While The Rest Of Us Die 2x2

1. Lipid problems, cardiovascular disease.

2. Cancer, dementia.

3. The list of medical problems tied directly

4. to the food we re being marketed.

5. We are actually making ourselves sicker by eating the

6. processed food that the food industry has

7. told us is good for us.

8. An industry driven by greed.

9. The soda industry is really exhibit A here.

10. And deception.

11. I knew I was onto something good.

12. An industry that infiltrates government agencies

13. designed to protect us.

14. And that's a common strategy is,

15. get industry-friendly scientists on these review committees.

16. An industry increasingly powerful...

17. Billionaires are looking at farmland as

18. just another financial asset.

19. and dangerous.

20. They discredit people who get in its way.

21. People were afraid to talk to me in their front yard,

22. in the middle of nowhere.

23. This is unsustainable. We are immolating the planet.

24. This is how we feed ourselves.

25. They re gonna make a whole lot of money until the time

26. they re gonna die anyways so, who cares?

27. For over 70 years, our leaders have told us

28. one thing under the bright lights...

29. The protection of the lives and property of Americans is the

30. responsibility of all public officials.

31. I care, we re trying.

32. We have it so well under control.

33. Help is here and we will not stop working for you.

34. But for decades, America s shadow government and its

35. powerful friends have spent trillions of dollars on an

36. agenda that serves their interests, not ours.

37. You guys paid for all this.

38. So, when the shit really hits the fan, we re on our own.

39. This is not science fiction.

40. This is reality in America right now.

41. The truth is, the rich and powerful will do

42. whatever it takes to save themselves...

43. While The Rest of Us Die.

44. Presidents Day, 1996.

45. Vice President Al Gore announces a plan to levy a tax

46. on Florida sugar growers to help restore the Everglades,

47. where most of their product in the state is produced.

48. The Florida sugar industry controls more than

49. 400,000 acres of the northern Everglades.

50. The Clinton administration was going to be releasing

51. its Everglades restoration plan soon.

52. 100,000 acres of sugar fields were going to be turned into

53. reservoirs to provide fresh, clean water

54. for the Everglades.

55. And he also announced that the Clinton administration would

56. support a penny a pound referendum,

57. to tax every pound of sugar that was produced in Florida

58. to help pay for Everglades restoration.

59. So, it was a very big deal.

60. That afternoon, a couple hours later,

61. Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office.

62. He was busy breaking up with his girlfriend, Monica Lewinsky.

63. The president is in the middle of an

64. intense conversation with his young intern...

65. when his phone rings.

66. She later told Kenneth Starr s investigators that she wasn t

67. sure who it was, but it was somebody from Florida,

68. maybe named Fanjuli.

69. Forgive her if Fanjul is a tougher name to remember than

70. all the brand names that contain his company s sugar.

71. Alfy and Pepe Fanjul own and run Florida Crystals,

72. which is one of the two major players in

73. the Florida sugar industry.

74. Alfy is a Democrat. Pepe is a Republican.

75. There s no doubt that having the two top executives working

76. both sides of the aisle has been very beneficial

77. for their business.

78. They were two of the most dominant figures in,

79. in national politics.

80. Alphonso Alfy Fanjul is not just another fat cat donor

81. he d been Clinton s campaign co-chairman in the key

82. battleground state of Florida.

83. They spoke for 22 minutes.

84. It s never come out exactly what they spoke about.

85. But we can say that the final Clinton administration

86. Everglades Restoration Plan had only 50,000 acres of

87. sugar fields that would be turned to reservoirs,

88. not the 100,000 acres that Al Gore had promised.

89. And the Clinton administration did not

90. support the penny a pound tax.

91. It s a pretty good sign that you have a fair amount of

92. political clout when you can get the President of

93. the United States on the phone for 22 minutes

94. while he is breaking up with his girlfriend.

95. The sugar industry just about always gets its way.

96. America wasn t always addicted to the white stuff.

97. It was only over the last century that sugar

98. invaded the western diet.

99. Sugar originated in India in 1200 B. C.

100. The Indians learned how to boil down sugar cane

101. into a brown syrup. And they called this khanda.

102. And that's where we get the word candy from today.

103. The Europeans figured out how to extract sugar

104. from sugar beets.

105. Big sugar operated in the 1400s in ways that are

106. very similar to the way it operates now.

107. It relies on cheap labor.

108. It relies on copious amounts of water.

109. And sugar, itself, is vastly useful.

110. I mean, it helps extend the shelf life of products.

111. And so that increased sugar consumption and

112. production even more.

113. You can find it in absolutely everything.

114. And that's a supersized problem. In 1980,

115. the average American consumed 90 pounds

116. of added sugars per year.

117. And 15% of us were considered obese.

118. By 2010, we d upped our yearly consumption to

119. 120 pounds.

120. And obesity rates more than double to almost 36% .

121. The food industry constantly says to us: Well,

122. you need sugar to live. But the truth is

123. glucose generates an insulin response and insulin is

124. behind all of the chronic metabolic diseases that

125. we know of today: Type two diabetes, hypertension,

126. lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer,

127. dementia, fatty liver disease.

128. There s a fairly well-established correlation

129. between levels of added sugar in the diet and

130. high rates of comorbidity.

131. So, when we have a pandemic, who is it that suffers the most?

132. It s the communities that have predominantly been exposed to

133. more sugary sweetened beverages, for example,

134. and more sugar in their diets.

135. The story of the supermarket is really evidence of

136. a food revolution in America.

137. The customers are looking for foods that are convenient.

138. Over decades, the American diet has been

139. transformed by ready-made foods.

140. Now prized for their ease of preparation,

141. consumers first needed to be sold on the

142. value of their convenience.

143. I buy as many foods that will save me time as possible,

144. to save time to devote to a family of

145. four children and a husband.

146. The key to this food revolution was industrializing

147. the way food is produced.

148. It s called ultra-processing, and it works by manipulating

149. and extracting food s natural ingredients and replacing them

150. with preservatives, artificial colors and flavors,

151. and sweeteners.

152. The push for processed food began out of necessity in the

153. 1930s, when the nation was hit by the Great Depression and

154. a massive drought.

155. Dust on the rampage. Dust that rides in the wind.

156. That follows the storm. That spreads over increasing areas.

157. That piles thicker and thicker, adding to the woes of the west.

158. To alleviate hunger and help farmers climb out of debt,

159. the Roosevelt administration uses public money to

160. prop up private food producers.

161. We had all the food in the northeast,

162. and we had a destitute population in the southwest.

163. And somehow, we had to get the food to feed these people.

164. And the problem was that if they just put it on railroad cars

165. and sent it, by the time it ended up getting there,

166. it would have all gone rancid.

167. And so, this was the beginning of the food processing industry.

168. This was the beginning of pulverizing wheat,

169. stripping of its fiber, packing it into bags.

170. And this worked to solve our starvation crisis

171. through World War Two.

172. After World War Two, this policy became unnecessary.

173. Lots of food industries figured out how to make money at it,

174. and so we doubled down.

175. And we went whole hog and we said, you know, cheaper food.

176. I like Trix better than carrots.

177. By the 1960s, it s common for American children to eat

178. breakfasts with more sugar than a slice of chocolate cake.

179. Trix, the corn cereal with the tangy taste of natural fruit.

180. Fruit colors too! Who needs carrots?

181. You do, silly rabbit, cause Trix are for kids.

182. Oh, what a sneak!

183. Processed food backed by massive advertising campaigns,

184. drives massive profit to big corporations like General Mills

185. and General Foods, who develop popular brands like

186. Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Birds Eye and Tang.

187. Consumers are soon adding those products to shopping lists.

188. But removing all of that fiber will

189. wreak havoc on Americans health.

190. Fiber is really an essential nutrient, for our microbiome,

191. for our intestinal bacteria.

192. But we ve taken it out for shelf life.

193. Dietary fiber, also known as roughage, is the fuel that

194. helps bacteria in the gut break down foods for digestion.

195. It also helps boost our immune system.

196. We are actually making ourselves sicker by eating the

197. processed food that the food industry has

198. told us is good for us.

199. The industry doesn t have to tell us how much

200. they ve processed the food we re eating.

201. The USDA released the first mandatory nutrition labels

202. on food in 1990 by listing ingredients only,

203. they masked what processing was doing to the product.

204. The problem is, it s not what s in the food,

205. it s what s been done to the food.

206. And you could not tell the difference between sugar

207. that s, say, in fruit, versus that which the company added.

208. As refined sugar becomes a key ingredient in almost

209. everything, America sees a skyrocketing number of

210. Diabetes cases, affecting more than 30 million today.

211. The condition can also lead to heart problems, kidney disease,

212. nerve damage even amputation.

213. Dentists also begin to see an epidemic of tooth decay.

214. That's exactly what Cristin Kearns saw.

215. She s a pediatric dentist who uncovered the hidden history of

216. the Big Sugar lobby, through more than

217. a decade of painstaking research.

218. As a dentist, I know that the sugar industry has really

219. infiltrated into my profession for a very long time.

220. They ve sponsored dozens and dozens and dozens of

221. scientific projects between the 40s and the 70s.

222. And over 300 publications.

223. And I think we ve only scratched the surface on

224. telling the story of what the sugar industry has

225. been up to behind the scenes.

226. Kearns became an authority on sugar after first hearing the

227. industry tell its big lie at a dental conference in 2007.

228. I was given a brochure by one of the keynote speakers,

229. about how dentists could help manage

230. type two diabetic patients.

231. And it didn t say anything about reducing sugar.

232. And then, a second keynote speaker ranked Lipton Brisk

233. sweet tea, which had 44 grams of sugar, as a healthy drink.

234. And, I actually chased him down and said:

235. How can you possibly say sweet tea is healthy?

236. And his answer to me was: There is no evidence

237. linking sugar to chronic disease.

238. And I was, literally, stunned. I had no words.

239. Tooth decay is the number one chronic disease in children.

240. You know, how could you possibly say that sugar

241. is not linked to chronic disease?

242. So, I started to wonder, had the sugar industry influenced

243. what I was hearing at this dental conference?

244. Kearns began researching the sugar industry and stumbled

245. upon an industry how-to guide for deceiving the public.

246. I typed in "sugar" to my local library catalog and found

247. records to the Great Western Sugar Company.

248. I'd never heard of the Great Western Sugar Company.

249. I started looking through...

250. the finding aid and found these boxes with references

251. to nutrition and policy.

252. The first folder that I opened had a confidential

253. Sugar Association memo.

254. I knew I was on to something good.

255. In 2009, pediatric dentist Cristin Kearns discovered a set

256. of confidential sugar industry documents that laid bare their

257. carefully constructed campaign to keep Americans

258. addicted to their product.

259. I couldn't believe that I d found that.

260. But I happened to be the first one to look at these

261. confidential sugar industry documents just sitting

262. unexplored in this collection.

263. Kearns had, in her hands, the smoking gun

264. records of a secret campaign by the trade group

265. representing cane and beet sugar.

266. And this was a public relations campaign that set out to

267. influence the Food and Drug Administration,

268. who at the time was evaluating the safety of sucrose

269. for the first time, in the 1970s.

270. So, all of the documents I found showed how

271. the sugar industry influenced that FDA report.

272. They also showed how the sugar industry was mirroring the

273. successful campaign to shape government policy and

274. public opinion launched by Big Tobacco decades earlier.

275. The sugar and tobacco companies definitely

276. use the same strategies.

277. And it s all about casting doubt on that evidence,

278. linking a product to any kind of harmful effects.

279. And then, pairing that together with a PR campaign

280. to get the message out.

281. What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?

282. The brand named most was Camel. Yes, surveys show more doctors

283. smoke Camels than any other cigarette.

284. Smoke Camels, the cigarettes so many doctors enjoy.

285. The world s most thoroughly tested filter.

286. That's snow fresh, filter Kool.

287. Kearns uncovered how the sugar industry laid

288. its own trap to deceive.

289. The sugar industry was very good at following a line that

290. the tobacco industry has done quite well in,

291. which is to obfuscate science.

292. How the sugar industry paid experts to

293. downplay health risks.

294. The sugar industry paid scientists to find either that

295. sugar had very little to do with a range of public health

296. outcomes or, more successfully,

297. pointed the finger away from sugar towards fat.

298. And that's why you had, through the 1970s,

299. a very successful deflection by the sugar industry of

300. regulation away from itself towards the regulation

301. around the consumption of fat.

302. Are you making the most of your Marvel?

303. Marvel makes cooking deliciously light...

304. And helps keep you looking just right,

305. when used in a calorie-controlled diet.

306. And so this started the low-fat craze.

307. Example of that: skim milk.

308. It turns out that dietary fat was actually good for us.

309. Dietary fat actually suppressed cardiovascular disease.

310. We took that out, and so basically,

311. we engineered our products to be toxic.

312. And they didn t just make foods that were unhealthy.

313. They actually promoted them as being the better choice.

314. Try delicious Light and Fit Greek.

315. It s no ordinary non-fat yogurt. Be light and fit and satisfied.

316. In these folders, it listed all of the research projects that

317. they were funding,

318. the scientific consultants that they were working with,

319. the PR firms they hired, the ways in which they were

320. connecting with the media to get their messages across.

321. Their strategy was to publish science that would be

322. conflicting with evidence that might be linking sugar to

323. obesity or diabetes or heart disease or tooth decay.

324. Along with paying scientists to write reports in its favor

325. and masking its involvement by hiding its funding

326. the Sugar Association pushes back on findings it

327. doesn t like, a strategy That's become common practice

328. in many parts of the food industry.

329. The food industry has tried to discredit people

330. who get in its way. They have tried to discredit me...

331. hopefully, to this point, to no avail.

332. But, you know, they, they have their ways.

333. The sugar industry definitely comments on

334. anything that I write. They write a letter to the editor.

335. If I get media attention, they re writing press releases

336. to try and counter what I say.

337. The sugar industry has done very well in terms of messing

338. about with the science and avoiding regulation.

339. The soda industry is really exhibit A here.

340. A number of initiatives and a number of local ballots across

341. the country tried very hard to introduce something

342. called a soda tax.

343. The new tax that's leaving a bitter aftertaste

344. is almost a week old.

345. A small tax a cent or two per fluid ounce

346. to be able to dissuade consumption and

347. use that money for public health benefits.

348. And they did very well.

349. The Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Act...

350. So, what does the soda industry do?

351. They lobby very hard.

352. The American Beverage Association,

353. opposing a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks.

354. It s a bad tax.

355. This tax is only going to hurt.

356. And successfully

357. I feel like I have the right to drink soda and if I need to

358. gain a few pounds, That's my right.

359. Even the news media becomes the messenger for Big Sugar.

360. The sweetened beverage tax is no more in Cook County.

361. Come back to Cook County. Spend your money here.

362. The influence of the sugar lobby extends to both the

363. US Department of Agriculture and the

364. Food and Drug Administration the government divisions

365. meant to regulate the industry.

366. The heads of each of these organizations can

367. come from the industry. They go back to the industry.

368. They make sure that other people from the industry

369. go back into government.

370. And so, there is this revolving door that basically keep the

371. USDA and the FDA from being able to be overhauled.

372. It s known as agency capture.

373. And the USDA and the FDA are the most famous

374. captured agencies in American government.

375. In fact, the scientific committee that reviewed the

376. dangers of sugar for the FDA was led by

377. a man named George Irving.

378. He also was a paid consultant for the sugar industry.

379. So, he was responsible for that safety review of sugar.

380. And that's a common strategy, is to get industry friendly

381. scientists on these review committees.

382. It works for the food industry and ultimately,

383. it works for government, too, because they make

384. $56 billion off the tariffs each year.

385. The problem is, they have not yet equated the costs of the

386. health care crisis that they have caused.

387. They see this as a separate silo.

388. So, let's do the math on this.

389. The food industry makes $1.4 trillion a year.

390. Of which, 657 billion is gross profit.

391. There's a lot of money riding on this.

392. Health care in America cost in 2015, $3.5 trillion.

393. Of that, 75% is chronic metabolic disease,

394. of which 75% of that could be reversed...

395. if we went back to the way we ate back in 1970,

396. before this chronic metabolic disease pandemic

397. took off like a moon shot.

398. 75% of 75% of $3.5 trillion

399. is $1.9 trillion a year going down a rat hole.

400. And 62% of all health care dollars are paid for

401. by the U. S. government.

402. That is a trillion dollars a year that the government is

403. paying so that the food industry can make

404. its 657 billion. This is unsustainable.

405. And all that happens is that health care goes down the

406. tubes, our personal health continues to shorten our lives,

407. and we are immolating the planet in the process...

408. all to keep propped up ultra-processed food.

409. The food system is structured the way it is right now because

410. a very small group of people had a very cunning

411. business strategy, that they executed over a

412. period of years and even decades.

413. This wasn t some sort of passive evolution.

414. Jerry and Kanita Yandel had been raising birds under

415. contract for Tyson Foods, which is one of the largest meat

416. companies in the world and the largest chicken producer

417. in the United States.

418. This couple raised animals under contract.

419. But Tyson owned the birds, it owned the feed.

420. It delivered whatever medicine the birds needed.

421. And these farmers really had no control whatsoever over the

422. health of the animals or the success of their operation.

423. Local chicken farmers were having a major problem.

424. There was a mysterious disease that was jumping

425. from flock to flock of the chicken houses.

426. We re talking thousands of birds dying at a time.

427. They really kind of started rotting while they were

428. still alive, and their bodies were turning purple.

429. And, Kanita Yandel would have to go out to these chicken

430. houses with her kids and cart off thousands of dead animals.

431. This affliction put them into bankruptcy

432. in a matter of months.

433. The farmer ends up taking all the risk,

434. but the company gets all the profits.

435. And that's basically the way the meat industry has evolved

436. in the past 30 years.

437. This weakening power of the American farmer wasn t a

438. natural evolution it was a corporate coup.

439. An overthrow by a handful of huge companies who saw

440. a business opportunity and seized it.

441. This is the story about a few companies

442. taking over an entire industry.

443. If the strategy which we have established is maintained,

444. and the battle not faulted by change in the midst of action,

445. we shall win.

446. When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928 and famously

447. promised Americans a chicken in every pot what he was really

448. saying was that the recent uptick in American prosperity

449. was here to stay.

450. Back in the 1930s, when Tyson Foods got into business,

451. chicken was like a luxury meat. It was like lobster.

452. You know, you had chicken on Sunday night.

453. But when Tyson got in the game, it streamlined production and

454. prices fell year by year.

455. Did you know that poultry is the nation s

456. third-largest agricultural crop?

457. A $3 billion business?

458. Pretty chicks? Yes, sir!

459. This animal happened to be very adaptable to

460. the conditions of industrial production.

461. You could stack the eggs on trays.

462. You could heat them and raise literally millions of chicks.

463. Do chickens miss scratching in the barnyard?

464. Probably not.

465. They ve never known any other life but this.

466. You could pack them into crates,

467. and then put them in a building where the temperature was

468. controlled perfectly, and the feed was formulated perfectly

469. to make these animals gain as much weight as possible

470. in as little time as possible.

471. They ve got automated feeders, automated watering systems.

472. I mean, we re really talking about mid-sized food factories.

473. The chicken of tomorrow.

474. A broad-breasted bird with bigger drumsticks,

475. plumper thighs and layers of white meat.

476. Yes, sir! Make mine chicken!

477. Chris Leonard spent nearly a decade reporting on

478. agribusiness for the Associated Press.

479. His book, The Meat Racket, exposed the dark side of

480. America s food business.

481. The thing that struck me was how overwhelmingly powerful

482. this company was. In this town of Waldron,

483. there was an enormous Tyson Foods chicken plant

484. that processed about a million birds a week.

485. Out in the hillsides around it, you had dozens of farmers,

486. all working under contract for this company.

487. You know, we think about farmers as this

488. stubbornly independent bunch.

489. But what I saw when I went down there was

490. overwhelming and pervasive fear.

491. People were afraid to talk to me as a reporter in their

492. front yard, on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

493. I just thought to myself, how could one firm have

494. so much power over this entire region?

495. And you know the story behind that is the story of

496. corporate consolidation and the rise of monopolies.

497. And Tyson Foods has been behind that story for decades.

498. Golden, crispy Tyson Chick n Chunks. Just for you!

499. Today, Tyson Food is the leading producer of chicken,

500. beef, and pork controlling as much as 20% of the market.

501. In the U. S., it s estimated one in every five bites of meat

502. is of an animal owned by Tyson.

503. The majority of the meat that Tyson Foods sells

504. doesn t carry a label.

505. This is the meat that we eat at cafeterias, in schools,

506. out at restaurants, in nursing homes.

507. The rotisserie chicken at the grocery store.

508. "Tyson continues to find new ways to help put

509. a chicken in every pot."

510. The industrialization of livestock farming

511. has been cruel to the animals.

512. But it s also had a devastating impact on the farmers.

513. These farmers who are working as sharecroppers

514. in a way for the company. They don t really own anything.

515. If you go to a town that produces Tyson chicken and you

516. see that this company operates the slaughterhouse,

517. the feed mill, the bird hatchery,

518. the trucking lines that moves the baby chicks to the farm and

519. the grown birds back to the slaughterhouse.

520. And then it operates the very sophisticated marketing arm of

521. the business that sells these products directly to fast food

522. chains like McDonald s or Wendy s.

523. Tyson was one of the first companies to really bring

524. all these parts of the business under one roof.

525. And that gave it not just tremendous control,

526. but it allowed it to really reap all the profits at

527. every link in the chain.

528. While innovation and buy-outs fueled Tyson s growth,

529. another big push came from the U. S. government

530. through antitrust laws.

531. This is the body of law that governs

532. how big companies can get.

533. It's not like supply and demand determine

534. the price of something anymore.

535. It's the market power of the monopoly.

536. And the monopolies use this power to underpay people for

537. what people give them, in this case, farmers raising animals.

538. And then the monopoly uses the power on the flip side

539. to raise prices for consumers.

540. That's why we have antitrust laws.

541. But when you saw the Reagan revolution come along,

542. there was this school of thought that all that mattered

543. was the consumer price.

544. And so they took off the shackles and they let companies

545. buy out their competitors.

546. The federal government allowed merger, after merger,

547. after merger, after merger...

548. until monopolies had taken total control.

549. What you see is the industrialization of

550. chicken farming, now gets coupled with the

551. monopolistic control of just one or two companies.

552. What it has meant for farmers is an absolute and

553. total loss of control over their operations.

554. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the company s so-called

555. tournament system, where Tyson ranks its chicken

556. producers by how well they fatten up their birds.

557. I've never seen anything like this in over 20 years of

558. covering American business. Here s how it works.

559. What Tyson does is, it collects all of the birds

560. from all of the farms in a given week.

561. And then it measures each farm on how well the farmer managed

562. to fatten up the birds, given the feed that Tyson provided.

563. Critically, what Tyson then does,

564. is it ranks all of the farmers in a given week

565. against one another.

566. The farmers at the top are paid a bonus.

567. But critically, that bonus payment is taken out of the

568. paycheck of the farmer at the bottom of the ranking.

569. So, they compete against each other with each paycheck,

570. and divide and conquer. And it works.

571. I met farmer after farmer after farmer,

572. who explained to me how the price they received for a cow,

573. for a pig or for a chicken had nothing to do with

574. how hard they worked. It had everything to do with

575. how much power Tyson Foods had over their operation.

576. Tyson doesn t just have power over the choices

577. its farmers make it exercises power over

578. your own decisions in the grocery store,

579. whether you know it or not.

580. Let s say you go into a grocery store and

581. walk into the meat aisle.

582. You will see these beautiful displays of dozens of different

583. products and dozens of different brand names.

584. And it really gives you this perception that

585. you ve got a lot of consumer choice.

586. I think that's what we think of when we think about capitalism.

587. The reality is, about four companies control the

588. entire meat aisle of any given grocery store.

589. The consumer has lost the ability to vote

590. with their dollar. So, right now,

591. the entrenched monopolies are absolutely

592. winning the political fight.

593. And now, new players are joining the battle over

594. food production armed with billions of dollars and

595. a certainty that they know best.

596. Essentially what we re seeing is this billionaire class,

597. that is convinced that technology is the

598. only answer to feeding the world going forward.

599. Bill Gates is pushing the failed green revolution.

600. He s pushing chemicals. He s pushing GMOs.

601. He s pushing patents.

602. It s demonstrably false.

603. I've chosen to take my fortune through the

604. Gates Foundation and apply it, overwhelmingly,

605. to these development projects.

606. Bill Gates spent decades cultivating his persona as the

607. world s leading philanthropist on global poverty,

608. hunger, and healthcare.

609. But he s also quietly making moves in another area.

610. Agricultural productivity is one of the most basic things

611. that can help the poor move to a more prosperous life.

612. The 4th richest man in the world is buying up farmland

613. nearly a quarter-million acres of it across 18 states,

614. making him the top private owner of farmland in the country.

615. He s being joined by other billionaires all looking to

616. transform global agriculture as we know it.

617. They re looking at farmland as another financial asset,

618. which I think we should be terrified by.

619. I mean, this is how we feed ourselves.

620. There was a Green Revolution based on new seeds.

621. It was one of the great breakthroughs of all time.

622. Now, we need to bring that

623. This, to me, is not a recipe for

624. feeding the world going forward.

625. What it s a recipe for is rewarding investors like

626. Bill Gates for their investment in these companies in the

627. short term. And in the long term, destroying this incredibly

628. important resource and making it more and more fragile at a

629. time when we desperately need to make it more resilient.

630. January 2021.

631. Violent protests wrack the Indian capital.

632. Tens of thousands of farmers are protesting new laws they

633. say will make them vulnerable to big corporations.

634. They made their way to the iconic red fort,

635. a symbolic moment in this resistance.

636. Bill Gates may be the face of global health in the west.

637. But for many critics in the developing world,

638. he represents something more sinister

639. a corporate system that s destroying the planet

640. and pushing farmers to the brink.

641. Bill Gates, who has donated billions to improve

642. public health in poorer countries and so on.

643. You re saying, essentially, he s a dictator.

644. When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the

645. poor in Africa and preventing famine.

646. What s he doing, he s pushing the failed Green Revolution.

647. He s pushing chemicals. He s pushing GMOs.

648. Pushing patents.

649. In his quest to transform the food system,

650. Bill Gates and his foundation have been quietly promoting

651. high tech solutions from corporations like Monsanto

652. the maker of crops genetically engineered to be resistant to

653. their own brand of toxic pesticides that also require

654. farmers to pay a license fee to use their seeds.

655. Nearly every village here is a hotspot.

656. The suicide crisis inescapable.

657. It s a system that's sending millions of farmers in the US

658. and around the world into debt leading to an epidemic of

659. suicides in places like India where farmers are killing

660. themselves by drinking pesticides in a gruesome act

661. of symbolic protest.

662. An unfathomable number, some thirty people a day in a

663. country where trying to kill yourself is illegal.

664. Bill Gates, he s essentially a techno utopian, you know,

665. he thinks that bigger and bigger farm machines,

666. that more and more high-tech seeds engineered to resist more

667. and more pesticides are the only answer to, you know,

668. feeding the world going forward.

669. Not only are farmers becoming dependent on

670. these dangerous chemicals, critics also point out that

671. Monsanto s seeds are making them

672. vulnerable to disease and ecological collapse.

673. What you ve gotten is this incredible specialization.

674. Where, not only are farms specializing in one or

675. two crops, but you also get regional specialization.

676. Monoculture, the problem is it uses up the soil.

677. We know that if you look at sort of the history of

678. human civilization, loss of topsoil is one of the things

679. that drives societal collapse.

680. We re way more productive, but we also

681. surrender topsoil at a world historic rate.

682. What the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is nudging

683. the planet towards is the larger farms that involve monocultures.

684. We ve got all the data in the world that says that, in fact,

685. polyculture of agro ecological farming is an incredibly

686. important way to be able to survive climate change.

687. And we have 8 million farmer groups around the world

688. exploring this kind of agriculture.

689. But what you have from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

690. is not the wisdom of 8 million farmer groups.

691. But what it is that a few PhDs can figure out by themselves

692. without ever having to trouble themselves with

693. engaging with the peasantry.

694. There s no doubt that a

695. combination of better seeds and

696. better inputs, including fertilizer,

697. can raise African agricultural productivity.

698. Call it scientific imperialism: The idea that we can project

699. our expertise onto the world of agriculture and sustainability.

700. I don t know who I'm more scared of: the billionaires

701. who are continuing to extract everything they can

702. from our world, or the ones who think they know how to fix it.

703. It s worth looking at how the Bill and Melinda Gates

704. Foundation gets to its solutions.

705. It kind of works like Microsoft.

706. And why shouldn t it work like Microsoft?

707. Bill Gates learned everything he knows from Microsoft.

708. And what did he learn from Microsoft?

709. Well, monopolies are a good thing.

710. There s something very attractive to someone who s

711. made his billions through a monopoly on a product

712. that was inescapable. Finding in Monsanto

713. something of a kindred product to Microsoft Windows.

714. In the same way that the seed genetics is patented and

715. a closed box for farmers.

716. You sign a license in the same way that you sign a license

717. when you when you tear open a software packet for

718. installing windows on your machine.

719. And it s pretty much the same with Monsanto.

720. It s clear that their approach is very much informed by

721. an intellectual philosophy that denies

722. an intellectual life to farmers.

723. Now they re just robots who follow the damn instructions

724. on the side of the packet.

725. Critics of chemical agriculture argue that corporations like

726. Monsanto have different priorities and incentives than

727. farmers who pride themselves as protectors of the land.

728. And what is best for big agribusiness can ultimately

729. be deadly for the rest of us.

730. We ve got to think of Big Food like a for-profit hospital.

731. A for-profit hospital is going to make the most money

732. off the sickest person that doesn t die.

733. What Big Agri needs to do is create the sickest,

734. most chemical and science and intervention dependent

735. agricultural system, that just doesn t die.

736. So, to them, the erosion and destruction of the topsoil,

737. the vulnerability of plants to insects,

738. the death of bees and pollinators,

739. these are all good things.

740. Because you know how much it s going to cost to create little

741. drone bees to replace the bee system?

742. This is multi-trillion dollars, because it s barely possible.

743. It probably isn t. But if it is,

744. they re gonna make a whole lot of money on it.

745. And if it s not, they re gonna make a whole lot of money until

746. the time they re gonna die anyways, so who cares?

747. It s their grandchildren who are gonna die.

748. But in the Arctic circle, some people do care,

749. and are preparing for a doomsday scenario.

750. It is the plan B for the most valuable

751. natural resource on Earth.

752. But can we guarantee that nothing can ever go wrong?

753. Well, of course not, we re not gods.

754. Aleppo, Syria. September 2015.

755. The Syrian government enlists the Russians to launch

756. airstrikes on rebel troops.

757. Shelling schools and hospitals.

758. Even chemical weapons are dropped.

759. 31,000 die, and the city is leveled,

760. including much of its prized ancient ruins.

761. But for months, international partners have been silently

762. coordinating the removal of Syria s treasures

763. including a trove of precious native seeds.

764. Amid the chaos, the seeds are sent to the

765. safest place imaginable.

766. It s called the Svalbard Seed Vault. And it looks as if a

767. spaceship has crashed into the side of a mountain.

768. And it s up in the Arctic Circle.

769. And it s a place where the genetic knowledge of all the

770. world s civilizations are kind of kept in ice.

771. The Svalbard seed vault in Norway contains boxes from

772. all over the world, housing seeds for plants

773. native to each region.

774. They re kept at the end of a 479-foot access tunnel dug into

775. the mountain, which leads to three separate vaults,

776. each about 89 feet long.

777. The seeds are stored at exactly 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

778. And the vault can hold more than two billion of them.

779. It s very interesting to walk down the rows and look at,

780. ah, here s a box from North Korea!

781. Ah, it s very close to the box from South Korea.

782. They seem to be getting along.

783. But it s no garden-variety library.

784. The seed vault is a global security imperative,

785. built to outlast climate change, natural disaster and world war.

786. At best, the seeds encased in the mountain s vaults

787. will provide the diversity needed to adapt to

788. future life on Earth.

789. At worst, you re looking at the planet s food supply.

790. Seeds need to be saved, diversity needs to be saved,

791. because it s really the raw material for evolution.

792. Because you need natural selection,

793. or in the case of our domesticated crops,

794. you need people to be able to select among the traits that

795. exist to fashion new varieties that are

796. adapted to new climates.

797. Or, resistant to pests and diseases.

798. We need to save that diversity if we re gonna have a

799. functioning agricultural system.

800. Cary Fowler is the mastermind behind the seed vault

801. a concept that expands on seed banks that

802. exist in nearly every country.

803. Fowler was called to action when he came across a comment

804. in a scientific journal from the 70s warning

805. of catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.

806. So, we began thinking about making a safety duplicate

807. a backup of all the seed collections around the world.

808. And storing it in the safest place we could imagine.

809. We came to think of that as being Svalbard.

810. At 78 degrees north, above mainland Norway.

811. Very close to the North Pole. Farthest north you can fly

812. on a scheduled regular commercial aircraft.

813. The seed vault is an insurance policy, and it s

814. like your health insurance or car insurance policy.

815. You don t want to use it.

816. I d be happy if somebody at the end of my life, you know,

817. wrote my obituary and said, This is the guy behind that

818. boondoggle near the North Pole that was never used.

819. But, I m afraid that's probably not what s gonna happen.

820. We ll continue to lose diversity in regular seed banks.

821. And we ll continue to find that we can get that stuff.

822. It didn t go extinct because we have the seed vault.

823. Most farmers are so dependent on

824. a very long distance,

825. tenuous and complicated supply chain. And everything that s

826. produced is with razor thin margins.

827. So, there s just enough. So, if any branch of the supply chain

828. of all this stuff, all the way to the supermarket,

829. the whole thing comes down.

830. And we ve really only got two or three days of food

831. in the system to support our eating.

832. At some point, we will realize that things are incredibly bad

833. and that we need to turn things around.

834. And that will happen when there are five hundred million people

835. who are food insecure.

836. A billion people who are food insecure.

837. Two billion people who are food insecure.

838. How high does this number have to get before we realize that,

839. actually, the exploitation and the crisis that's part of the

840. system is endemic to it?

841. That will continue for as long as we allow the food

842. corporations, the finance corporations and the government

843. to dictate how it is that we all get to eat.