Reply #36: fear mongering [View All]

Deciduous fruit is most dependent upon European honey bees, and while there are concerns it is not the crisis that is being portrayed in these scare campaigns. Among the hundreds of growers I talk to on a regular basis, no one is suffering fruit loss because of any bee calamity. Climate change on the other hand is a serious problem. So is the collapse of the public agricultural infrastructure and the privatization of the public Land Grant colleges, and the lack of funding for research, safety and health inspections and extension services and the various agricultural departments.

The working group at Penn State is doing some good work, and of course they are looking at pesticides. They would be remiss to do otherwise. All of the land Grant colleges are continually looking at this in all phases of agriculture. Unlike suburban environments, farming is highly regulated - people ignorant about farming have no idea how much this is true. That is probably why you are at vastly greater risk from toxic chemicals in your suburban neighborhood than you ever are from food. Every office building, every school, every grocery store and supermarket, every restaurant routinely uses pesticides, administered by untrained employees and with no regulation or oversight or controls. Many products that would never be used by farmers are for sale as consumer products, or are approved for "organic" because they are "natural" - "natural" being a meaningless term that supports an anti-science view of food safety and toxicology.

Food security is seriously threatened by "free trade" and globalization and by the destruction of local sustainable and cooperative communities by US corporations, by the deregulation of investors in the food industry, by concentration of control over the food supply in the handful of a few multinational corporations, by plantation style corporate farming - encouraged and supported by the demand from upscale yuppies in the US and northern Europe, and their desire for "natural" and "organic" foodie items and their support for and promotion of various "free market" and "consumer choice" ideas to replace robust public food policies and ag infrastructure. Family farmers and farm communities are threatened by all of this, they are not the perpetrators of this, as all of these scare campaigns are leading people to believe.

Small farmers and farm communities are in the way of the corporations, are a barrier to the total exploitation of farm land and mineral resources, are a barrier to the privatization of the food system and the destruction of the public agricultural infrastructure.

I think the bee scares, and many other food-related scare campaigns are for the purpose of distracting the public from the real problems, and many of them originate with right wing pro-corporate think tanks and are then distributed by gullible liberals and liberal organizations.

The entire food production and distribution system is under horrific pressure. There is an ongoing campaign going on attacking small family farming globally, and liberals contribute to it when they buy into the propaganda and spread it around. In the last few days we have seen false accusations of child labor law violations, the usually strawberry scare campaign (the USDA statistical services has extensive records on actually pesticide residues, or lack of same actually - the greatest danger is from imports including much imported food labeled "organic"), calls for arresting anyone who hires brown people, and now we have the bee scare again.