Sick Planet

Stan Cox

Description

Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.



Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.



While individual efforts to 'shop for a better world' and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.
Preface

1. Health care's malignant growth

2. Feeling OK? Are you sure?

3. Side effects may be severe

4. Swallowing the Earth whole

5. 'Agroterrorists' can take a vacation

6. Down-to-a-trickle economics

7. Supernatural food

8. The world is your kitchen

9. Political impossibility vs. biological impossibility

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Sujets

• Food Industry
• Industries
• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Pharmaceutical industry
• Manufacturing
• Economics
• Business
• Industrie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849643849
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sick Planet Corporate Food and Medicine

STAN COX

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Stan Cox 2008

The right of Stan Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2741 9 (hardback) 978 0 7453 2740 2 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound in the United States of America

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Acknowledgements Preface

 1. Health Care’s Malignant Growth  “If they build it, we’ll fill it”  An unhealthy industry  Growing pains  Those bad apples  Green health care?  The model wealth creator

 2. Feeling OK? Are You Sure?  Disease mongering  Directtopatient, directtodoctor

 3. Side Effects May be Severe  Colorful India  Side effects  Cracking down?

 4. Swallowing the Earth Whole  Caution: this diet is not for everyone  Appearances and reality  All the fish in the sea  A selffattening industry

 5. “Agroterrorists” Can Take a Vacation  The industrialized farm economy  Hazards of food production  Who wants to take away our freedom?

vii viii

1 3 6 10 13 15 19

21 22 27

34 36 39 42

47 48 50 54 63

65 66 69 76

vi CONTENTS

 6. Hunger for Natural Gas  Nitrogen, human existence, and economic logic  Gas: so good it’s bad  Coal: a lousy plan B  Full jacuzzis, empty stomachs  Nitrogen: too little, too much  Needs and wants

 7. Downtoatrickle Economics  Dimming, global and local  Dark horizon  The 66,000lb gorilla in the living room

 8. Supernatural Food  Goliath junior vs. Goliath senior  Shop where you work?  Industrialstrength organic  Other routes  A gaping hole

9.

The World is Your Kitchen Some of the planet’s toughest little molecules Turning up the heat on teflon Chemical stewardship Paths of least resistance The chemical amnesty program

10. Political Impossibility vs. Biological Impossibility  Three big books  Efficiency  The European mirage  Different kinds of impossibility

Notes Suggested Reading Index

85 86 88 91 94 96 99

103 103 107 111

117 118 121 125 127 130

134 134 137 144 146 149

154 156 162 168 172

176 209 213

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many, many people, both good friends and acquaintances, for ideas and information: Andrew Jameton, Kathleen SlatteryMoschkau, Allani Kishan Rao, Shailaja, Krishna, Manoj Agarwalla, Jenardhan, S. Jeevananda Reddy, Venkat Ram, Jayaram Mamidipudi, Marty Bender, Supi Seshan, Nabil Muhanna, Rosalyn Evans, Bruce Carraway, Maria Chavez, Manuel Chavez, Miranda Cady Hallett, Tim Crews, Y.V. Malla Reddy, and Kristan Markey. For inspiration, encouragement, and writing help I will always be grateful to Wes Jackson, Harris Rayl, Bill Martin, John Exdell, David Van Tassel, Chris Picone, Scott Bontz, Jonathan TellerElsburg, Tai Moses, Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Jan Frel, and finally, Roger van Zwanenberg, who gave me the chance to write a book. And my deepest thanks go to Greg Cox (my brother and chief medical advisor), Santosh Gulati (my motherinlaw, who kept me housed, fed, and encouraged during much of the writing), Tom and Brenda Cox (my parents, whose support is perfect and unwavering), Paul Cox (my son and research assistant), Sheila Cox (my daughter and first reviewer of anything I write), and Priti Cox (my wife, love of my life, and translator—even from English to English—who was with me every step of the way and without whom I could never have done this).

vii

PREFACE

My aim in writingSick Planetis neither to catalog the ecosphere’s many grave symptoms nor supply a prognosis. You already know that the global outlook is grim and getting worse. Instead, I will show how ecological damage happens in two essential parts of our lives—health care and food—and argue that the changes needed to reverse that damage are much more radical than the dilute quartermeasures currently being proposed in Washington and other capitals. Agriculture, food processing, and medicine generate smaller shares of total greenhouse carbon than do, say, personal transportation or indoor “climate control.” But looking at the totality of life on Earth has led some of the key scientists in the mammoth Millennium Ecosystem Assessment project to the conclusion that agriculture plays a central role in “confronting 1 the human dilemma.” And medicine, one of the fastestgrowing sectors in industrialized economies, has become fully intertwined with food production. The stories in this book illustrate how all economic growth is ecologically destructive and why all of these sectors will have to be reined in together. Furthermore, it is crucial not to allow the biggest crisis looming ahead of us— rapid climate change—to blind us to other ecological problems that are already an everyday reality to impoverished people and threatened species on every continent. I can’t make that case any more sharply than did Garret Keizer in the June 2007 issue of Harper’smagazine. “Global warming, we are told, will have the most devastating effects on the world’s disadvantaged,” wrote Keizer. Therefore, according to too many experts, “we need not care so particularly about the world’s disadvantaged; we need care only about global warming—as mediated, of course, by those who stand to make a bundle off it.” Keizer concluded,

viii

PREFACEi x

You do not repair the climate of an entire planet without staggering sacrifices unless the burden is shared with something like parity. To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wars, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for 2 most of us.

It’s too easy to see us all having a common interest in curbing climate change, whether we are tycoons or working people, whether we live in a powerful or a weak nation—to stress, in the words of former VicePresident and current climatechange 3 ambassador Al Gore, that “we’re all in this together.” True, but some of us are “in it” much deeper, and destined to sink much, much deeper, than others. And those divisions have everything to do with the causes of humanmade climate change. The class struggle hasn’t ended after all; it’s going into sudden death overtime. The global economy has proven itself capable of producing environmental misery and devastation at least as efficiently as it produces wealth. Those two faces of economic growth may be best illustrated by the ways in which the food and medical industries meet our fundamental biological needs. Each of this book’s first nine chapters will illustrate contradictions in the way economic lifesupport systems operate in the world’s second and third largest nations: India and the United States. More specifically, these chapters will show that:

• The fastestgrowing major industry in the US, one meant to improve people’s health, is instead undermining health— both directly and by degrading natural systems on which human wellbeing depends. • Drug companies are achieving growth not only by making remedies for people who are sick, but also by creating whole new populations of sick consumers. • The very symptoms meant to be treated by drugs manufactured in India for export are appearing among

x PREFACE

people exposed to pollution from bulkdrug factories there; even their ability to grow food is being lost. • Nutritional products meant to cure health problems caused by overproduction and overconsumption end up stimulating greater consumption. • As America mobilizes to protect industrial agriculture against terrorists, agriculture itself is doing the very kind of damage that terrorists are said to be planning. • A “cleaner” fossil fuel increasingly being relied upon to curb global warming will be consumed at a rate that may threaten soil fertility and food production in countries already endangered by global warming. • Rapid industrialization, being relied upon to pull a billion South Asians out of deep poverty, could end up weakening monsoon rains, making people even poorer and hungrier. • Retailers are managing to sell more pleasing, healthful food, but almost exclusively to the welltodo, and only by employing people who can’t afford those very luxuries. • Chemical compounds manufactured to help people cook in a more healthful way have been found in the bloodstreams of humans and other animals all over the planet—possibly causing cancer and other diseases.

There follows a tenth chapter that examines questions raised throughout the first nine, with help from three thinkers going back a century and a half: Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen, who demonstrated that all economic activity, whatever its purpose and however well it is done, inevitably accelerates the depletion of resources, production of waste, and sickening of ecosystems; Karl Marx, whose work showed how the essential mainspring of capitalism is the pursuit of insupportable growth; and William Stanley Jevons, who demolished the idea that resource efficiency alone can reconcile limitless growth with ecological sustainability.

PREFACExi

The pages that follow will be populated with companies and individuals that are pushing the planet toward ecological ruin, but only as part of their routine, almost always legal, operations. And I won’t be picking on especially bad examples. Sure, we’ll encounter some scandalridden healthcare corporations and meatpacking firms that have no qualms about ravaging their workers’ health. But I’ll go the hardest on those with seemingly good intentions, because they illustrate how idealism cannot tame capitalism’s nasty side. I’ll try to show that the planet’s current predicament is not necessarily the work of evil, scheming tycoons bent on personal enrichment. Rather, it’s the natural product of a system that rewards the industrious capitalist who pours a life’s energy into building a vigorous, growing business in a competitive world. Just as we can’t blame the current global predicament on “bad” corporate executives, we can’t expect the “good” ones to come to the rescue. When corporate owners and managers claim they can’t operate in greener ways without sacrificing essential profits, they aren’t just being stubborn and greedy; they are acknowledging material reality. The immediate causes of the destruction and misery that I’ll describe may be industries or corporations or investors, but lying behind all of those is capitalist economics. If the human species, against all odds, finds an alternative to capitalism, it won’t necessarily save the Earth. But if we find no alternative to capitalism, the Earth cannot be saved. Efforts by “green” capitalists to pursue a socalled “triple 4 bottom line” by accounting for the wellbeing of people and nature along with profits, are as doomed as any effort to build a perpetualmotion machine. When those three goals come into conflict, as they inevitably will, it’s the bottombottom line—profit—that must take priority. I also take no comfort in predictions that capitalism will erode its own foundations, eventually crumbling along with the breakdown of ecosystems and depletion of resources, ushering in a new, green era. John Bellamy Foster has argued convincingly that the astonishing ability of the capitalist system to adapt to almost any development, including 5 environmental catastrophe, makes it all the more dangerous.