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Agribusiness Quotes

Browse 24 quotes about Agribusiness.

Agribusiness Quotes

“[Agribusiness Conglomerates'] growth relies on ripping down circuit breaking, back-up systems, and modularity, and streamlining a system whose major nodes are already too big and whose links are already too strong. It's an accelerating cycle that inexorably destabilizes the system.”

GrowthResilienceEfficiencyFragilityAgribusiness
Book:Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
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“Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.”

CornAmerican CultureObesityFast FoodBig BusinessAmericansAgribusinessObesity EpidemicYou Are What You EatHfcsGeorge McgovernNixon AdministrationCorn Corn CornIt S All About The CornSolyent Green Is Corn
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”

ProductivityEfficiencyFarmingAgribusinessDairy CowsDairy FarmersMilk Production
Book:Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
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“There are more obese people in the world than starving people. As China and India start to develop our eating habits - and not by accident but because agribusiness is going over there and imposing our habits on them - if the population doesn't increase at all, we'll have to raise twice as many animals as we do.”

PeopleIfsWorldAnimalHabitEatingIndiaIncreaseRaisesPopulationChinaAccidentsStarvingImposingObeseEating HabitsChina And IndiaAgribusiness
Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“The idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people might shape the economy and government for their own benefit goes against the American grain. Nevertheless, the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant power figures in the United States. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington. Their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments.”

PeopleIdeasRealStatesGovernmentMightTogetherFormGrowthCommunityLevelsUnitedCompanyUnited StatesEconomyGroupsLandFiguresDevelopmentShapesBenefitsPropertyIncomeLocalsManagersCorporateCorporationsFixedOwnersConstructionGrainNeverthelessDominantEstatesPrivilegedFederal GovernmentCoalitionsLocal GovernmentAgribusiness
Author:G. William Domhoff
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“The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs.”

PeopleWayNeedsHas BeensRealCommonSituationPracticeGenerationsIntellectualThreatCorporationsIncapableMonopolyHandfulPharmaceuticalEnclosureAgribusiness
Author:Vandana Shiva
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“Undercover investigations threw back the curtain on the systemic exploitation of animals on factory farms. The response by agribusiness interests has been to back laws that ban animal advocates from taking pictures or videos at these facilities, and ban the media from publishing any that are taken. The laws also make it a crime for animal advocates to seek employment at animal enterprises without disclosing their intentions.”

Has BeensLawInterestAnimalTakenMediaCrimeIntentionResponseVideoEmploymentEnterpriseFarmsFactoriesInvestigationPublishingExploitationCurtainsFacilityBansTaking PicturesUndercoverAgribusiness
Author:Wayne Pacelle
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“Colombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called "Food for Peace. " It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.”

CountryBigsCoursesSoundPoorNicePlansOpeningProducersDestroyedTaxpayersWheatColombiaPoor CountriesAgribusiness
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.”

BelieveStillsConditionsCarStupidProduceBehaviorProductionsWork OutInstanceDisappointedTiedElectricBelieve In MeCommerceRollingChasingCompelledPromotingMotorCropsTransportationPhantomsRailroadsBailGeneral MotorsWalmartElectric CarGenetically ModifiedEthanolAgribusiness
Author:James Howard Kunstler
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“Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".”

HumansShowsSpiritualCommunityHoursChurchStruggleFieldsTvsCoupleLonelyClintonPainfulGenuineCorporationsZoneVillageGrimEcologicalSabbathLabsInhumanityTalk ShowsMutationMultinationalsSo LonelySweatshopsMultinational CorporationsAgribusinessGenetic MutationSpiritual CommunityDead ZoneIt Takes A Village
Book:God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
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“The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.”

FirstsHas BeensWaterAirEconomicCostRiversEcologyIncentivesManufacturingPesticidesAgribusiness
Book:Moving Beyond Words: Essays on Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender
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“Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.”

KnowsMadeImportantBigsKnow HowEnvironmentGrowingRevolutionCrisisProfitSurfaceChainsFood ChainBeneath The SurfaceAgribusiness
Book:Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!
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