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Vol. 2 Issue 03 March 2017 www.Trillions.biz

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In this Issue05 How a Smart Diet Could Change the World

09 Trump's Attack on Our Food Supply

10 Megatrends Driving Food Prices Up

13 Contractor Sentenced to 68 Months for Theft of Labor Union Funds

14 Saudi Lobbyists Recruit Veterans to Combat 9/11 Law Suit

16 Trump's Wall: Needed Security, Monument to Stupidity or Something Else?

19 Africa: Rich in Resources and Even Richer in Corruption

22 Building a Strength-Based Culture

25 Habits of Highly Effective Agribusiness Tyrants

28 Trump's War on Wetlands

29 In Search of Solutions to the Food-Price Dilemma

31 Food: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Your Table

34 New Antibiotics Urgently Needed to Combat Resistant Bacteria

Trillions is published monthly by the North America Procurement Council, Inc. PBCPO Box 40445, Grand Junction, CO 81504 * TEL 302-450-1923 * www.NAPC.pro

Copyright © 2017 All Rights Reserved

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In the Chinese life-force energy discipline, Qigong, there is an advanced state of being called Bigu in which a person does not need to eat anything for months or even years. Instead of food, a person merely subsists on Qi (life-force). Records of the phenomenon go back more than two thousand years and it has been studied extensively by scientists and confirmed as real. PennState even held a Bigu con-ference in 2000.

The reality for most of us is that we have to eat and now that there are 8 billion people on the planet, what we eat collectively has massive and far reach-ing consequences for the planet.

Because much of our food is genetically modified and contaminated with increasing amounts of toxic chemicals, the health consequences of what we eat have become more severe.

Humanity cannot continue on its present food course for much longer. As our population continues to grow, climate change impacts crop production and the food industry makes us sicker, fundamental change becomes ever more urgent.

This fundamental change is starting to occur. More people are waking up and choosing to buy local and organic food. The popularity of farmers markets has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years as con-sumers start to reject the industrial food system and support their local growers.

More grocery stores are offering organic food and claiming to sell local produce. Organic food sales in the U.S. continue to experience double-digit growth year after year and in 2015 reached $43.3 billion.

In 2009, only 1% percent of the US population re-ported eating vegetarian or vegan. Now, 5% of the United States population is vegetarian and half of those people are vegan. 33% of Canadians are either already vegetarian or reducing their meat consump-tion. In Britain, the number of vegans has increased by 360% in the last 10 years.

How food is grown is evolving as well. Aquaponics combines aquaculture with hydroponics for a chem-ical-free intensive food system and LED lighting is making it vastly more economical to grow food in-doors. As the price of solar keeps dropping it has never been less expensive to grow healthy food in-doors.

The growing agroecology movement is enabling more people around the world to create healthier and more sustainable food production systems that can better withstand climate change.

In this issue of Trillions we will explore the Smart Food Revolution from multiple perspectives and of-fer information that can help you make vital changes in your own life, family and community.

Tim Loncarich, Publisher

From the Publisher

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Trillions is the official publication of the North America Procurement Council (NAPC), a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation whose primary mission is to make government procurement open-access and transparent in order to provide more opportunities to more companies, reduce costs to taxpayers, stimulate the North American economy and reduce corruption.

In 2017 we expect to provide more than 1 million business opportunities to more than 2.5 million businesses through more than 115 web sites. The estimated contract value of these business opportunities will be more than $3 trillion.

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In addition to providing free business opportunities and a public procurement solution, we offer market intelligence, productivity tools, publish news and offer free classified business ads.

The NAPC is member supported. To explore the many ben-efits of membership please visit www.NAPC.pro or call us at 302-450-1923. Together, we can make a difference.

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By Tim Loncarich

Some readers may feel uncomfortable reading the follow-ing. If you prefer temporary comfort over positive change then please skip to our next article.

The only topic more emotionally explosive than poli-tics or religion is diet. So, lets get explosive and blow up some obsolete belief systems and destructive be-havior.

What if you could greatly reduce your carbon foot-print, be healthier and happier, live longer and save money simply by changing your diet to one that is more varied, more delicious and more nutritious?

Would you do it?

What if changing your diet meant that more people could eat and not go hungry?

What if not doing so could contribute to the mass extinction of life on Earth?

What if the diet was plant-based and excluded ma-terials from dead animals and the bodily secretions of live animals?

Is there any good reason NOT to do it?

Most North Americans are unwilling to significantly change their diet under any circumstances, even if not doing so will kill them prematurely and rob the rest of the world of a future.

That may change soon because we are at the point where more people must change their diet or suffer grave consequences.

With almost eight billion people on the planet, we can no longer feed most people a meat-based diet without causing even more catastrophic damage to the plan-et. There is simply not enough land to grow enough grain or grass to feed the animals to feed to people and much of the land already in use must be refor-ested to soak up the carbon we have spewed into the atmosphere.

We can't keep cutting down more forest to grow more soybeans to feed pigs, chickens and cows to feed hu-mans. Continuing to do so means mass extinction for most life, including humans.

The good news is that there is no nutritional require-ment for humans to consume meat—none, nada, zero. We can get all of the nutrients we need from plant sources, just like many other species do, including the great apes, our closest relatives.

The first person to win the Iron Man Triathlon three times in a row was vegan Brendan Brazier. The Iron-Man is one of the most grueling and difficult athletic competitions ever devised and consists of a 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride and a 26.22-mile (42.20 km) marathon run, all done-without a break in fewer than 17 hours.

How a Smart Diet Could Save the World

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Many of the world's leading athletes are vegan, which completely debunks the idea that athletes need to consume animal protein.

Forty percent of the population in India subscribes to a vegetarian diet and 25% of British women are now vegetarian. A meat free diet is not only possible, but is highly desirable on many levels. Following are some of the good reasons to reduce meat consumption.

Diet and Health

Despite the vast amount of industry sponsored disin-formation, the leading cause of illness and premature death actually is diet.

In North America, clogged arteries (atherosclerosis) is the leading cause of stroke and premature death. While genetics play some role, arteries mostly be-come clogged from the wrong diet, stress and lack of exercise.

Atherosclerosis can be reversed in most cases by changing to a vegan diet, reducing stress and exer-cising. Vegans almost never have clogged arteries. In fact, a vegan diet is the only diet that can reverse heart disease and is recommended by some health insur-ance companies.

Eating meat and dairy also contributes to cancer, which is the second leading cause of death. Even the World Health Organization now classifies red meat and processed meat as carcinogenic.

Farm animals are usually kept in highly unsanitary and tortorous conditions. They are fed, sometimes force-fed, an unnatural diet containing a wide range of toxins. The toxins are concentrated in meat, fish and dairy products. Many of the toxins concentrated in an-imal products are known to cause cancer. Ninety-five percent of human exposure to the potent carcinogen dioxin comes from consuming meat and dairy.

In the United States alone, there are 75 million cas-es of food poisoning each year. Five thousand people die from the food poisoning directly but many more die from the long-term effects. The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims that 70% of food poisoning is caused by contaminated animal flesh.

Roxarsone, one of the antibiotics used in factory farms, contains significant amounts of the most car-cinogenic form of arsenic. Consuming just 2 ounces of chicken exposes a consumer to 3 to 5 micrograms of inorganic arsenic, which causes cancer, dementia, neurological problems, and other diseases in humans.

The toxins found in meat and dairy are passed on to the human fetus from the mother. More than 50% of

children born in the U.S. have some sort of serious health problem.

Most farm animals are dosed with high levels of ever more powerful antibiotics, which results in anti-biot-ic resistant bacteria. The super-bugs produced by the meat and dairy industry pose a serious threat to wild-life and humans.

The gene that gives bacteria resistance to most anti-biotics is now jumping from one type of bacteria to an-other. Doctors are already running out of options when treating simple infections as they find more infections that are unresponsive to any available antibiotic.

Currently, nearly a million people die each year world-wide from anti-biotic resistant infections and the num-ber is expected to increase exponentially.

Industry lobbyists ensure that government won't ban the use of antibiotics in the meat industry so it is up to each of us to stop our own contribution.

The human body is essentially a self-propelled self-regulating container of water filled with microbes, chemicals and organs. The food we eat feeds and im-pacts the factory of approx. 1,000 different types of microbes in our digestive tract called the microbiome.

The microbiome is also where our immune system starts and a healthy microbiome needs a healthy diet.

What we eat determines how effective our microbi-ome is at producing the nutrients our body and brain needs and influences how we feel and think.

A bad diet can result in a substantially different mi-crobiome which can contribute to physical as well as mental illness. In fact, it is the microbiome's response to a meat heavy diet that contributes to clogged ar-teries.

Diet and the Environment

The leading cause of environmental degradation and climate change is the human diet.

Deforestation: Almost half of the Earth's forests have been destroyed for grazing or to grow grain. 70% of the grain grown in the U.S. is fed to animals, not peo-ple. Half of the Earth’s land mass is already grazed, and degraded by livestock.

The Wageningen University & Research Centre reports that 80% of deforestation around the world is for ag-riculture. The vast majority of new deforestation for agriculture is to support meat production.

Pesticides and herbicides: The corn and soy grown to feed animals is mostly genetically modified and re-

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quires massive amounts of toxic chemicals to grow. These chemicals end up in the environment and in our bodies.

The mostly commonly used herbicide, glyphosate (Roundup), damages DNA and radically alters soil bi-ology and the human microbiome. By scrambling the DNA of soil microbes and our microbiome it creates entirely new pathogens that wildlife and humans may have no inherent resistance to.

Glyphosate is now found in the blood of most peo-ple on Earth at levels high enough to cause adverse health impacts. Many countries have banned the deadly chemical but in North America its use is grow-ing rapidly despite the fact that it is now well known to cause serious illness.

A study published in the Journal of Organic Systems correlated the massive increase in deaths and dis-ease in the United States to the increase in the use of glyphosate.

Water: It takes 1,800 to 2,400 gallons (6,800 to 9,000 l) of water to produce a single pound of beef.

Meat production is by far the biggest contributor to polluted rivers and streams in the US, with more than 60,000 (96,000 km) miles of streams in the U.S. pollut-ed by feedlots.

The fertilizer and manure run-off from fields used to grow food for animals has created vast dead zones in the oceans. The number and size of marine dead zones has doubled each decade since the 1960s.

The drinking water in nearly every Midwestern city south of Chicago is contaminated with the agricultur-al chemicals used primarily for crops to feed animals.

Wildlife: Every major ecosystem is in a state of de-cline and countless species are being pushed into extinction by the meat industry from deforestation, pesticides and herbicides, super-germs and the new pathogens created by glyphosate.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion, 85% of global fish stocks are "overexploited, de-pleted or recovering from depletion."

Air pollution & climate change: Industrial agriculture is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases and cause of global warming and climate change.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, former chair of the UN Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urges peo-ple to reduce or eliminate their consumption of meat as the single most effective thing they can do now to reduce their contribution to climate change.

According to David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who studies energy use in agriculture, it takes about 284 gallons (1,075 l) of oil to produce one steer in the U.S. Reducing meat consumption is essential for the refor-estation necessary to remove carbon from the atmo-sphere, cool the planet and reduce drought.

Research at the Oxford Martin School shows that merely adopting global dietary guidelines would cut food-related emissions by 29%, vegetarian diets by 63%, and vegan diets by 70%.

“What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment,” says Dr Marco Spring-mann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, who led the study.

Diet and Economics

The cost of a meat-based diet to public health is stag-gering and unsustainable.

Health care costs in the U.S. are the highest in the world and are now more than $3.3 trillion each year, or $10,000 per person. The share for a family of three is $30,000 a year.

Easily preventable with a smart diet, clogged arteries alone costs the U.S. economy more than $1 billion each day in direct medical costs. And the cost to the economy from lost productivity is vastly more.

37% of medical costs are in the form of Medicare and Medicaid, paid for by taxpayers and soon to be cut by Donald Trump to give more money to the war industry.

Because the U.S. federal government doesn't actually have the money to pay for Medicare and Medicaid, the money is borrowed. The debt is now at $20 trillion and the federal government must keep borrowing just to pay the interest.

In North America, the cost of meat and dairy products is subsidized heavily by tax payers in the form of $25 billion a year in financial subsidies to the agricultural industry, which ends up mostly in the pockets of the largest corporations, some of them multi-national criminal corporations like Chevron.

Worldwide, more than a trillion dollars in savings could be easily realized each year by simply reducing meat consumption significantly.

Switching to a smart diet means eating more locally grown organic produce and less food produced by a destructive industrial food system. This means more local jobs, healthier and more productive people and more vibrant economy. It also means that more peo-ple can live in rural areas and enjoy the benefits of

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smaller communities with greater democracy.

World Hunger

A diet high in meat means less food for others.

It is estimated that people who eat beef use 160 times more land, water and fuel resources to sustain their diets than people with a plant-based diet.

The one acre required to produce 250 pounds of beef could instead produce:

• 61,000 lbs (28,000 kg) of potatoes or• 37,100 lbs (17,000 kg) of apples or• 65,000 lbs (29,000 kg) of onions

Nearly 1 billion people suffer from chronic hunger while more than 2 billion are obese.

Diverting grain to feed animals increases the price of not just grain but also other crops that could have been grown on the same land. Higher food prices means that more people can't afford to buy food.

While the lack of food in some regions is not always related to the dietary choices of others, consuming less meat is one way to help ensure that more food is available to others and that food is more affordable to all.

How to Make the Switch to a Smart Diet

If you are a meat-eater and have continued to read this far then I applaud your willingness to consider new information.

A smart diet is one that doesn't destroy the planet or one's health. It also happens to be vastly more eco-nomical when all things are considered. Yet most peo-ple won't choose a smart diet and will conjure up all

kinds of excuses and justifications for eating meat and even express animosity for non-meat eaters.

Food is a sensitive issue and actually changing one's diet is not easy, but it is certainly possible and can be an essential step in conscious evolution.

What we choose to eat is to a great extent programmed into us in childhood and some foods can be highly ad-dictive. We are also bombarded with highly effective advertising and social engineering designed to get us to buy unhealthy food.

Then there is the peer pressure. Family and friends may not understand the wisdom of switching to a smarter diet and may be resistant to education and apply tremendous pressure to conform to their diet.

When I decided to change my diet 35 years ago I ex-plained to others how I wanted to be the first male in my family to not die of a heart-attack, have a by-pass operation or go on medication. That seemed to work and today I am the only male over 40 in my family line that is not suffering from clogged arteries. I am also the only male herbivore in my family.

I was not raised a vegetarian and it took six months to no longer crave cheese and two years to stop craving chicken but I had no problem ending my consumption of pork or beef.

One thing that can really help reprogram one's dietary system is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). It can help you change the way you feel about food and dis-mantle obsolete emotional programming related to food.

Education is also helpful. Fully realizing the many ben-efits of a smart diet strengthens one's resolve.

It is important to eat a wide variety of fresh non-GMO fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains and nuts. If you adopt a vegan diet you may need to take a vitamin B12 supplement from time to time and should be sure to get some sun once in awhile for vitamin D.

A truly smart diet is also one that consists of unpro-cessed organically grown local food.

Growing your own food is becoming increasingly im-portant and is not difficult.

We have a choice about what kind of future we want. We can choose to destroy our health and our planet with an inappropriate diet or we can adopt a smart diet that could change our future and the future of our children for the better.

Image: Scheff

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After only a little over a month since Donald Trump became America's unelected President, it is becoming more apparent than ever that he will be targeting just about every aspect of our lives. One of those is our food supply.

Trump’s promise to remove regulations affecting big businesses and his cabinet of the corrupt and mean will ensure that food safety will become a thing of the past and our food supply will become even more toxic and expensive.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos: She’s a fierce ad-vocate of private approaches to public education, so, among other things, don’t assume she will be increas-ing support for local food supplies or organic food pro-grams for local schools. Betsy wants to destroy public education and replace it with unregulated religious in-doctrination centers.

Betsy bought her way into Washington with money from the Amway fortune she married into. Amway is a highly successful but predatory and cultish multi-level marketing enterprise that was the subject of a 6-year U.S. federal investigation as a pyramid scheme and fined $28 million by Canada for defrauding the coun-try on customs duties.

Her brother happens to be Erik Prince, former CEO of 'Death Squads Incorporated', a criminal corporation formerly named Blackwater, then XE and now Academi. Prince is a long-term supporter of clients like Monsan-to–and its toxic GMO product lines.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry: The former Texas gov-ernor made some of his food positions known back when he was Texas’ Secretary of Agriculture. In that role he helped make possible the unconstitutional “food slander” laws, making it a crime for someone to openly “disparage” (tell the truth about) agribusiness corporations.

Perry's anti-free speech law ended up bringing even Oprah Winfrey in court after she truthfully said that the beef industry’s practice of recycling blood, manure and slaughterhouse waste into cow feed was a cause of CJD, also known as “mad cow disease.”

Perry also supported large corporate agribusinesses, praised Monsanto and supported junk-food producers like McDonald’s.

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt: A former Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt was one of the first in the country to sue the EPA over its “Waters of the United States” rule developed to protect drink-ing water from factory farm waste. He is also on re-cord as being a supporter of GMOs and the fossil fuel industry, both of which need more (not less) curtailing.

During Trump's campaign he vowed to abolish the EPA and Pruitt is certainly the man for the job.

Under Pruitt we can expect our air, water and food to become increasingly polluted and a sickened popula-tion to become even more ill, medical costs to soar and life expectancy to decline even further.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions: The former Alabama senator is on record as being a strong supporter of the Monsanto-Bayer merger, which would provide GMO producer Monsanto with an even bigger war chest to continue its crimes against humanity. Sessions also voted for the DARK Act to prevent states from requir-ing labeling of toxic GMOs and has made it clear that he believes states cannot mandate labeling of GMOs.

Sessions is likely to be the yes-man that paves the way for a criminal corporate dictatorship.

Dept. of Agriculture head Sonny Perdue: The former governor of Georgia is on record as supporting factory farms at almost all costs, with everything that goes with them. In 2009, for example, he signed off on a law blocking local communities from passing any regula-tions involving animal cruelty, pollution or other haz-ards from factory farms.

Past backers for Perdue's political campaigns in-clude Monsanto and other pesticide companies. The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry propaganda group promoting GMOs, named him its “2009 Governor of the Year” for all the support he gave its causes in the state.

Perdue was so supportive of the unbridled profits of the large industrial food producer that the president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association came out quickly to praise Trump’s nomination of Perdue to lead the USDA, saying that the association “looks forward to working with [Perdue] on issues key to keeping America’s food the safest and most affordable food supply in the history of the world.” A loose translation of the propaganda statement is that under Perdue no regulation will be left unturned to further the interests of the industrial agriculture cartel and that profits will soar at the expense of the consumer.

With this sort of “leadership” in place driving the U.S. administration’s food supply policies for the next four years, it is no wonder that many of our stomachs are already churning in anticipation of what’s ahead–and what we will be stuck with on the dining tables of America.

If you aren't supporting your local organic growers and growing your own food, now is a great time to start, while you still can. America's already toxic industrial food supply is about to get even more poisonous.

Trump's Attack on Our Food Supply

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By Brad Reddersen

The value chain is one reason why food markups are so high by the time they get to retail. Behind that, how-ever, is the overall trend that food prices continue to go up and up, almost without control. And there are megatrends driving those prices up that are to a large extent at least human driven if not easily curtailed. Understanding them could be a key to ensuring our long-term access to healthy food at good prices.

Trend 1: Demand Rising Higher Than Supply

For a number of reasons, many outlined below, our global food supply is just not growing anywhere near as fast as the demand for it. In the developed world, that demand is about the latest food items and in-creased insistence on freshness and an almost-per-fection-driven desire for things like produce with no blemishes. New products, either in new forms or from new regions, are also becoming a reason for mar-ket-driven price increases.

In developing markets, the rapid rise of middle-class incomes in countries often thought of as third-world –within Asia and Africa in particular–is also behind some of this increased demand.

In these regions, when incomes were lower, the lack of ability to buy food at all was more of a concern, and

the lowest-cost products were more than suitable. Now, however, with incomes rising especially within the larger middle classes in those regions, more peo-ple are jumping on the bandwagon for better end-prod-uct quality.

Along with all of this is the increasing pressure from the sheer increasing size of the human population de-manding food. While year-to-year numbers may seem to be easily handled by food providers and the market-place, the rapidly increasing size of the human race seems destined to dwarf all other issues involved in the increasing demand.

In the face of lower supply, the higher demand eventu-ally just pushes prices up. And some of that is–very bluntly–because one or more of those who control the supply of food to the consumer decide to take advan-tage of that demand and increase profit margins at a cost to all of us.

Trend 2: An Increasingly Complicated Supply Chain from Farm to Fork

Another kind of increased demand that is also operat-ing is the desire to have access to more goods in more places at virtually any time of the year.

That result adds additional distance between the source providers of foods and their eventual custom-

Megatrends Driving Food Prices Up

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ers. The larger distance means more handling steps in the process and more opportunities for what the industry calls “shrink,” the term for losses from either damage or theft, at every step in the process.

There are also increased demands for more complex food goods – foods that are trimmed, processed, cooked, mixed with other ingredients and repackaged. Items such as peanut butter, soups, canned vegeta-bles, fish, meat, frozen-food options and more are not only common parts of our daily diet; they are also increasingly complicated in how they are made. And there are items that once seemed short-term fads, such as picked and prewashed salad green mixes, which are now considered a staple of many middle- to upper-class consumers. This is in spite of these latter food items being more costly to produce, with additional shrinkage considerations, than the raw veg-etables that the average person would be more than capable of turning into a nearly gourmet meal – if they just took a few more minutes a day to prepare them.

Trend 3: Organic Food as a High Profit Center

With customers increasingly interested in higher qual-ity food, the demand for organic food has been grow-ing for some time. It is now very much out of the “fad” category and has merged into the mainstream.

In the early days, organic food was simply food that met the legal definition of organic. That definition meant no use of pesticides or artificial fertilizers as part of the farming process. It was, in fact, the way things had always been produced before there were things like pesticides and artificial fertilizers.

Growing organic food – again, back in the “old days” –required some common sense and basic knowledge. One needed to find ways to deal with specific pests that could bring down an entire crop if not dealt with. Mixing different kinds of plants among the ones in-tended for harvest and sale could actually help push those pests away. (And this is, in fact, one of the ways organic growers providing grapes for wine use protect their crops without the need for pesticides.) Grinding up unused parts of the harvest and taking manure from farm animals provided natural means of fertiliz-ing soils. Crop rotation– the concept of occasionally letting the soil regenerate from time to time without further planting or by planting something different in it–was also a normal part of life.

“Organic” was just the way food was produced for thousands of years. It was not inherently more expen-

sive than other means of producing foods, and experts in the field today say there is no need for it to be more expensive even in modern times.

And yet in the face of increased demand for it, organic food has become a “marketed” item. It is pushed as having higher value, with labels proudly displaying the logos associated with 100% organic food. That much of the process is fine, of course, but with those proud logo displays also come the higher prices for organic as compared to non-organic foods.

Whole Foods Market, a massive 'natural' foods gro-cery store supplier in the United States, is perhaps as responsible as any for this trend and the marketing that goes with it. It provided fresh organic and “nat-ural” food in attractive displays and packaging and with only the highest quality associated with all of its products. It also had high prices – and high operating margins – to go with this.

Others have followed the trend, with conventional food suppliers such as General Mills committing to a major portion of their food now being “100% organ-ic” – with jacked-up prices to match. Even Walmart has joined in, offering higher-priced organic food to its customers while using its massive buying clout to keep source pricing low.

The result of all of this is that the once-simple “organ-ic” food – the food that the human race used to live on just fine for millennia – is now a high-priced, high-mar-gin food offering that adds significantly to the cost of the groceries in our shopping baskets.

Trend 4: Not Enough Workers in the Fields

As more and more food is produced by farmers, the demand for workers is increasing as well.

Many of those workers, especially in regions such as California’s Central Valley, where much of that state’s produce – critical to the country’s market supply – is grown, are immigrants. With an estimated 2.5 million immigrants coming to that state every year, the de-mand for H-2A visas to bring them in has been grow-ing as well. But with the visa program not functioning all that well, both the immigration process and the companies hiring the immigrants have suffered.

As evidence of that, the Partnership for a New Amer-ican Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Im-migration Reform issued a report in March 2014 that said that “labor challenges faced by U.S. farmers and

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the inadequacies of the H-2A visa program are a key reason why American farmers have been unable to maintain their share of the domestic market. Labor alone can explain as much as $3.3 billion in missed GDP growth in 2012.” Another section of the same re-port blames labor shortages for farms being shorted as much as $1.4 billion, which they could have har-vested if the labor was available.

Now add to the current labor mix the drive by the ad-ministration of Trump to crack down on immigrants. That illegal immigrants are indeed part of this critical farm labor pull is not in doubt, even though producers have in many cases gone to great lengths to minimize how large a percentage of those laborers are present. Trump is expected not only to go after those illegals in a big way but is also likely to end up targeting the whole H-2A visa process as well, on the misguided grounds that the visa program is taking jobs away from U.S. citizens who would happily take the immi-grants’ places, In reality, most native-born Americans would never take a menial farm job.

The end results? Less labor means less production, and less production means less supply in the face of higher demand for the same food, which once again drives prices up.

Trend 5: Climate Change Impacts – Heat, Drought and Storms

Higher global temperatures are responsible for yet another set of long-term trends affecting the world’s food supply.

Higher heat has its own set of direct implications on the food supply. It can force produce yields for exist-ing crops to much lower levels, shorten the available growing seasons, create a climate in which certain food-attacking pests that might not have existed be-fore are now increasing in large numbers and often drive changes in what kinds of crops can even grow in a particular area.

With higher heat also comes drought in many regions of the world. In the United States, the continuing droughts in both Texas and California for several years had a major impact on food production. It was so bad that decisions had to be made as to whether to shift between water-intensive crops such as California’s famous almonds to less water-demanding ones. That drought, which at one point was estimated as affect-ing 55% of the state, definitely affected the amount of food the state was able to produce. And although the

current torrential rains throughout the state may have eased conditions, that is only a temporary blip on a long-term bad trend.

Outside the United States, high drought has created major agricultural problems in multiple regions in Afri-ca (including Ethiopia and the sub-Saharan countries) and restricted farmers significantly in Indonesia, the Philippines and other areas of Southeast Asia. The situation is so bad that foreign aid is perhaps the only way these regions can stabilize. But once again this is only a temporary solution.

In all of the above cases, with drought also comes higher costs for the water itself, with prices rising in the face of lower supply and far more demand than ever before.

High heat has also brought with it what are, in some cases, drastically changing thermal currents in the world’s oceans. As those temperatures rise, fish and other sea creatures naturally migrate to where the temperatures are tolerable just in order to live. Unfor-tunately, the full living ecosystems they were used to do not necessarily migrate with them or regenerate in the new location fast enough to sustain the increased newly “immigrant” populations. All of this puts pres-sure on the fishing stocks, which are also critical parts of the food supply.

The same drought and high heat also mean major problems for other parts of the food chain that feeds us all – livestock. Meat production is, by combining water needs both for the livestock as well as the foods they must eat on their way to becoming slaughter-wor-thy, one of the most water-intensive parts of the food system. So there is either less livestock that will be produced or the rising price of water itself will drive up the cost of these food items.

Beyond high heat and drought are also the problems of climate-change-induced storm systems, which are rapidly becoming more common and more intense around the world. Those storms create their own major toll on farmlands everywhere, every time they strike. They are also increasingly causing such major damage that it can take years for a region to recov-er agriculturally, as farmlands must be reworked and even the nature of the crops that will be regrown must be reconsidered.

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Trend 6: Industry Consolidation

It is virtually impossible to pick up a business news-paper without reading yet another story about a food processor, grocery store chain, food distributor or even farming groups being bought up by yet another com-pany. The trend is definitely way up, especially as prof-its have increased to the point that companies feel far better positioned than in previous years to take on the costs and risks of a merger.

Such acquisitions may be good for the business, but statistics show that they are mostly, in the long run, bad for the consumer. Although short-term cost sav-ings may be passed on to the consumer, within only a few years after the merger is consolidated, prices slowly – and sometimes rapidly – begin to go up.

One of the saddest parts of industry consolidation is that when there are fewer and bigger potential buyers for a farmer’s crops and livestock, the farmers often get negotiated down in their pricing in order to win a narrowing number of large business deals. The ar-gument “You’ll get more sales volume” from a larger merged company generally does not turn out to be true. And if there’s any question of this, note a com-ment that merging food companies often make about why they are pursuing the deal: It provides increased buying clout.

The Bottom Line

The combination of all of these trends is creating a cy-cle of ever-increasing food prices that right now may seem insurmountable.

In the long run, too high a set of prices will cause some collapse in the system that built them up, as consum-ers back off on their contributions to the price equa-tion and realize they have to find a way to eat anyway. Government regulatory actions may also begin to ap-pear in order to stabilize the most chaotic conditions, especially where food prices are clearly climbing far faster than the costs underlying their associated pro-duction.

Yet other items on this list, such as industry consoli-dation, increased population and climate change, ap-pear to be ones that will stay big and get even bigger as the years proceed further. So it will take some of our bigger brains and strongest leaders to find true groundbreaking solutions to continue to feed us all – starting right now.

Contractor Sentenced to 68 Months for Theft of Labor Union Funds

The owner and CEO of a Greenbelt, Maryland build-ing contracting company was sentenced to 68 months in prison for stealing more than $1.7 mil-lion from Local 657 of the Laborers Union of North America (LIUNA) and other related offenses.

Gary Amoes Cooper, 57, of Kettering, Maryland, the owner and CEO of STS General Contracting, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia, who also ordered Cooper to pay $1.632 million in restitution to Local 657 and to forfeit $1.734 million of criminally-derived pro-ceeds.

Evidence presented at trial demonstrated that Cooper and his co-defendant, Christopher Andrew Kwegan, conspired with Anthony Wendel Frederick Sr., the former business manager of Local 657 of LIUNA, to convert for personal use $1.7 million in funds stolen from Local 657. LIUNA’s Local 657, now merged into LIUNA Local 11, represents con-struction laborers in Washington, D.C., and five ad-jacent counties.

According to the evidence at trial, from May 2013 to June 2014, Frederick directed more than $1.7 million in Local 657 funds to STS General Contract-ing for an unauthorized construction project and other work which STS General Contracting did not intend to perform. Cooper and Kwegan then made a number of financial payments to Frederick with the funds stolen from Local 657, including a down pay-ment of $225,000 on a home Frederick purchased and directed more than $600,000 to a corporation owned in part by Frederick’s wife.

Frederick, 51, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, previ-ously pleaded guilty to the same offenses and was sentenced to 48 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.632 million in restitution to Local 657 and to forfeit $1.734 million on Feb. 7. Kwegan, 58, of Ran-dallstown, Maryland, also previously pleaded guilty to the same offenses and was sentenced on Feb. 8. Both Frederick and Kwegan were sentenced by Judge Mehta.

14 Trillions March 2017

By Brian P. McGlinchey

Using misinformation and lots of cash, Saudi Arabia is recruiting well-meaning U.S. military veterans into its campaign to eviscerate a recently-passed law allow-ing 9/11 families to sue the monarchy for its alleged role in facilitating the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

It’s a brazen effort, considering 9/11 inspired so many veterans to enter military service. However, working through hired American proxies who don’t draw atten-tion to their Saudi sponsorship, the kingdom is finding success by taking advantage of veterans’ patriotic in-stincts.

Specifically, lobbyists are telling veterans that, if other countries reciprocate by passing laws like the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), military service members and veterans will be sued in foreign courts.

Veterans who do their own research will discover an essential fact Saudi Arabia doesn’t want them to know: JASTA only allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments for supporting terrorism—not individu-als.

Saudi lobbyists also falsely claim that JASTA is a ma-jor departure from the previous U.S. approach to sov-ereign immunity; in fact, it is a narrow adjustment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which already allowed Americans to sue foreign state sponsors of terror.

Veterans Enticed with Free Airfare and Luxury Hotels

Misleading arguments aren’t the only weapon in the Saudi arsenal—its lobbyists are also putting the king-dom’s deep pockets to work, reportedly enticing vet-erans to lobby legislators on the issue by picking up the tab for airfare and stays at luxury Washington hotels—specifically, the Trump International (a choice

that raises thorny legal questions for the Trump ad-ministration).

Combat veteran Malachias Gaskin told Daily Caller that he was solicited via email to travel to Washing-ton, and that his suitor was slow to reveal what cause he was being asked to join and who would be paying for his trip. After being asked to sign an online petition opposing JASTA, Gaskin researched the issue and concluded the law shouldn’t be amended or repealed. “I was like, ‘this is why they aren’t giving me informa-tion,'” said Gaskin.

Daily Caller also reported that Dauntless Communi-cations, sub-contracted by PR giant Qorvis, operated a booth at a gun show in Reno, Nevada on January 28 and 29. Beneath a banner exhorting passers-by to “protect our troops from JASTA backlash,” the hosts gathered names of veterans and others who would help oppose JASTA. (Qorvis helps lead Saudi Arabia’s far-reaching public relations and lobbying effort.)

While some veterans are winging their way to Wash-ington and staying at luxury hotels on the Saudi dime, others have been convinced to put their names on the bylines of anti-JASTA opinion pieces. Judging from identical language in these pieces, it seems likely they’re being prepared by the lobbyists and then sub-mitted on the veterans’ behalf.

For example, retired Air Force general William Russel Cotney “wrote” this for Nashville’s The Tennessean:

“The principle known as sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. In international re-lations, it preserves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other govern-ments on behalf of their citizens.”

Saudi Lobbyists Recruiting Veterans to Combat 9/11 Lawsuit

Veterans told they’re shielding the U.S. military—in reality, they’re only protecting the Saudi monarchy

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…while former Army medical specialist Angela Sinkov-its “wrote” this for The Denver Post:

“The principle of sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs with-out their consent. In international relations, it pre-serves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

Using Veterans to Silence 9/11 Families

Given their high standing in American society, veter-ans are extremely valuable in shaping public opinion and influencing legislators about a wide variety of is-sues. What’s remarkable in this instance is the fact that a foreign monarchy, accused of aiding the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on U.S. soil, is enlist-ing veterans to prevent the victims of that attack from presenting their evidence in a court of law.

That evidence includes 28 pages from a congressio-nal 9/11 inquiry that were partially declassified in July 2016, revealing many financial and other connections between Saudi government officials, 9/11 hijackers and their close associates. The trail of clues points to high places: One of the officials who figures most heavily in the pages is the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Allegations of Saudi ties to terror don’t end with 9/11: Veterans of the war on terror should also note that a leaked 2014 email from Hillary Clinton said the gov-ernment of Saudi Arabia was “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups.”

Family members of those killed in the 9/11 attacks have condemned Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of veterans. “We find the recently revealed actions made on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ‘co-opt our troops’…absolutely appalling,” said the September 11th Advo-cates, Kristen Breitweiser, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, in a statement.

McCain and Graham Aid the Saudi Cause

Perhaps one reason why Saudi Arabia’s fallacious ar-guments against JASTA have been successful with veterans is the fact that they’ve been embraced by a variety of current and former officials who’ve routinely protected the kingdom, such as South Carolina Sena-tor Lindsey Graham and Arizona’s John McCain.

In December, Graham and McCain introduced a mea-sure that would amend JASTA and make it far harder for 9/11 families to pursue justice in the courtroom.

Graham once said he would hesitate to declassi-fy those 28 pages on Saudi government links to the 9/11 attacks if doing so could “damage” the kingdom. Meanwhile, the Saudis appear to be very grateful for McCain’s ongoing support: In 2014, the Saudi embas-sy donated $1 million to the The McCain Institute for International Leadership.

Graham and McCain have been among Capitol Hill’s chief alarmists about alleged Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election. Seizing on that, and well aware of the duo’s anti-JASTA stance, the Sep-tember 11th Advocates used their statement to de-mand equal scrutiny of Saudi influence on U.S. law:

“We call upon the leading voices in Congress who have spoken out regarding the dangers of foreign intervention (in U.S. politics)—Senator John Mc-Cain and Senator Lindsey Graham—to address these facts that have now come to light regarding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its actions to manipulate and use members of our armed forces against 9/11 family members and JASTA.”

For more information please visit: 28pages.org

Editor's Note: Above, George W. Bush meeting with Saudi Arabian Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the Bush Ranch in Craw-ford, Texas in 2002. This meeting took place after the attacks of 9/11 when it was known that Saudi Arabia supported the attacks. Bandar bin Sultan was so close to the Bush family that he was nicknamed Bandar Bush. The Bush family concealed not just the role of the Sau-di's but also their own treasonous role in 9/11.

16 Trillions March 2017

Donald Trump promised in his campaign for U.S. Pres-ident to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and make Mexico pay for it. It seems that he will keep his promise to build the wall but it will be the American taxpayers who pay for it, not Mexico.

On or about March 6, 2017 the Dept. of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will issue a procurement solicitation for the design and construction of several prototype wall structures near the border with Mexico.

Contractors will have only until March 10 to submit a concept paper. The concepts will be evaluated and selected contractors will be notified by March 20 and then have only until March 24th to submit their formal proposal with pricing. Multiple contract awards are expected to be made by mid April.

Once constructed, each prototype will be evaluated and then contracts will be issued for the remainder of the border.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly previously stated that the wall will be finished within two years but an internal Homeland Security report estimated that it would take three years and cost $21.6 billion.

History has shown that with large federally funded projects the final cost can be at least double what the government initially estimates and take more than twice as long to complete. So, the ultimate cost could be as high as $50 billion and take more than 5 years to complete.

In addition to the construction costs there will be the cost to maintain the wall and the additional security systems and staff that the wall will require. People will try to scale the wall, throw things over it and tunnel under it.

Given the low level of efficiency and high degree of cor-ruption and incompetence of the federal government, the continued cost of the wall will be substantial.

Is a Wall Needed?

Trump justifies the wall by claiming a wall would keep out drugs, terrorists, illegal immigrants, rapists and other criminals.

The United States certainly should secure its borders and while a wall may deter some of those on foot who would enter the United States illegally, it won't keep drugs or potential attackers out.

Crosses for those who died trying to reach the U.S. displayed on the Mexican side of the wall in Heroica Nogales, Mexico. Photo by Jonathan McIntosh

Trump's Wall: Needed Security, a Monu-ment to Stupidity or Something Else?

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Drugs are already being delivered from Mexico and other countries by aircraft, cars, trucks and boats. Very few drugs are ferried across on foot so the wall won't reduce the availability of drugs in the United States.

As long as Americans continue to buy illicit drugs, the drugs will be transported into the country one way or another.

Someone determined to kill Americans in the U.S. in retaliation for American war crimes abroad or any oth-er reason, will not be deterred by a wall on the border with Mexico. They can enter the U.S. by plane on a forged or stolen passport, by boat or just walk across the Canadian border.

The 5,525 mile (8,891 km) Canadian border and Amer-ica's 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of coastline will remain a relatively easy way into the U.S. for anyone deter-mined to enter.

The best way to reduce the potential for a terrorist at-tack is stop supporting terrorists and the sources of terrorism. The American war industry creates terror-ists, funds them and manufactures conflict to justify its existence and siphon off vast sums from the Amer-ican taxpayers. America's war industry costs taxpay-ers nearly $1 trillion every year. The Pentagon refuses to account for nearly $10 trillion in tax dollars, even though it is required to do so and has been ordered to do so numerous times by Congress.

Every cowardly and illegal murder-by-drone of inno-cent women and children creates more people who hate the United States and would kill Americans if they could. Building a wall on the border with Mexico won't stop someone from targeting Americans. Changing America's predatory and murderous foreign policy is the only way to reduce the potential for retaliation.

In reality, illegal immigrants aren't a big problem for the United States. Most come to the U.S. to work and find employment and even pay taxes. They do the work that most native-born Americans won't do and contribute billions of dollars in value to the U.S. econ-omy each year.

While there are exceptions, the data show that immi-grants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. On average, large cities with substantial immigrant populations have lower crime rates than those with minimal immigrant populations.

The number of undocumented immigrants has al-ready declined on its own, from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2014. Most of the decline is from Mexicans, whose numbers dropped from 6.9 mil-lion in 2007 to the 5.8 million as of the last estimate.

A large portion of illegal immigrants are those who come on visas or from countries that don't require a visa and simply don't leave when they are supposed to. Most of them arrive by plane as tourists.

Existing border patrols and security technologies al-ready ensure that most who cross the border illegally are apprehended. Simply adding more border patrol agents and immigration judges would reduce the number of new illegals and help clear the backlog of 1 million who are awaiting deportation, which Trump is trying to do.

Illegal immigration from the Mexican border is caused primarily by American foreign policy and the CIA's support of the drug trade and more recently, climate change.

Most Central Americans and Mexicans come to the United States because their own countries are a mess, dangerous and offer no economic opportunities. Their countries are a mess because:

1. The U.S. has repeatedly overthrown democrati-cally elected governments and replaced them with those that serve only the interest of the CIA and se-lect corporations. The last Central American gov-ernment overthrown by the U.S. was Honduras, be-cause the President wanted to raise the minimum wage and was friendly to Venezuela.

2. The CIA-backed drug trade and drug gangs cre-ated by the CIA prey upon Mexico, Honduras, Gua-temala and El Salvador. For some young men and boys, the only way to avoid being killed or forced to join one of the gangs is to leave the country.

The best way to reduce illegal migrants into the U.S. is to end the drug gangs by legalizing narcotics and al-low the people of Mexico and Central America to have good government of their own choosing.

The money spent building the wall could instead build long-term prosperity in Central America and even draw Mexicans south instead of north into the U.S.

Since a wall is not really needed now and won't make much of a difference, why build a wall in the first place?

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To understand the mentality of wall builders it helps to consider who builds walls and why.

Berlin Wall: The wall between East and West Germa-ny was built by Soviets to keep their own people from crossing into West Germany to escape the brutality and economic despair created by the Soviet system and helped conceal the failings of Soviet communism.

Israel: Israel built its wall to separate itself physically from the Palestinians they oppress and protect illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine. The wall encompass-es nearly 10 percent of the Palestinian West Bank and includes prime agricultural land and strategic water reserves. It is not really a security wall but a wall to shield Israel's criminal activity and culture of hatred and cruelty towards non-Jews. Cyprus: The wall between the Greek and Turkish sides of Cyprus is primarily a cultural wall that is in place because Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots won't get along with each other. It protects neither side and hinders the economy of both sides. The wall is a mon-ument to the stupidity of both parties and badge of dishonor for Turkey, which is the main obstacle.

Many of the walls between nations or groups are a re-sult of cultural, social and political failure on the part of those building the wall.

Trump's motivation for building the wall is partially be-cause he said that he was going to do it and wants to be seen as following through on his campaign promis-es, unlike most other politicians who will say anything to get elected and then betray voters as soon as they are in office.

The reason that the wall became a campaign issues is because it was highly effective. Many Republican vot-ers respond best to simple messages that resonate with their fear and anger. They see their economic and social privilege and power being reduced and emo-tionally need to blame someone. Immigrants were an easy target and a big wall to keep them out is a simple solution they can understand. Making Mexico pay for it was just the icing on the yummy emotional cake.

For Trump, the wall is also an issue of ego. He likes to build large fancy things and put his name on them to show the world how cool he is. It helps displace the deep insecurity he feels and feeds his narcissism. So, a Trump wall is a monument to Trump, a symbol of his power and might.

Another potential purpose for the wall is the one that Americans should be most concerned about. What if the wall is not only to keep people out but to also keep people in, just like the Berlin wall?

This is no longer a radical or extreme concept.

America has not been a democracy for a long time and the Oligarchy we currently have is shifting rap-idly towards fascism. The people who have gained control over the federal government and many state governments have no regard for the U.S. Constitution or democracy. They want power and control and are already targeting those who oppose them.

Trump was in violation of the Constitution from day one. Since 2001, Congress has continued to pass laws that violate the Constitution. States such as Arizona regularly pass laws that violate the U.S. Constitution.

Fascism arises when a major segment of the popula-tion feels a deep social and economic insecurity and powerlessness. A portion of the population wants a strong government that will tell them what to do and protect them from perceived threats.

Government oppression in the U.S. is already at alarm-ing levels and it isn't just protesters and activists who are being targeted. Journalists and even medics who were present at demonstrations during Trump's inau-guration have been charged with felony rioting even though they were not rioting or even participating in the protests.

Arizona just tried to pass a bill in direct violation of the Constitution that makes pretty much any type of public protest a felony.

As more Americans wake up to the idea that their greatest enemy and threat to their country is their own government, violent revolution and civil war becomes not just a distinct possibility but a probability.

Trump has already shown that he won't hesitate to or-der the mass murder of innocent women and children in other countries and that he has zero respect for the Constitution and basic human rights. So why wouldn't he wage a war on Americans who oppose him and try to keep them from fleeing to safety in Mexico?

Are the new detention camps and existing secret pris-ons currently for immigrants destined to house free-dom loving Americans in the not too distant future?

19Trillions March 2017

In January, the Nigerian Federal High Court seized control of Oil Prospecting Licence (OPL) 245 for the government. It was a long-overdue payback after two oil giants had allegedly paid $1.2 billion in bribes to the country’s former petroleum minister long before.

However colorful this story and its details (to be de-scribed later) are, unfortunately this is just the tip of an incredible iceberg of corruption throughout the conti-nent. It involves an estimated $25 billion+ a year in illegal money flows leaving the country, an ingenious concept called “trade mispricing” amounting to $38.4 billion a year and easy access to illegal tax havens as far away as the British Virgin Islands.

The data above come from averages estimated be-tween 2008 and 2010 and three reports from the OECD, the 2012 Global Financial Integrity Illicit Finan-cial Flows from Developing Countries Report 2001-2010 and the World Global Economic Prospects Re-port from January 2013.

Illegal money flows constitute everything from illegal kickbacks (often made to internal government offi-cials in return for helping close an international busi-ness deal) that, in turn, head directly out of the coun-try for protection purposes to shield them from future seizure all the way to overcharging and overpricing of services at every step of the resource processing val-ues chains.

“Trade mispricing” is the fine art of mispricing some-

thing so the actual value is hidden and the difference is easily pocketed and then, like other illegal gains, sent offshore.

With $100 million worth of legitimate oil exports flow-ing out of Nigeria to elsewhere in the world every year, plus $70 billion of oil exports shipped from its very successful southern neighbor Angola, one can see what could happen just from those opportunities alone.

Besides oil, the African continent is also richly en-dowed with many other much-in-demand resources, including:

77% of the world’s platinum: mostly from South Africa

53% of the world’s cobalt: Democratic Republic of the Congo

46% of the world’s chromite: South Africa

22% of the world’s diamonds: Botswana

21% of the world’s industrial diamonds: Democratic Republic of the Congo

21% of the world’s manganese: South Africa

16% of the world’s uranium: Namibia and Niger

9% of the world’s gold: mostly from Ghana, Tanzania, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso

8% of the world’s bauxite: Ghana

Africa: Rich in Resources and Even Richer in Corruption

Anti-Corruption Billboard in Uganda. Photo by FutureAtlas.com

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Other countries have launched projects in the past few years that, while not as fully up and running as the above harvesting enterprises, also have strong poten-tial. Examples, including how much money each coun-try earned from those resources in 2011, are:

Gas and coal, which earned Mozambique $3.5 billion

Gas, gold and nickel, which earned Tanzania $3.5 bil-lion

Iron ore and petroleum, which earned Liberia $1.7 bil-lion

Iron ore, which earned Guinea $1.6 billion

The Jubilee Oil Field, which earned Ghana $850 million

With all of this money at stake – and especially money coming mostly from raw resource gathering enterpris-es (which are harder to count as precisely, like, for ex-ample, autos in production) – it is no wonder that the funds often go overseas.

In addition, the governments of these nations are also riddled with corruption. It is no coincidence that Afri-can nations’ own financial budgets – the place where one could search for funds heading in the wrong direc-tion – are some of the least transparent in the entire world. With few exceptions, African nations generally appear in the bottom 25% of all country rankings for the openness of their budgets.

Another aspect of the corruption involves the initial purchase of rights to each of the various raw materials often involving behind-the-scenes trades and bribes that are generally virtually impossible to trace. Even if the initial prices of the actual raw material explora-tion rights are disclosed accurately, the negotiations behind the scenes with government officials and bor-der trade representatives will likely not be. And those numbers are often staggering to behold, especially as they become more visible with various leaks.

The Siren Song of Offshore Tax Havens

One of these leaks was the recent uncovering of the Panama Papers, which showed numerous foreign offi-cials with offshore bank accounts. Even if the source of the money that flowed into those accounts might not be clear enough to file charges against the offi-cials, the amount of money – in the trillions of dollars worldwide – makes it clear that something inappropri-ate had to be going on.

The top tax havens in the world, per the Panama Pa-pers list, in order from highest to lowest usage, with the number of tax havens listed beside each locale, are:

British Virgin Islands: 113,648

Panama: 48,360

Bahamas: 15,915

Seychelles: 15,182

Niue: 9,611

Samoa: 5,307

Anguilla: 3,253

Nevada: 1,260

Hong Kong: 452

United Kingdom: 148

The British Virgin Islands tops the ranks for the num-ber of tax havens, with an estimate going back to as early as 2000 that some 41% of the world’s offshore companies were formed there. And of the 823,000 companies registered there as offshore entities as of 2008, over 113,000 were what are generally called tax havens.

The reason why the British Virgin Islands has become such a magnet for such companies is quite obvious when one studies the local tax regulations: It charges zero taxes to offshore companies who do no business in the region. That includes profits, interest, dividends, corporate tax, capital gains tax, estate tax, withhold-ing tax and income taxes. All a company registered there with no business in the region has to do is pay an annual fee to the government.

The offshore bank accounts there are also tax-free, with tight protections on privacy and confidentiality. Only the account holder’s permission or a court order can reveal what is held in those accounts.

Other tax havens work in a somewhat similar manner but generally without the full benefits provided by the British Virgin Islands entities.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo Connection

As to the linkage to Africa and to give a sense of how much can be made there illegally, one example that surfaced recently involved a detailed investigation in corruption involving five major sales of mining rights.

The investigation, conducted in 2013 and directed by the Africa Progress Panel and chaired by Kofi Annan and Global Witness, revealed several interesting facts. One was fairly easy to uncover – that the estimated gap between the total market value of all five mining rights concessions and what was paid as of the offi-cial records was at least $1.36 billion.

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According to the results of the report, the money was hidden relatively easily through the use of offshore shell corporations, commercial secrecy on the part of the mining companies themselves, limited require-ments for reporting by state companies and govern-ment agencies to the DRC’s legislators and the com-plex interlocking nature of the offshore companies where the money was laundered.

As the study indicated, the state-owned mining com-panies themselves created a lot of the problem. They were already poorly managed, and most of their in-ternal operations were hidden deeply from view. Gov-ernment auditing procedures on the companies were also mostly nonexistent; the legislature had almost no financial oversight capabilities over such companies, and many involved actually showed open contempt and disregard for transparency and accountability. That contempt and disregard is not surprising con-sidering the amount of money that was being stolen.

With all of that in place, another serious issue that emerges – but not proven specifically in this case – is the ease by which political leaders and public of-ficials can make their own secret deals with foreign investors.

The Nigerian Malabu Oil Scam

The DRC is of course only one of many corruption cases like this.

The Nigerian case that came up in January 2017 and was mentioned at the beginning of this article is yet another example of where too much secrecy, lax con-trols, easy access to places to shelter illegal funds and a combination of corporate and personal greed are sucking the profits out of the continent.

What happened is that a highly valued oil drilling block controlled by the Government of Nigeria – the one covered by Licence 245 – was going out for public bidding for exploration and oil rights about six years ago. The two eventual winners of the bid were Royal Dutch Shell and Eni, the petroleum company formerly known as Agip of Italy.

On the books, Nigeria’s state oil company received $210 million from those two companies for those very valuable oil rights.

On the side, and decidedly not a public part of the transaction, Dan Etete, the country’s former petro-leum minister, and his cronies pocketed a separate payment of $1.2 billion from Shell and Eni in return for their help in making it all possible.

It was a bribe of the highest proportions. And as a fur-ther indication of how brazen the whole case is, the oil companies paid that $1.2 billion bribe into a Nigeri-an government escrow account at JPMorgan Chase’s London branch. The funds were then dispersed cour-tesy of an authorization from former Nigerian justice minister Mohammed Bello Adoke.

Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commis-sion, according to a petition filed with the Nigerian Federal High Court, is preparing charges that cover all of this, along with allegations of “conspiracy, brib-ery, official corruption and money laundering” against Shell and Eni. Back in December, the commission previously filed charges against the former ministers Etete and Adoke, who coordinated the deal along with Aliyu Abubakar, a local businessman.

Those earlier charges lay out an intricate plot in which General Sani Abacha, the former military dictator of Nigeria, and Etete together formed Malabu Oil and Gas Ltd. and then – without any legal basis for it – assigned OPL 245 to themselves long ago. Abacha died in 1998 of unknown causes, and following that, the shareholding for Malabu Oil and Gas Ltd. ended up creating a second fraud by divesting Abacha’s son Mohammed from the corporation.

Though the current charges in this situation have been applauded for their boldness and apparent intent, those watching the situation carefully are reminding everyone that Nigeria attempted to take back OPL 245 16 years ago, when it was under the leadership of civilian Olusegun Obasanjo in 2001. Then, Malabu Oil sued and an out-of-court settlement, likely also fully greased with bribes, returned the OPL to its original illegal owners.

Most feel that this situation – like many others within the corrupt culture of the African governments and economies – is far from concluded. Other dirty se-crets and protected illegal funds will likely be revealed as more becomes known from all parties involved.

As for the African continent itself, much more must be done to tighten internal controls, increase oversight and open the books in all aspects of public transac-tions. It may also take task forces like the ones led by the Africa Progress Panel and Global Witness to pen-etrate the dark veil that protects other such everyday corrupt transactions from seeing the light of day.

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Building a Strength-Based Culture

By Dr. Chance T. Eaton

“Oh my God this is boring.” I was 100 miles into a trip hauling feeder cattle to the Midwest. The scenery was fine, but I just couldn’t sit behind a wheel for such long periods of time when it felt like there was so much more to life. My trucking partner Nate disagreed. One night while we were driving, he got on the radio and asked me, “What was that word you once used for when you feel in flow, like you are really in it?” I said, “Not sure – was it ‘euphoric’?”

“Yes, that’s it – euphoric,” Nate said. “I feel euphoric driving a truck late at night, no one else on the road, a tall Mountain Dew and country music.”

I thought, “This guy is crazy. Who could possibly feel euphoric doing this crappy job?” I didn’t know why one person could love something that I absolutely de-spised; nor did I have any education or skills to ponder the question. The only background and education I had was business school and the farm/ranch for work experience. And I knew my role at that time was to be a good truck driver, moving feeder cattle from the northern plains to Midwest feedlots and adding eco-nomic value to our company by doing my job.

It is almost amusing to look back at that time knowing what I know now. The reason he was euphoric and I was not is simple: Nate was playing to his strengths, and I was not. He liked the routine, structure, order and predictability – the consistency. Nate looked for-ward to driving the truck; when he was driving, he felt confident and in flow, and when he returned after a long trip, he felt rejuvenated. I, on the other hand, was distressed just thinking about another long haul. Driv-ing it took tremendous effort, and when I returned, I felt exhausted and weak.

A strength is any activity that makes you feel stronger: You get excited as you anticipate the activity; you feel confident and in flow while doing it, as if time passes by quickly; and when the activity is complete, you feel rejuvenated and strong. A weakness is any activity that makes you feel weaker: You feel distress as you approach the activity, it takes tremendous effort to accomplish the task, time feels as if it’s standing still and upon completion you are exhausted and weak.

The most effective people on this planet, throughout time, engage in self-awareness to uncover how they are fundamentally built. They become reflective and take notice of what makes them feel strong – be it

Image by Claudia Dea

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implementing solutions, organizing data, selling ideas, performing, leading, solving problems, investi-gating, serving people, building, using their imagina-tion, etc. They take the time to know where they are wickedly talented and where they find the most joy. The most effective people don’t stop there; they con-tinue to invest in their talents with additional knowl-edge and skills. When you play to your strengths, you unleash energy, focus, confidence and commitment. The greats all know where they are strong and how to continue growing and investing in their strengths, and they have fun doing it.

In the workplace, we know that incorporating your strengths has enormous positive outcomes. For ex-ample, when employees have the opportunity to do their best at work as a result of playing to their strengths, they are six times as likely to be engaged at work and three times as likely to be engaged in life in general (Gallup, 2012). The Human Capital Institute (2016) reported that when organizations emphasize strengths, there is a 38% higher probability of success on productivity measures and a 44% higher probabil-ity of success on customer loyalty and employee re-tention.

Further research on teams focusing on strength-based development from Gallup (2012) has shown the following:

• Teams that focus on strengths every day have 12.5% greater productivity.

• Teams that receive feedback specific to their strengths have 8.9% greater profitability.

• Turnover rates are 24.9% lower for employees who receive strengths feedback than for those who do not.

• When managers take an active role in focus-ing on their team members’ strengths, there is only a 1% chance that they are actively disen-gaged at work.

What is disappointing is that companies rarely play to their team members’ strengths. They encourage their teams to work on their weaknesses and become well-rounded. Only four in 10 employees actually use their strengths at work (Gallup, 2017). If the ratio were to move to eight in 10, organizations would see an 8% increase in customer engagement, a 14% increase in profitability and a 46% reduction in safety incidents. At some level, it makes sense that companies don’t incorporate a strength-based philosophy; companies don’t exist to build their employees – they exist to fulfill their mission and, ultimately, to maximize stake-

holder value. To be successful in a competitive mar-ket, companies place great attention on measuring performance by assessing job duties and competen-cies. Further, managers place their focus on exposing and fixing employee weaknesses as an intervention to improve job-performance ratings.

The reason why companies and managers are fixat-ed on fixing weaknesses is that we are still operating from the industrial paradigm. In the industrial par-adigm, every person plays a small role in creating a finished product. Urgency, thoroughness, speed and quality are highly valued, and people are just another cog in the wheel to accomplish the task. People are lit-erally looked at as things, assets, capital and resourc-es. This is the very reason why we are still fixated on improving our weaknesses in order to create greater efficiencies. By doing so, we’ll fill in the gaps of pro-ductivity and become more consistent – hence the well-oiled machine. As we move into the knowledge era, we are starting to see that humans can’t be seen as a sheer resource; they are complex beings, each with unique talents waiting to be unleashed.

Fixing their weaknesses will get an employee’s per-formance only so far. Author Marcus Buckingham (2008) shares a story about Shaquille O’Neal’s expe-rience with the LA Lakers. Shaq was renowned for his poor free throw shooting percentage with the Orlando Magic. He spent a lot of energy and time working to improve this part of his game. When he moved to the LA Lakers, his new coach, Phil Jackson, told Shaq that he could spend a little time practicing free throws but should focus most of his time and energy working on his inside game. Shaq replied that he was one of the best centers in the NBA and could be even better if he could improve his free throw percentage. Phil agreed that he was one of the best centers in the NBA but said that if he focused on and improved his strength of being a big inside player, he could be one of the best centers of all time. Playing to your weaknesses will only get you so far; the biggest return on investment will always come from playing to your strengths.

I think a lot of managers are flat out scared of having to deal with human complexity and truly leading peo-ple. The human being is so multifaceted, whirling with unique motivations, talents, past traumas and sub-jective values and beliefs. It is much easier to treat people all the same (like cogs in a wheel), measure for performance and place focus on improving weak-nesses. Managing for efficiency is a much easier gig than leading for effectiveness. If managers continue to stay stuck in the industrial paradigm by managing for efficiency and focusing only on weaknesses, they will get left behind.

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The next-generation companies are taking note of the growing knowledge economy, listening to the needs of the millennial generation and receiving quality lead-ership education. They are opening up to the fact that humans are not a resource, not an asset – they are not a thing. They are seeing the sheer complexity of the human being and looking to unleash the untapped po-tential that every employee possesses. They see that when you help employees understand their unique strengths, ensure that they are in the right job and then provide them with the knowledge and skills to fully express their talents, they unleash energy, con-fidence, ownership, motivation, engagement and total brilliance.

As it turns out, my strengths don’t involve the need for consistency, unlike those of my trucking partner Nate. My strengths include learning, helping people develop and thinking strategically. I also know that the companies I work for may not know how to use strength-based strategies, so it is ultimately up to me to incorporate my strengths into my day-to-day living. Specifically, each week I intentionally set two Strong Week Goals. I look for activities at work where I will express my needs for learning, helping people develop and thinking strategically. This keeps my juices flow-ing and makes me more confident, self-efficacious, hopeful, optimistic and resilient. I anchor to what makes me great, and I press the gas. I do this – and so can you.

My advice for you is to take the time to identify what makes you great. An easy way to get this ball rolling is to take multiple personality assessments. You will begin to see a tapestry of how you are built and what motivates you. The Clifton StrengthsFinder in partic-ular is my first recommended assessment. The first step is to get very clear about your strengths and to start investing in the knowledge and skills to create a compounding performance effect. Second, set goals each week around your strengths, as this will keep you leaning forward with contagious hope and optimism. This helps remind you of where you are talented and builds motivation and momentum for upcoming situa-tions and opportunities. Third, if you are in a manage-ment role, be the leader that your employees deserve. Help them to identify their strengths, and build teams that are diverse but saturated with individuals playing to their strengths. The industrial paradigm is dying, so become a next-generation company by building a strength-based culture.

References:

Buckingham, M. (2008). The Truth About You: Your Se-cret to Success. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Gallup (2017). State of the American Workplace. Re-trieved from

gallup.com/reports/199961/state-american-work-place-report-2017.aspx

Haralalka, A., and Leong, C.T. (April 3, 2012). Why Strengths Matter in Training. Gallup Business Journal. Retrieved from gallup.com/businessjournal/153341/why-strengths-matter-training.aspx

Human Capital Institute (2016). Performance Manage-ment Innovation: Certification Guide.

Dr. Chance Eaton has over a decade’s worth of experi-ence working in the field of Learning & Organizational Development. Due to his unique educational and work ex-periences in finance, psychology, leadership & manage-ment, education, noetic sciences, and agriculture, Dr. Ea-ton provides his clients with relevant business solutions grounded in theory and research. To learn more about Dr. Eaton’s services, please visit www.HRSolutionsInternational.com.

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There is a saying that there are two businesses that will always be in need no matter what happens to the economy. The first is the funeral business, because everyone will die someday. The second is the food in-dustry, because everybody must eat to survive.

Eating healthy and economically is a whole different matter, however, since one of the unfortunate conse-quences of there being a product like food, which ev-eryone must buy rather than would like to buy, is that providers get greedy. Well-focused greed in the hands of dishonest leadership brings big profits at the cost of everyone – consumers end up paying more for less healthy food, the environment gets destroyed in the spoken cause of productivity, and factory farms raise livestock in unclean and crowded environments and use medical and other tools to induce animal or bird growth in ways even horror-movie buffs would find frightening.

And just as we have grown bigger from eating un-healthy and irresponsibly created food products, so too have the agribusiness companies along the way. They did so by following a set of well-honed practices that have forced the old traditional family farms into bankruptcy; taken citizens’ money by charging high-er prices and in the form of subsidies from taxes; de-stroyed croplands; and delivered food that is far less nutritious, bland and even unhealthy to all. In the wake of these actions the companies have also dropped us.

Let us examine just a few of the ways these compa-nies make so much money at our and the world’s ex-pense.

Merge, Get Bigger and then Merge Again

Almost daily one reads of mergers in the mega-indus-try known as agribusiness. The result has created a handful of companies that control what grows and is raised on our farms and ends up in our stomachs. Con-sider these behemoths and the products they oversee:

Archer Daniels Midland (revenues of $62.35 billion for the 2016 fiscal year)

• Business segments include Agricultural Ser-vices, Corn Processing, Oilseeds Processing, and Wild Flavors and Specialty Ingredients

• A major provider of corn sweeteners (consid-ered to be a major contributor to obesity world-wide) and GMO products such as soybeans and raw corn itself

Cargill (revenues of $107.2 billion for the fiscal year end-ing May 31, 2017)

• Specializes in food ingredients and animal nu-trients for other parts of the food industry

• Acquisitions of note: EWOS, a feed sector pro-vider of additives and food, for $1.36 billion, acquired in 2015 and integrated in 2016; FPL, a meat processing plant in South Carolina, ac-quired in 2016 for undisclosed terms

Conagra Foods (revenues of $11.6 billion for the 2016 fis-cal year)

• Brands include Hunt’s, Marie Callender’s, Ber-tolli, Banquet, Chef Boyardee, Slim Jim, Hebrew National, Wesson, Swiss Miss, Healthy Choice, Rosarita and Peter Pan, among others.

• Acquisition of note: Frontera Foods, a provider of regional Mexican food through the Frontera, Red Fork and Salpica brands, for $108.9 mil-lion, in 2016

Tyson Foods (revenues of $36.88 billion for the 2016 fis-cal year)

• Providers of fresh and prepared chicken, beef and pork products

• Completed a major merger with Hillshire Brands in 2014

Smithfield Foods (annual revenues of $14 billion)

• Brands include Smithfield, Eckrich, Farmland, Cook’s, Carando, Armour, Margherita, Gwaltney, Nathan’s, John Morrell and Kretschmar

• Acquisition of note: Clougherty Packing LLC, purchased from Hormel Foods in 2016 for $145 million; key product lines acquired include Farmer John (the top-selling bacon and sau-sage brand in Southern California) and Saag’s Specialty Meats

Kraft Heinz (revenues of $26.5 billion for the 2016 fiscal year)

• Brands include Kraft, Heinz, Gevalia, Oscar Mayer, Ore-Ida, Jell-O, Maxwell House, Velvee-ta, Kool-Aid, Grey Poupon, Capri Sun, Classi-co, Planters and Lunchables. Company was formed by the 2015 merger of H. J. Heinz Company and Kraft Foods Group, creating the third-largest food and beverage company in

Habits of Highly Effective Agribusiness Tyrants

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North America and the fifth largest in the world

• Recent acquisition attempt: proposed merger agreement with Unilever for $143 billion

(Note that in the above items the products and brands listed are trademarks owned by their companies.)

Secure Your Subsidies

Whoever said a business needs to make all the money it needs on its own has never met the U.S. agribusi-ness community.

Like the U.S. energy industry, which for years has tak-en many billions of dollars to shore up companies like ExxonMobil, the agribusiness community depends on – but not in a good way – securing billions of dollars from the U.S. government to help it grow, fund further mergers and pay for new business development.

Exactly how big the total subsidies are for the agri-business community is a little difficult to estimate ful-ly, since there are many ways both federal and state governments help these industries. These include tax breaks on new factories brought into a region, pre-ferred treatment in legal matters that on their own are worth billions and special arrangements written into laws just for them to protect them from excessive government scrutiny while giving them preferred trad-ing status beyond our borders.

But what is a matter of record is how the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture paid almost $25 billion in farm subsidies, much of which directly benefited the large agribusiness companies. Those subsidies provided major support for wheat, corn, soybean, rice and cot-ton farmers. And although it is estimated that more than a million farmers received some funds from the subsidy programs, industry experts emphasize that the big producers – often owned or controlled in one way or another by agribusiness giants – received the lion’s share of those funds.

Lobby, Lobby and then Lobby More

Getting those subsidies, preferential trade deals, ex-port arrangements and privileged tax arrangements takes a lot of human energy and money.

According to OpenSecrets.org in just 2016 alone, agri-business lobbying expenses totaled $126,242,202 and approximately 1,000 lobbyists were dedicated to bringing in – excuse the slang – the “bacon” for their estimated total client base of 439 companies or orga-nizations driving the practice.

Bribing politicians to betray their constituents is not

hard, but it is expensive. But now that Trump is in pow-er the cost is likely to go down because now most of the federal government is doing the bidding of large corporations without having to be lobbied.

Here is a breakdown of those total lobbying numbers by specific parts of the agribusiness industry:

Agricultural services/products: $32.3 million

Food processing and sales: $26.4 million

Crop production/basic processing: $21.5 million

Forestry and forest products: $14.5 million

Dairy: $6.4 million

Livestock: $3.3 million

Poultry and eggs: $1.5 million

Miscellaneous agriculture: $0.6 million

This of course is direct lobbying for the agribusiness community itself. If one adds lobbying for the sup-pliers of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, equipment and other goods as well, the total numbers involved would be several times that.

Market, Distract, Mislead and Lie

Another major practice of the agribusiness communi-ty is to divert consumers from learning what is genu-inely healthy for them.

The main way most consumers experience this is from advertising in all of its forms. According to a re-port from Statista, in 2015 the food industry spent the following trying to convince consumers what to buy:

U.S. food and beverage segments: $136.5 million

U.S. prepared food industry: $1.6 billion

U.S. confectionary and snacks industry: $1.98 billion

In that same year, Kraft Foods spent $367 million in ad-vertising just on television alone. General Mills spent $50.7 million on Internet advertising alone. And indus-try giant Hershey Company spent a total of $561.64 million worldwide, mostly to convince everyone to buy more chocolates and candy.

Advertising, in all of its glory, is amazing in its ability to distract consumers from what’s important to know about a product. One very famous case was present-ed some years ago, when cholesterol consumption was being overemphasized (as it turns out) as a major health risk. A candy maker – the people behind the virtually 100% sugar product Life Savers – marketed its product as “100% cholesterol-free.” This was true, of course, but rather irrelevant to what was more im-portant: that it was all sugar.

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A similar distortion in food advertising is the recent trend to market products as “all natural.” Organic or GMO-free are fine for labeling, as they have specif-ic legal meanings to them – at least so far. But the phrase “all natural,” while sounding good because it implies that good stuff is used to make a product, is grossly misleading. All that means is that it does not contain purely synthesized materials. It could have any amount of unhealthy components in it and still be “all natural.” And if the point being made here is not completely clear, consider that raw oil tapped from underground is “all natural,” but who would eat it? Yet consumers continue to eat up both the advertising and “all natural” foods in larger and larger quantities.

Beyond just the scale of advertising, there is also the issue of misleading consumers about what is healthy and what is not.

Remember the Food Pyramid that appeared in 1992 and other examples going back to the 1970s? It was developed by industry not to support public health but to support industry profits.

Even today, the food pyramid promotes a diet that is unhealthy for people and the planet by pushing meat, and dairy and not enough fruits and vegetables.

The industry also influences medical schools and ensures that nutrition is not part of the curriculum or only given passing coverage.

The Food Pyramid is of course not the worst set of lies and misdirections to come out of the agribusiness community. Among the most serious of all time was concocted by the sugar industry and the food provid-ers who supply it to consumers.

Sugar of all kinds is habit-forming and addictive in many ways, just because of how human beings are physically “wired.” Our species evolved biologically to desire sweets and carbohydrates but only because that evolution happened at a time when food was far more scarce and sugars were not that available. Now they are, of course, and in products that might sur-prise one.

Over 400 years ago – in 1700 – when sugar was ex-pensive and rare and only the wealthy could get their hands on it, the average American consumed about 4 pounds (2 kg) of sugar per year. In a 2008 analysis, it was estimated that the average American’s sugar consumption has grown to 180 pounds (80 kg) a year.

Most of us do not need any added sugar to be healthy. But to imagine eating 180 pounds a year, or about a half a pound a day, is staggering.

The American public has reached this point partly due to the prevalence of sugar-laced products at low costs and partly due to advertising. But beyond this was one of the bigger lies the food industry has spun to date, in an industry scandal rivaling the cover-ups within the tobacco industry about known health risks and the de-ceit of the oil and gas industry with respect to green-house gas emissions and climate change.

That set of lies was the sugar industry’s concentrated effort to pin most of the dangers for becoming obese on eating too much fat. Just like in the case of the en-ergy industry trying to hide the relationship between its products, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the sugar industry invested in scientists to write papers and lobbyists to work elsewhere to di-rectly and indirectly convince the public that sugar was a minor issue and fat consumption was the real culprit making us fat.

In fact, consuming fat in even large quantities, cou-pled with a diet very low in carbohydrates, actually leads to people losing rather than gaining weight.

But in the meantime, with sugar so much a part of all of our diets, the population is getting fatter and sicker than ever before.

Closing Comments

The agribusiness industry has many other tricks up its sleeve to control and distort our food supply. They in-clude the use of hazardous technology such as GMOs and their associated carcinogenic pesticides (such as glyphosate, present in Monsanto’s Roundup). They in-clude a continued push to move us (using advertising and other means) away from the unadulterated foods that are actually our healthiest sources of nutrition. And they also include finding ways to mislead us as to the dangers of what are often the most profitable parts of their product mix.

In the end, however, consumers and citizens do have the power to change some of this. By making better food choices ourselves and “voting with our wallets,” we can cause the food industry to react to consum-ers in a positive way. The increased availability of or-ganic foods is just one example of that. All citizens should fight to ensure that highly unhealthy foods are removed from our diets and those of our children. And the outrageous food subsidies that keep these agri-business giants doing what they are doing must be stopped.

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Donald Trump and his corporate masters seem to hate nature and don't mind causing the extinction of other species.

In his latest move to weaken environmental protec-tions nationwide, Trump signed a new executive order that will make it easier to destroy, pave over and pol-lute thousands of wetlands across the United States, especially in the arid, interior western states.

Wetlands are among the most important ecosystems in the country, providing clean fresh water, flood con-trol and essential habitat for birds, fish and other wild-life, including many endangered species.

“Trump just put millions of acres of wetlands on the chopping block, and our wildlife and waters will suf-fer,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “This order is a gift to Trump’s friends who will pollute and destroy some of the last remaining wetlands in the country. It’s deeply troubling — but not surprising — to see Trump move so quickly to gut wetlands protections.”

The anti-wetlands order requires the U.S. Environmen-tal Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engi-neers to begin the legal process to rescind the Obama “Clean Water Rule” and replace it with a new rule that would only protect wetlands with nearly permanent connections to downstream waters.

This definition of a wetland is moronic at best.

Many wetlands would not be protected under this re-strictive approach, including those that are home to dozens of endangered species.

The order requires the two agencies to adopt a nar-row interpretation of the Clean Water Act advanced by Justice Scalia in the 2006 Supreme Court Rapanos v. United States case. Under Scalia’s view, only wetlands that have a relatively permanent, surface connection to a downstream water body that is “navigable in fact” can be protected under the Clean Water Act. This view has never been adopted by the full Supreme Court, and none of the lower courts have concluded that Scalia’s iditotic test should be the sole rationale under which a wetland can be protected. Justice Kennedy explained that the Los Angeles River and large areas of the arid, western United States would not be protected under Scalia’s approach.

Reducing the jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act will certainly hurt endangered species. Ephemer-al aquatic habitats are important habitats for endan-gered Chiricahua leopard frogs, Sonora tiger salaman-ders and crustaceans like vernal pool fairy shrimp. Removing legal protections for wetlands that support these species will mean these areas could be degrad-ed more easily without proper mitigation to protect endangered species.

“Anyone who has ever spent time in a wetland, even a wetland in the Arizona desert, knows these are in-credible places, oases teeming with life. Trump’s or-der casts a dark shadow over them, and the very real effect will be fewer homes for the birds, fish and other animals — many of them rare and in danger of vanish-ing — that we all hold dear,” Suckling said.

Trump's

war on

wetlands

29Trillions March 2017

As food prices rise for all of the reasons noted in other articles in this issue, many are rapidly seeking solu-tions for holding them in check.

What Producers Can Do

Consider forming or joining a co-op. For farmers, get-ting far more efficient in the use and buying of just about everything associated with their farms is crit-ical. Joining cooperatives can allow sharing of re-sources such as farm equipment and even those tied to maintaining it. Co-ops can also combine their buy-ing power to purchase seed and other supplies at po-tentially lower costs when they can guarantee higher volumes for their suppliers.

Get better educated on adapting to climate change. This is not only already a part of our lives but is also going to be an increasingly tougher challenge to deal with. Producers need to monitor the climate’s impacts more tightly and plan for them as well.

Find ways to cut steps in their food products’ value chain. One of the larger drivers of costs for food pro-ducers is the current need to follow the same old sup-ply chain that they have always been using. Consider

setting up more local farmers’ markets to allow con-sumers more direct access to the foods. Sell direct to restaurants if possible; higher-end restaurants often have a close relationship with local farmers. Within a co-op, consider setting up local distribution with the co-op’s own trucks. Even if only a relatively small per-centage of sales volume makes it through these new channels, the result can be higher direct average pric-es for the farmers while still driving prices down for the end consumers.

Become “agile” farmers. As market demands shift and farms have to deal with the impacts of storms and climate change, farmers should invest some of their time in planning how to be able to shift what they are producing more rapidly than in the past. The term “ag-ile manufacturing” has applied to other industries for some time, with very positive economic results for the companies involved. Becoming agile farmers can have a similar effect while still keeping end prices down for the end result, because these farmers are more prof-itable overall due to their responsiveness to change.

Do not get taken in by the GMO sales pitch. As nu-merous studies have shown, farmers are the ones al-

In Search of Solutions to the Food-Price Dilemma

Image by Caden Crawford

30 Trillions March 2017

most always stuck with the bad end of the deal when they sign up with companies like Monsanto to buy GMO seeds and their herbicide/pesticide partners. On a purely economic basis, farmers are finding that the supposed greatly increased yields for using GMO crops are not happening. A recent major report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture actually challenged the whole concept of what GMOs are supposed to do, that by allowing increased use of specific herbicides or pesticides the GMOs are “immune” to, the overall yields will be much higher than those of convention-al crops. The report showed, in fact, that those yields were not backed up by independent reports at all and that in some cases yields were even worse with GMO crops than without them.

GMO crops have other problems associated with them. Once a farm buys the seeds, it is often stuck with having to continue to buy the seeds again and again with no ability to shift away from them. The rea-son for this is that the seeds are patented and any re-sidual seeds in the soil are considered “owned” by the seed provider. So if the seeds grow at all and the farm has chosen not to renew its contract, those seeds be-come the basis for a patent-infringement lawsuit by the highly litigious providers of the seed.

The other bad part of the Faustian bargain of buying into the GMO seed + herbicide/pesticide mix is that the increased use of crop chemicals can have disas-trous effects on the farms and the world. Locally, a farmer may find that the soil used to grow its crops ends up sterile and unable to produce. The food it pro-duces will also continue to bring the presence of pes-ticide traces such as glyphosate (already categorized as a carcinogen) and suspect GMO crops themselves into the world, poisoning many and crippling others with life-threatening illnesses of the kidneys, circula-tory system, breasts and more.

What Consumers Can Do

On the consumer end, there are several options that can help keep rising food prices in check.

Buy food from farmers’ markets. Consumers can save money and often get access to much healthier foods by buying as directly from the farmers as possible. These markets are readily available even in urban cen-ters. They are also very much a part of daily life in de-veloping countries. With consumers buying “close to direct,” farmers can get higher prices than they would have been able to charge their normal buyers – and consumers often get lower prices.

Eat simpler and more basic foods. Stop buying the value-added and often unhealthy concoctions food

producers create just to find a way to have you pay more for the much lower concentration of nutrition in-volved.

Stop eating meat. Meat is one of the least cost-effec-tive offerings most of us consume. It takes a lot of water and a substantial amount of primary food crops to raise livestock and is thus more expensive pound for pound than an equivalent non-meat source of the same nutrients. Besides all of this, large-scale food producers are often disease-ridden and cruel places to raise animals.

Learn to cook and do more of it. Schools used to have these classes called “home economics” where chil-dren learned to cook. Parents also used to teach their children to cook. Modern society and its economic demands have pushed many away from that, often with the majority of foods they consume being sold through a restaurant or fast-food company. Often that food is less nutritious and full of unwanted ingredi-ents people are eating along with the prepared foods. It is also – in most cases – far more expensive than if the individual were cooking and preparing for them-selves.

Pressure your legislators to keep artificially inflated prices down in the face of increasing demand. Just because a food-providing enterprise can increase pric-es because the market will pay them does not mean it should. And if a food-provider merger gets approved by government regulatory bodies with the claim by those merging that the merger will bring prices down in the market, make them live up to that commitment every day.

Photo by Henry de Saussure Copeland

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Once upon a time, all of us used to eat food grown, harvested, or butchered not far from us, and with a minimum number of steps between the farmers and the table where we eat. Those days are over. And along with them have come a complex maze of steps, value-added costs and more that make our food some of the costliest for consumers and least profitable for producers.

Take this typical tale of woe. A producer of blueberries recently was quoted as getting paid $0.30 per pound. Those same blueberries at the market go for $5.00 a pound, and yet the store claims that it only has a 5% markup. Where did the $4.70 difference “farm to fork” go?

The answer, as is so often in complex problems, is “it depends”.

Common to all of the answers to this is the food deliv-ery value chain, which includes the following sequen-tial steps, all of which have costs associated with them.

1. Crop Planting and Growing

2. Crop Losses during the growing season

3. Gathering and Harvesting

4. Losses associated with Harvesting, including sorting, packaging and damage

5. Initial handling/processing of the food and fur-ther packaging

6. Secondary processing losses (when the prod-uct is modified further for final use and ship-ment; this includes everything from pre-cutting the product to creating fully-processed foods)

7. Distribution, including shipping and handling by master distributors who ship to retailers, and direct shipping to the stores

8. Retail losses (in store, in handling, in storage, and in throwing out waste, which can be, ac-cording to industry experts, as much as 25% of the products received)

9. Consumption Losses at the consumer end

According to an analysis done by the World Econom-ic Forum on the subject of Sustainable Consumption, in developed markets like North America, the Unit-ed Kingdom and Europe, the losses associated with pre-harvest activities are generally quite low, with the following major value losses along the way:

• Harvesting and processing losses (from steps 4 through 5) amount to 12 to 21% of the cost

• Secondary processing steps (#6) add from 1 to 10% of the cost

• Distribution and retail losses (#7 and #8) amount to 2 to 26% of the cost

• Consumption losses (#9) amount to between 3 and 40%, depending on the product.

In developing countries, the cost structure is very dif-ferent.

• Pre-harvest losses (#s 2 and 3) amount to be-tween 26% and 40% of the cost

• The total of Harvesting and Processing, Sec-ondary Processing, Distribution and Retail Losses runs to a cost of 10 to 50%

• Consumption losses (#9) run at from 0 to 10%

Put another way, the food supply chain in developed countries is very efficient for the most part, even if it has many steps. There is little waste at the front end and the steps in between, although they are respon-sible for high cost (especially as consumers insist on having food available year-round, with complex pack-aging and more), most of the ‘waste’ in the process is at the tail end of the process – where we as consum-ers waste a fairly high percentage of the food we buy.

In developing countries, the situation is the oppo-site. The front end of the value chain is messy and unstable, with everything from inefficient produc-tion methods, inability to plan for climatic chang-es over time, and lack of training racking up what is at a minimum over 25% and as high as 40% of the total costs. Developed countries, likely because of the problems with ensuring a stable supply of healthy food in general, are also far more serious about keeping consumption waste to a minimum.

Food: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Your Table

32 Trillions March 2017

The Major Players as the Food Moves from Farm to Fork

That describes the nature of the costs and their allo-cation. But what further is going on that makes those costs at so many steps so high?

The Farmers and Livestock Producers

Whether it be a small farm or a big one, these are the people and companies having to prepare the soil, plant the seeds, irrigate the crops, care for the livestock, and manage the harvesting of all.

To be cost effective, farms must now be more tech-sav-vy in the use of the latest equipment and must find ways to maximize yields with minimum cost of hu-man labor. That means more and more equipment, more training, and more conscious tracking of what makes farms most effective. It also means that more and more capital is need to buy, maintain, replace and update the equipment used year after year.

A second issue farms must now deal with is to be-come more market-focused. In earlier times farmers would sell just what they thought was appropriate to produce, with little consideration of market trends. These days, however, the farmers are often chasing the next big demand that might come up from the marketplace, such as specific varieties of vegetables all the way to organic products and more unusual variations. These shifts may require different growing cycles, different soil preparation, different equipment and more. But the higher margins available by selling what’s “hot” in the market may be worth it.

A third issue driving costs is having to deal with the increasing challenges of climate change for all the crops they grow. This can include everything from dealing with different rain and temperature cycles as the world gets hotter throughout. It also can involve having to deal with the increasing higher likelihoods of natural disasters from flooding to even more seri-ous storm damage. Both of these more significant cli-matic events can produce massive short-term losses and often many years before the same land that used to produce so more reliably in the past.

The Food Processers

This group includes those responsible for harvesting the crops, butchering meats, cleaning and cutting fish for distribution, and more. The produce may also be sorted for sale into different applications, depending on quality, which is often something the “food proces-sor” group is responsible for. This group also includes simple packaging for raw goods.

This group also includes those involved in more com-plex further processing of the goods to make other products. Peanut butter, canned sardines, tuna fish, hamburger patties and other goods, sometimes pro-vided for retail stores and sometimes for restaurant distribution, all are part of the food processor mix.

For this group, one of the biggest challenges that drives cost is the constant changing of what specif-ic foods customers may want – and what food pro-cessing “value-added” features need to be involved. It is a complex chain of items constantly shifting in demand. All of which means marketing, strategic product planning, investment decisions in the neces-sary capital equipment to support the new items, and consideration of market cycles for both fads and long-term consumer shifts.

Another issue this group has been increasingly faced with dealing with is food safety related to the process-ing itself. A listeria scare in a meat processing plant may be handled by lot number control, especially when it is clear that bad food may have made it through the chain over a clearly-defined period of time. But oth-er things, such as tainted food that may or may not have become tainted while in the producers’ hands, are more complex. Hence the increasing requirement of traceability of the food every step of the way from farm to fork.

Another thing the producers also need to deal with is how to juggle the various processing steps they have so as to most cost-effectively handle the food for all the possible final forms that food may be in – when it leaves the processors hands. Think of it as not that much different from the ‘modularity of design’ one often hears about in manufacturing. Because this re-ally is about ‘manufacturing’ food, not just passing it along.

The Food Distributors

This includes the truckers, haulers, and shippers that bring the food from one place to the next in the val-ue chain. It also includes the master distributors and warehouse operators who gather goods in one loca-tion from multiple suppliers, then move the products out to their final destinations.

For this category, the food must be moved along as efficiently as possible from its receipt by the distrib-utors to its delivery to the retail stores or restaurants which will receive it. It must be kept clean. It must be kept at the right temperature. It must be kept free from pests. It must be protected from damage. And it must be packed in a way that supports cost-effective loading and unloading, especially when a given truck

33Trillions March 2017

or shipping unit is carrying mixed quantities of goods and being distributed to multiple end destinations. And yes, every part of this process adds costs includ-ing transportation expenses (e.g., trucks, fuel and driv-er expenses) and material handing considerations.

This category of providers also requires food trace-ability systems as well every step of the way. These days it also requires tracking of weight, losses in tran-sit, and even in-shipment temperature monitoring for certain goods.

Retailers

The end retail supplier of food products has issues somewhat similar to those faced by both the food pro-cessor and the distributors.

Most major retail stores do some re-processing of their goods after receipt, either into final packaging or for display purposes. They also build internal pro-motions around availability of various goods, which makes them far more involved in the marketing as-pects of their products.

Retail stores also have the problem of high losses from the least-processed of the various kinds of foods. Because consumers will not even consider produce which is bruised or damaged even in the slightest way -- even though the food may be perfectly healthy and even taste good – that ends up taking even the most slightly damaged foods and having to throw them away. An industry expert at Kroger, one of the world’s bigger grocery chains, stated that as much as 30% of certain kinds of produce are just thrown away for this reason. And the craziest part of this is that in many cases the bruising is also directly accountable to the consumers themselves, as they pick over the goods to find ‘the best ones’ for their home.

So – after all that -- where does all that cost markup come from, from farm to fork?

It is in a lot of places. It involves the critical expenses needed to support all the various concerns and needs of each step of the value chains as outlined here. It includes the losses, some human-caused, some ac-cidental, and some trending from what nature and climate are handing us to deal with, that affect every step of the chain. It also involves those of us in the de-veloped countries being an incredibly wasteful group of people even with what we buy, bring home and then eventually just throw out for one reason or another.

And it also involves us as consumers constantly de-manding food varieties which really should be season-al if we sourced it from close to home, but for which we now demand to buy something year-around and produced far from us. It involves us as consumers constantly changing what we want to eat, forcing ev-ery step to constantly shift and adapt.

With the cost markup involved comes another very challenging problem, however. For as much as con-sumers may be constantly demanding more and more, we consumers are less and less willing to pay much higher prices for the goods. All of which puts pressure on the entire value chain, forcing prices down at every step or else the providers cannot stay competitive.

Unfortunately, it is often the very first place in the val-ue chain that ends up getting the toughest pressure. For every other part of the chain, from retail store down through distributors and processors, will find other ways to create value-adding to increase their own margins elsewhere. But when you get to the raw producers – the farmers and livestock providers – they have little place to go and the entire weight of the value chain telling them that their products need to take the cost hit or else they just might not have the products purchased by anyone.

So once again, it is about big business and the buying clout that comes with that, plus the greed to push ev-erything back to the farmers for them to do something to solve the problem.

Which is why, more and more, the little farmers we grew up with as children, the ones who delivered local eggs, milk and even vegetables as close to direct and with minimum handling, are rapidly disappearing from the so-called developed world.

Photo by Laurl Rantala

34 Trillions March 2017

The United Nations World Health Organisation has just published its first ever list of antibiotic-resistant “priority pathogens” – a catalogue of 12 families of bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health.

The list was drawn up in a bid to guide and promote re-search and development (R&D) of new antibiotics, as part of the World Health Organization (WHO) efforts to address growing global resistance to antimicrobial medicines.

Especially threatening is gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. These bacteria have built-in abilities to find new ways to resist treat-ment and can pass along genetic material that allows other bacteria to become drug-resistant as well, WHO reported on Feb. 27.

“This list is a new tool to ensure R&D responds to ur-gent public health needs,” says Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation. “Antibiotic resistance is growing, and we are fast running out of treatment options. If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we most urgently need are not going to be developed in time.”

New resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally, threatening our ability to treat common infectious diseases, resulting in prolonged illness, disability, and death.

Without effective antimicrobials for prevention and treatment of infections, medical procedures such as organ transplantation, cancer chemotherapy, diabetes management and major surgery (for example, caesar-ean sections or hip replacements) become very high risk.

Three Categories According to Urgency of Need

The WHO list is divided into three categories accord-ing to the urgency of need for new antibiotics: critical, high and medium priority.

The most critical group of all includes multidrug re-sistant bacteria that pose a particular threat in hospi-tals, nursing homes, and among patients whose care requires devices such as ventilators and blood cathe-ters.

They include Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas and vari-ous Enterobacteriaceae (including Klebsiella, E. coli, Serratia, and Proteus). They can cause severe and of-ten deadly infections such as bloodstream infections and pneumonia.

These bacteria have become resistant to a large num-ber of antibiotics, including carbapenems and third generation cephalosporins – the best available antibi-otics for treating multi-drug resistant bacteria.

The second and third tiers in the list – the high and me-dium priority categories – contain other increasingly drug-resistant bacteria that cause more common dis-eases such as gonorrhoea and food poisoning caused by salmonella.

Tuberculosis – whose resistance to traditional treat-ment has been growing in recent years – was not in-cluded in the list because it is targeted by other, dedi-cated programmes, says the UN specialised body.

“Other bacteria that were not included, such as strep-tococcus A and B and chlamydia, have low levels of resistance to existing treatments and do not currently pose a significant public health threat.”

WHO explained that the criteria for selecting patho-gens on the list were: how deadly the infections they cause are; whether their treatment requires long hospi-tal stays; how frequently they are resistant to existing antibiotics when people in communities catch them; how easily they spread between animals, from ani-mals to humans, and from person to person; whether they can be prevented (e.g. through good hygiene and vaccination); how many treatment options remain; and whether new antibiotics to treat them are already in the R&D pipeline.

“New antibiotics targeting this priority list of patho-gens will help to reduce deaths due to resistant in-fections around the world,” warned Prof Evelina Tac-conelli, Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Tübingen and a major contributor to the development of the list. “Waiting any longer will cause further public health problems and dramatically impact on patient care.”

New Antibiotics Urgently Needed to Combat Resistant Bacteria

35Trillions March 2017