Blog Posts: Economy

The Ides of March – March 15 – marks the day in 44 B.C. that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate. This year in the United States, If Congress and the President reach the First of March without a budget compromise, the state of our economy could become just as bloody and the federal agencies that protect our food and water could be crippled beyond repair.

These severe cuts being threatened are part of a process that Congress invented called “sequestration,” which comes after several years of political show-downs including a committee that was anything but super, an imaginary “fiscal cliff” and deadline after deadline being pushed back. Sequestration was supposed to be the ominous bitter pill that we would never actually need because just the sheer threat of it would force both parties to behave and do their job. But here we are – about 72 hours away from 8 percent across-the-board budget cuts in many departments of the federal government. You don’t need to look much further than the front page of your local newspaper (no matter where you live) to see how these cuts will impact all of us, but particularly the most vulnerable members of society and the middle class. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

If I were to ask you to imagine that the frying pan you use to prepare meals was slowly dosing you and your family with radiation, what would you say? Or how about the steel water bottle you use to tote water? It’s not a far cry from reality if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy have their way.

This past December, the DOE released a proposal to recycle an initial 14,000 tons of radioactive metals from nuclear reactors and weapons facilities back into commercial production for consumer goods. If it gets approved, you can bet they’ll dump more of this toxic nightmare into the supply chain. 

Sadly, this is nothing new. Since the 1980s, the DOE and the NRC have been cooking up a scheme to recycle radioactive scrap metals back into consumer products. These radioactive metals, which wouldn’t be labeled as such under DOE provisions, could be used to manufacture any of a wide variety of products from metal water bottles to your children’s braces. Read the full article…

Last week, a condensed version of Andy Bellatti’s interview with Wenonah Hauter on her new book Foodopoly ran on Grist: Aisle be damned: How Big Food dominates your supermarket choices. We thought our blog readers would appreciate seeing the entire interview, which goes into the specifics on how fractured our food system really is,  how it got that way and what we can do about it.

1. In Foodopoly, you make a very convincing argument that, unlike what many in the “good food” movement think, crop subsidies are not the problem to solve, but rather the symptom of a much larger problem. Can you expand on that concept? Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Listen to Wenonah’s post-election town hall meeting

Last night, voters rejected a vision for our country that would have taken our economy, environmental regulations and consumer protections back decades. If there is one overarching lesson this election taught us, it’s that political organizing CAN overcome industry money in elections. But we can’t sit back and assume protections for our essential resources will improve; instead, we need to take lessons from the last four years and redouble our organizing efforts to press the Obama administration, Congress, and state legislatures across the country to keep our food and water safe and keep our essential resources in public hands. 



Two ballot measures Food & Water Watch worked on this cycle illustrate the need and power of organizing, even in the face of entrenched and powerful interests. 



One of the most exciting victories from election night was in Longmont, Colorado where voters passed an historic and precedent setting ballot initiative to ban fracking. We were up against incredible odds in Longmont, with the oil and gas industry spending over half-a-million dollars for TV commercials, full-page ads and multiple mailers to try to scare Longmont citizens. Governor Hickenlooper sued the citizens of Longmont to slow down our efforts and the Denver Post editorialized against this vote to ban fracking, but we were on the ground, knocking on doors, talking to voters and doing the hard work to support a citizen-led effort to protect our health, safety and property, and the citizens of Longmont spoke loud and clear. We won with nearly 60% of the vote!  

We also worked hard in California with many of our allies to pass Proposition 37, which would require labeling for all genetically engineered foods. This popular measure was only narrowly defeated at the polls, due in large part to the massive spending by large chemical and junk food companies (which outspent our side by over $40 million.) Despite this loss, support for GE food labels has never been stronger, and we will continue to build a robust national grassroots campaign to push for mandatory labeling across the country.



These measures prove what we already know: An educated and mobilized citizenry can fight back against the corporate control of our common resources, but our work is far from over. 



If you aren’t already on our mailing list, please join it now to remain informed on an ongoing basis about actions you can take to help build power to protect our food and water. We need your support to keep growing the movement! As the election demonstrated, together we can fight for the food and water protections we all want and deserve.

Mitch Jones, Common Resources Program Director

By Mitch Jones 

Although no one in the media seems to be talking about it, a meeting is taking place in Virginia that could cement the same economic interests that lead us to the 2007 crisis. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being negotiated by 13 countries would lead to increased gas exports and increased imported foods, while undermining our domestic laws and increasing the financialization of nature.

The secretive talks are in their 14^th round, having begun under George W. Bush in 2008, and have so far managed to avoid real scrutiny. Little of the document being negotiated has been made publicly available, but what we do know is frightening. The TPP would go well beyond NAFTA tearing down protections in the areas of financial services, telecommunications and intellectual property. It would create free trade for dairy, sugar and textiles. American manufacturers and farmers would suffer, while Wall Street banks reap huge profits and move more operations offshore.

The TPP is being sold as just another “free trade” agreement. But don’t be fooled, it’s so much more. Only two of the twenty-six chapters of the agreement are directly trade related. 

Read the full article…

The greenwashed economy threatens our ability to pursue sustainable development.

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch

(This post originally appeared at Otherwords.org.)

A group of international scientists says that the earth is dangerously close to its tipping point of irreversible damage. Clearly, we need a way out of the mess we’ve made of the planet.

The so-called “green economy,” which governments, business leaders, and some environmental organizations touted at last month’s United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is actually a greenwashed economy. Its proponents ask questions such as: how can we put a price on nature so as to better manage it? Or, how can we make it financially undesirable to pollute? Those are the wrong questions, and they don’t lead us to real solutions.

Putting a price on nature — as if it were a widget to be bought and sold on the market — devalues its life-giving properties. It partitions the environment off as a commodity, leaving it for sale to the highest bidder. And pollution trading is like paying a robber not to steal from your home. Neither gets to the root causes of our environmental problems: the failure to take meaningful regulatory actions and the undemocratic means by which our natural resources are managed worldwide.

As our access to the planet’s resources that once seemed endless has become limited, corporations, multinational institutions, industry-funded non-profits, and policymakers are eagerly offering market-based solutions. They typically position private interests to profit from our increased need for shared natural resources.

Calling this dangerous trend “the green economy” just isn’t appropriate. It’s more accurate to say that these special interests are promoting the same old dirty economy under a new banner. And this failure to prevent pollution threatens our ability to pursue sustainable development.

Through clever greenwashing campaigns, huge companies have somehow created the ability to buy and trade credits that they claim will curb pollution. These cap-and-trade programs do little but encourage larger companies with deeper pockets to continue with business as usual. That ultimately leads to the continued disposal of contaminants into our waterways and our atmosphere.

Likewise, thanks to relentless lobbying and a hefty advertising campaign, the oil and gas industry has managed to convince key lawmakers and consumers alike that fracking for natural gas is the key to energy independence. However, that process — formally called hydraulic fracturing or shale-gas drilling — requires large quantities of water and a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Fracking can poison drinking water supplies, air, and farmland, endangering public health.

Meanwhile, some of us are struggling to protect the marine environment from pollution and overfishing of endangered species, while large commercial interests try to privatize access to fish or acquire permits to establish aquaculture enterprises in federal waters. These factory fish farms threaten the health of ocean ecosystems. What’s “green” about that?

And while we struggle to maintain that water is a human right, multinational corporations are privatizing public water utilities in communities around the world and profiting in places where safe drinking water is scarce.

Our food system is also rigged to benefit a select few companies who monopolize markets and profit from farmers who have no choice but to sell their goods cheaply. Walmart, for example, says it wants to offer healthier food options at affordable prices, but until it changes its business model — which squeezes farmers and workers and drives food production to become more consolidated and industrialized — highly processed foods will remain more accessible than healthier, better quality food.

We must promote real solutions that involve communities in the decision making, not just companies. We must protect the land and our water and decrease carbon emissions for the benefit of the public — not for the profits of private interests.

Nature? Priceless.

By Mitch Jones

With the failure of governments to provide a vision for sustainability at Rio+20, some environmental leaders are looking to other stakeholders—mainly the private sector—to develop a green economy. But we know that corporations are, by nature, profit-seeking entities, and when you bring them to the table at a multilateral forum, they will come representing their shareholders—to whom they have a fiduciary responsibility. But with government leaders like Barack Obama and David Cameron AWOL at Rio, who was representing the rest of us and the planet?

Hopefully not guys like Robert Johnson, executive director of the Institute on New Economic Thinking. Here’s what he said at a recent event at Bard College, which was also posted on Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog:

Water and air are priced at zero…. On the other hand, if you cut off my air and water I would be willing to pay to get it turned back on. So there’s something amiss in a theory of value that doesn’t value these common resources, the common pool on which we all base our lives. Read the full article…

Watch a video explaining the financialization of nature.

By Darcey O’Callaghan and Gabriella Zanzanaini

The distance between the official UN Conference on Sustainable Development (or CSD, where heads of state, corporate stakeholders and NGOs convened this week) and the People’s Summit (an official venue for grassroots solutions) mandated between a one and two and a half-hour commute, which prohibited any meaningful dialogue between the two spaces. There were—literally and figuratively—several mountains between the two summits.

The final text for heads of state to consider makes no commitments, as evidenced by word counts. “We will” was used five times whereas “we support” was used 99 times.

It was continuously stated by the U.S., Canada, and other powerful countries that this is “not a pledging conference,” thus setting the tone for negotiations throughout the week and lowering expectations for outcomes. Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

Food & Water Watch recently published the report Public Research, Private Gain, which outlines how corporate agribusiness is purchasing influence at our nation’s land-grant universities. With hundreds of millions of dollars paying for university research, faculty chair endowments, naming rights at buildings and consulting contracts with professors, there is no shortage of examples of the ways in which corporate money is distorting the science and corrupting the public-interest mission of these schools, which seem more interested in partnering with corporations than with farmers or consumers like you and me.

The report was not received well by university administrations, who either defended the status quo or, incredibly, suggested that millions of dollars of corporate money was having no influence over the independence of their research.

While administrators are taking a defensive posture, some professors are saying that enough is enough. This week, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which represents tens of thousands of professors, released a set of principles and practices designed to counter the corrupting influence that industry influence can have and address the pervasive conflicts of interests in academia. Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

This post originally ran on Civil Eats

Unfortunately, today these public institutions are increasingly serving private interests, not the public good. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing from corporate agribusiness into the land-grant university to sponsor buildings, endow professorships and pay for research. One land-grant university, South Dakota State, is headed by a man who sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.  

The influence this money purchases is enormous. Corporate money shifts the public research agenda toward the ambitions of the private sector, whose profit motivations are often at odds with the public good. It strips our public research institutions of the time, resources and independence needed to pursue public-interest research that challenges the status quo of corporate control over our food system or that offers farmers alternative agricultural systems to monocultures and factory farms.

Industry-funded research routinely produces results that are—surprise, surprise—favorable to industry. This “funder effect” produces a well-documented bias on research while weak conflict-of-interest policies throughout academia (including at many scientific journals, which don’t require full disclosure of funding source) mean agribusiness’s pervasive influence over public research is basically unchecked. Read the full article…