beings, utter blindness to one of the greatest calamities in human history and a complete disregard for the next crisis aiming for our planet.
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Yaak Pabst for the German socialist magazine Marx21 spoke to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press, 2016) about the dangers of Covid-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases. Marx21 released the interview in advance of its scheduled March 30 publication date.
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For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
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In mid-March, as the reality of how COVID-19 would upend daily life became real for people across the U.S. and Europe, Katja Bartholmess went out for provisions in her Berlin neighborhood. At the REWE supermarket, she found long lines and emptied shelves, apart from the odd box of pasta. By contrast, the Boxi (Boxhagener Platz) farmers market was “well visited but well stocked.”
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