Global Food Homogenization Threat: How to Counter it

Conservative News DailyJanuary 4, 2023

The push toward globalism isn’t limited to political schemes; it also includes efforts to influence agriculture and homogenize food consumption around the world. While most people are not aware of this, it has led to significant changes in the sources and varieties of the food that we eat.

In many nations, bountiful supermarket shelves provide the illusion of abundance, while powerful global monopolies increasingly control food production, limiting farmers’ control over their crops and endangering plant species.

This directly affects the variety of food in our grocery stores—and its nutritional value.

Food to Extinction

In the book 2022 “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them,” Dan Saladino, author, examines why our diets have become so restrictive despite the fact that food is plentiful in wealthy nations like the United States.

Saladino, a long-time BBC food journalist, says that declining biodiversity is leading to the extinctions in some food plant species.

“Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly,” He wrote. “Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these―rice, wheat, and corn―now provide fifty percent of all our calories.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the proportion is closer to 60 percent. The FAO estimates that 15 crop plants provide 90 percent of the world’s food energy intake.

Saladino says that this dwindling variety is due to the strict control over food production by a few large corporations.

“The source of much of the world’s food―seeds―is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow [the Holstein],” He wrote.

“Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.”

Saladino told The Epoch Times that crop diversity is worth preserving because it’s “the legacy of thousands of years of farming and food production.”

“We all need to appreciate the importance of [food] diversity—for our future food security, for resilience, for health, and because it’s part of what makes us human,” He said.

Monopolies Rule the Global Food Market

As a result of laws passed in the 1990s to protect bioengineered crops, four corporations now control more than half of the world’s seeds, according to the 2021 Deutsche Welle article “Who Controls the World’s Food Supply?”

The four multinational corporations are Bayer, Corteva, and Monsanto. ChemChinaAccording to Charli Shield, they are Limagrain and, They are called “Calling them”. “staggering monopolies [that] dominate the global food supply,” Shield said that the practical result was that “more and more of the world’s food relies on less and less genetic diversity.”

The organisation Civil Eats In 2018, the monopoly was described differently by Philip Howard, Michigan State University’s researcher on consolidation in the seed industry. According to Howard, a sociologist, the “Big 4” Over 60 percent of seed sales worldwide is controlled by seed companies like Bayer, Corteva (a company created through the merger of Dow & DuPont), ChemChina (a German chemical firm) and BASF (a German seed company).

FAO expressed concern at this trend and asked, “What is happening to biodiversity?” Answering questions “The extension of industrial patenting and other intellectual property systems to living organisms has led to the widespread cultivation and rearing of fewer varieties and breeds. This results in a more uniform, less diverse, but more competitive global market.”

FAO estimated The World Food Security Council warned in 2010 that 75% of global crop diversity had been lost between 1900 & 2000.

“Biodiversity makes production systems and livelihoods more resilient to shocks and stresses, including to the effects of climate change,” The FAO reported in its 2019 Annual Report assessment, The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture.

Seed Patents

The 2022 Report No Patents on SeedsThe international coalition that produced the same name has released the following statement: “patents … granted on usages of naturally occurring genes, on seeds, on plants and [on] their harvest, represent one of the biggest threats to global food security and regional food sovereignty.”

The group said that even though the European Patent Office has stopped granting patents on conventionally-bred animals and plants, corporations are now using loopholes in order to patent randomly generated plant mutations.

These patents cover genes and genetic variations “block access to biological diversity for plant breeding,” According to the report.

Patents grant monopoly rights to plants and animals.

“If patents are granted on conventionally bred plants and animals within its geographic scope, the patent holder can exclude other breeders from using them to bring new varieties to the market,” This is the report.

In some cases, the short film series may be used. “Rich Appetites,” seed laws can make it illegal for small farmers to exchange seeds—or even to simply save them for replanting.

“Corporate control of seed violates farmers’ rights under international conventions and endangers people’s livelihoods, increasing hunger and eroding cultural traditions,” The second short film in this series is claimed by the filmmaker. “Seeds.”

“Rich Appetites,” The report, which was produced jointly by AGRA Watch (AFSA) and Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa(AFSA), examines how powerful groups can control food production around world.

“Billionaire philanthropists [such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation] are pushing U.S.-style industrial agriculture around the globe—including in Africa,” The film says so.

Industrial agriculture “is the single largest cause of biodiversity loss worldwide, fails to solve hunger, and hurts small-scale farmers and the planet,” According to the movies.

While Western-led charities may be charitable, their insistence upon imposing this farming approach has done more harm that good, AGRA Watch, and AFSA state.

According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, industrialization is good for both farmers and the poor. The foundation’s support of African farming groups, for example, comes from its commitment to “transforming smallholder agriculture into a sustainable, inclusive foundation of economic opportunity,” According to its website Discussing its agricultural development programs.

An effort to feed the world’s hungry more efficiently was what first drove the effort to modify foods for productivity and uniformity, wrote Saladino, who has traced this back to the decades following World War II. The time was a period when agriculture scientists discovered ways to produce rice, wheat. “on a phenomenal scale,” He wrote.

This was an admirable attempt. “to save millions from starvation,” It was a compromise that resulted in less food variety.

In an email to The Epoch Times, Saladino wrote: “We can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to feeding the world based around a reductionist vision of producing more and more calories. Science is just beginning to show us the complexity of many traditional foods and farming systems.

“This research deserves investment alongside new technologies. We have already lost too many genetic resources, knowledge, and skills that could help feed the world in the future.”

Solutions: Davids Face Goliath

A return to biodiversity-preserving farming practices seems impossible as long as industrial agriculture giants monopolize food production from seed to Shelf.

An important advocate for seed and food sovereignty for small farmers is Vandana Shiva, founder of the India-based Navdanya movement and Italy’s Navdanya International.

“The shift from globalization driven by multinational corporations to a progressive localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative, essential for food sovereignty,” she recently wrote.

Navdanya International has a problem with what it calls “biopiracy”—the patenting of agricultural knowledge and techniques—and encourages and conducts research, advocacy, and partnerships that help small farmers keep control over what they grow and how it is produced.

Two other groups working to change agricultural practices—the German nonprofit Foundation on Future Farming The Swiss nonprofit Biovision—recently published the optimistic Transformation of Our Food Systems: The Making of a Paradigm Shift.

The authors discuss the growing global effort to shift farming practices away from an industrialized system. They call it “anonymous.” “agroecological model.”

This model, according to the farmers, will allow them to feed an estimated 10 billion people in the world by the mid-21st Century while maintaining crop biodiversity and reducing dependence of harmful industrial practices.

Saladino provided practical advice for grocery shoppers who wanted to take part in this fight against global food homogenization.

“Technology has been one of the drivers of globalization and the homogenization of food, but technology can also provide us with a means to help preserve [food] diversity,” He said.

In his book, Saladino described meeting a farmer in southwestern China who’s saving endangered varieties of rice by selling directly to people in Chengdu and Beijing via WeChat.

“Through an app on our phones, it’s possible for more of us to have a direct relationship with farmers and food producers,” He told The Epoch Times.

These apps include Locavore and Simply Local, Farm Fresh 24/7 and Farmish.

Buy locally to cook with fresh produce.

“If all of us just cooked more seasonally, that would make a big difference to global food diversity,” Saladino said.

He recommended that you join local or regional networks that are dedicated to food sovereignty, biodiversity, and other issues. Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity And the Ark of Taste.

“We can’t replicate the relationship hunter-gatherers have with nature and biodiversity, but we can increase our awareness of the food that exists around us, the farmers and food producers in our part of the world, and the crops, fruits and other foods adapted to the places we live. One simple way of doing that is to live and eat in tune with the seasons,” He said.

Susan C. Olmstead writes about medicine and health, food, culture, and children’s literature. Her work has been featured in The Epoch Times (The Defender), Salvo Magazine (Salvo Magazine), and many other publications. She lives in northern Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie.