[Marxism] Cuban sanctions linked to obesity in americans

[Lajany Otum]

The root of the obesity problem lies in the structure of the US agri-food sector.
There is little profit to be made by agribusiness in producing and distributing 
fresh and unprocessed food. Hence farming is structured around the production
of inedible inputs for and agri-food processing industry that converts the inedible
raw materials produced by farms into generic ingredients such as sweeteners, 
starches and fats.These ingredients form the basis for the yummy "standardised
edible commodities" that are sold to the working populace of the USA, with 
such deleterious consequences for their health. 

Furthermore, the US agricultural subsidy regime acted as a selective pressure 
which favoured farmers who produce precisely these industrial inputs for the 
agri-food processing sector. US subsidies lowered the prices that agribusiness 
had to pay the farmers for the raw materials it required, and created the 
enormous food surpluses that were then disposed of through "aid" to friendly
regimes around the world under schemes like Marshal Aid and then Public 
Law 480, and the Mutual Security act of 1951. The "aid" was at once an 
instrument to bolster client regimes around the world, and to restructure world
agriculture by depressing world prices, effectively rendering all but the input 
intensive industrial US model of farming "uncompetitive". The EU was able 
to successfully reproduce the US model of farming, and this success, along 
with that of New Agricultural Countries like Brazil, destabilised the US centred
post war food regime. Consequently, through "aid" and subsidies, and the 
competitive pressures they created, the US successfully exported its industrial 
agri-food model, and the obesity problem that comes with it, to much of the 
rest of the world. 


Good sources on the capitalist food regimes are the works of Harriet Friedmann
and Philip McMichael. (See for example, Harriet Friedmann's article in New 
Left Review of Jan-Feb 1993, and articles by Friedmann and McMichael 
separately in the collection Rural Sociology and Development Vol 11 published
by Elsevier in 2005. McMichael is "Global development and the corporate food
regime," and Friedmann is "From Colonialism to green capitalism; social 
movements and emergence of food regimes".)

Lajany Otum



Marvin Gandall writes:

> I've always understood the obesity crisis to be attributable to the 
> relatively lower cost and mass marketing of high-calorie junk and 
> pre-packaged foods on time- and income-pressured American households, no?



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