"We have even had visitors from the farming world who have come to the sanctuary, spent some time working with animals, and left aspiring vegans." Gene Baur
Farm Sanctuary is an amazing place and Gene Baur, an unusual farmer. He doesn't raise cattle, he protects them, he doesn't confines pigs and chicken, he let them live their lives. The concept behind Farm Sanctuary is rare: consider farm animals as individuals with rights and liberty instead of just production units (which is an industry term). Although Animal Sanctuaries are more common nowadays (thankfully), Farm Sanctuary is the one that seems to have started it all. Gene Baur doesn't just promote respect and empathy towards "food" animals but also provide for educational visits to people from all over. Along the way, some people have left the sanctuary as newly converted vegans which I find quite an achievement.

This is a beautiful book which will make you submerge yourself in the world of several animals and their stories are so amazing that you will fall in love with them. I cannot for once imagine why somebody, who just read this book and got to know these animals, would want to eat them again. It is beyond me. Why do people consider eating animal flesh so important? When I read about these beautiful animals and about their intelligence and socialibility, I wonder why would God create creatures that can suffer and be adorable just to be eaten. Am I the only one who thinks it's illogical here?

Gene Baur is the kind of person I would want to work for if I could. Helping animals on a daily basis like he does and demonstrates in his book is at times frustrating (because of human laws) and rewarding (the joy of saving even just one life).

I recommend this book highly for anyone interested in looking beyond their plates into the eyes of their "food".

 

In this absolutely brilliant analysis of the free trade ideology, Naomi Klein explains how free trade came into being starting with Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics going all the way to the privatization of Iraq. I personally think, after reading this book, that Milton Friedman has created more damage to the world, killed (although not directly) more people in the world than Hitler ever did. And I mean that a 100%.

What is the shock doctrine? It is using disasters and crises in a country in order to force radical privatization of every sectors of a country's economy. The result is increased poverty due to massive layoffs following extensive deregulation which profit only a minority (the rich business one of course). The governments are forced to submit to the World Trade Organization and its US sponsored cronies. It therefore enriches a minority and impoverishes the majority.

Naomi Klein also goes into excellent detail about American imperialism and how it is directly linked to American corporations' desire to dominate markets in other countries, even when they are not wanted. Is it any wonder that McDonald's is all over the planet and represses local activists with big weapons? If a country rejects an American Corporation, it usually is put in serious troubles by American interests. The World Bank or the American military will probably get into action sooner or later. The scariest part of it all is the willingness of the NeoCons (or NeoLiberals as they are called in Europe) to destroy substantial social and governmental infrastructures in order to promote their agenda of free trade ideology. From Chile to Russia and from Sri Lanka to China, there is an, apparently, unstoppable weaponry of supposed experts (lead by their mentor Freedman) destroying economies in country after country.

After feeling seriously depressed by everything Naomi Klein brilliantly is exposing, fortunately there was the final chapter. She goes into an overall expose of some of the grassroots movements against globalization in the world. Hope is definitely there and we shouldn't be feeling oppressed in the view of the remarkable work a lot of people are doing in many places. The free trade ideology, just like any tyranny, will just die off once it has expired its supposed usefulness and people really reclaim their local economies. There is a growing movement towards this end.

The Shock Doctrine, I have no doubt, is one of the best books I have read in years. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the current social inequalities of the world. The answers are all there. Simply brilliant!

On May 2003, following the US troops invasion of Baghdad, the Iraq's seed bank located in Abu Ghraib, was destroyed. In its place, the US forces led by Paul Bremer forced Iraqi farmers to accept US genetically modified seeds and turned Iraq into a giant experiment for the biotech industry. The occupation of this country has been used as an excuse to remold Iraqi Agriculture to fit American agribusinesses interests and the free trade ideology.

There is no regulation on these "foods" because the government agencies which could have regulated this new technology were deregulated at the start of the 80's by Reagan and the following administrations. The birthplace of biotechnology is Hawaii. The Hawaiian story is symptomatic of what's happening around the world. The GMO papayas in Hawaii contaminated up to 50% of the non GMO papayas. And just like with other GMO crops didn't contribute to the local economies but made them worse contrary to what the biotech industry would have us believe.

The author sums up the GMO industry very well when she says: "The problem is GMO manufacturers are a chemical industry posing as agriculture. they say they are about creating life. Their advertisements always show happy faces and healthy plants. But what they're really about is death, the poisoning of weeds and insects." The real scary part about transplanting genes, besides contamination, is the kind of "mutant" crops they "create": corn with jellyfish genes, human genes in tobacco, sugar cane and rice, wheat genes in chicken. Shouldn't we reject this as a violation of the natural order and therefore consider this immoral? Claire Hope Cummings does in fact make a case against it and then goes into an historical account of the way native societies (from Polynesian to Native American) have delt with nature and showed reverence for it in stark contrast with our western ways.

But it gets better! The FDA wants to approved transgenic fish, which will kill up to 60,000 wild fishes over 40 generations (which is not long in a fish lifetime). And what about Monsanto? This company has so much blood on its hands with Agent Orange in Vietnam, you would think it had enough. But no, it gives hormones to cows and it loves to sue small farmers over so called crop contamination. Monsanto has been seen as the devil over the years for the way it consolidates and dominates the seed industry, suing and ruining small farmers to enforce its patents and therefore to CONTROL THE FOOD SUPPLY. I personally hate Monsanto. Ok, it's not exactly an objective review but I defy anyone to find me anything remotely good about this company.

The other scary part of the problem with GMO technology is worrying me even more is that "now, just four multinational agrochemical corporations decide what plants are grown, what foods and drugs are produced, and what price will be paid for many of life's basic necessities. The corporations are strengthening their grip on all aspects of the food system. Genetic Engineering and its patented products are both a tool for accomplishing this control and an end in themselves. Companies want market control; governments want political control. Either way, when these organizations exert top-down control over the food supply, ordinary people no longer have a say over what they eat. Since seeds are the first link in the food chain, when they are owned by a few multinational corporations, those corporations, and not the citizens of the world, will decide the future of food."

Despite all the gloom in this book, the author offers some home by showing us that there is a growing grassroots movement towards sustainable, organic and more humane agriculture. People are organizing more and more and are rejecting the models imposed by the corporate elite. I am very hopeful and convinced that the future of our food will have to take a turn for the better as the alternative is too dire to imagine. This book is an excellent complement to the books by Jeffrey Smith whom "Seeds of Deception" I have reviewed previously (see several pages earlier).