The poorest people of Johannesburg, South Africa saw some measure of hope with a judicial reaffirmation of the country’s constitutional right to water in April 2008. However, their fight is not over because the powers arrayed against them have appealed the decision.

The 2008 global food crisis is compromising the survival of 860 million undernourished people and threatens to push a hundred million people into extreme poverty, erasing all of the gains made in eradicating poverty in the last decade. Record high prices have put food out of reach for the poorest people in the developing world, many of whom already spend more than half their income on food. Growing food insecurity is undermining tenuous civil stability in at least 33 countries, about one sixth of United Nations member countries.

Costly Returns: How Corporations Could Profit from Inflating the Already High Cost of Repairing the Nation’s Crumbling Water and Sewer Infrastructure

This report, Cargill: A Corporate Threat to Food and Farming, will show that Cargill’s vast influence on global agricultural trade threatens the health of consumers, family farmers, the environment, and even entire economies and governments.

After a series of safety scares about imported seafood in 2006 and 2007, U.S. consumers are recognizing that more than 80 percent, about 10.7 billion pounds of the seafood they eat, comes from outside the United States. Much of it is imported from Asia and Latin America, regions that have potentially unsafe production practices.

In today’s world, seeing is not believing –– at least not when it comes to meat. Because of an ill–thought decision by our Food and Drug Administration, the meat industry was allowed to inject the toxic gas carbon monoxide into your ground beef’s packaging. The gas kept the meat red and fresh looking long after it had already spoiled, and when you ate it (past its sell–by date; you looked at that, didn’t you?) you also consumed the bacterial condoplex that had sprung up in the interim.

The bacteria Salmonella is the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States with nearly a million cases of salmonellosis attributed annually to meat and poultry consumption. Of these, more than 14,000 of the victims are hospitalized and more than 400 die.

Since the 1980s, industrial horticulture and floriculture farms in Kenya, centered for the most part in the Lake Naivasha region, have grown into the largest supplier of flowers to the European market. The more than 30 flower farms in the Lake Naivasha region pose a number of serious ecological problems for Kenya’s rivers and for the lake, including loss of water, an unsustainable increase in the population because of the laborers they have attracted, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers.

Four corporations control 66 percent of the U.S. hog market, as of 2007. At the top of this list is Smithfield Foods, which slaughters 27 million hogs every year, making it the biggest hog producer and processor in the United States and world–wide. For Smithfield, this means sales of $11 billion a year, but for farmers, consumers, workers, and the environment, this concentration in agriculture has been anything but a success story.

A prima vista, la carne bovina proveniente dal Brasile potrebbe sembrare appetibile nel sapore e conveniente nel prezzo. Stanno tuttavia emergendo una serie di validi motivi che rendono consigliabile l’imposizione di un divieto d’importazione nell’Unione Europea. Nonostante un’imposta doganale del 176%, il prezzo al mercato della carne bovina brasiliana rimane talmente basso che gli allevatori di bovini in Irlanda, Scozia, Galles, Italia e in altri paesi vedono minacciata la propria esistenza.