Industrial chemical agriculture & food major factor in massively screwing Earth (UN report)

[AxionExcel]

NATURAL CAPITAL AT RISK
A new report on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity program sponsored by UN Environmental Program, examined the profiteering of the biggest industries on this planet, and then contrasted them with 100 different types of environmental costs including water use, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste pollution, land pollution, and water pollution.

The report found that when you took the externalized costs into effect, essentially NONE of the industries was actually making a profit. The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of share-holders.

The corporate industrialized chemicalized system of agriculture, with its increasing reliance on CAFOs (huge, confined animal fattening operations usually serving up industrial-scale GMO feed with glyphosate residue), was fingered as a major player in this planetary rip-off: internalizing profits, while externalizing the cost of it's extreme harm to the life-support systems of the planet.

http://www.trucost.com/_uploads/publishedResearch/TEEB%20Final%20Report%20-%20web%20SPv2.pdf

For example:

[AxionExcel]

1. How it is

Plumping up our food with GMO-glyphosate grains (even though cattle naturally eat grasses, not grain) and trashing the planet while profiteering. How Republican is that?

[2naSalit]

3. Cattle are fed grain in thefeedlots.

Cows are born in/near pasture, graze for about a year - I think - and then sent to a feedlot to fatten up (where the grain comes in along with antibiotics and a range of injected/fed chemicals and then trucked off to the auction or slaughterhouse. At least that's how it works out here in the west for the producers who aren't entirely grass feeding their cattle... that number is picking up though.

[Rex]

2. We also waste a ming boggling amount of non renewable resources.

Just one of who knows how many car graveyards;

Much better to waste resources, then to give them away for free. No better they rot back into the ground.

And of course our military waste is legendary, here sits bombers to rot in the desert;

Eventually all this waste will catch up to the human race.

[2naSalit]

4. +1

[AxionExcel]

5. The industrial-chemical-GMO Ag Machine, Inc. causes vast harm to animals, too

From the Saturday (4/16) edition of the New York Times:

"...I don’t believe in reincarnation. But if I’m wrong, let’s hope you and I are fated to come back as puppies and not as chickens...."

"...A new investigation by Compassion in World Farming, an animal rights group, highlights the way the poultry industry today is often inhumane for birds, wrenching for farmers and potentially unhealthy for consumers. The investigation includes stomach-churning video of what actually goes on in chicken barns.

In particular, the video shows images of a grotesque disease called gangrenous dermatitis that a website about the poultry industry calls a No. 1 health problem for some chicken companies. To watch the video is to develop an appetite for soy..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/animal-cruelty-or-the-price-of-dinner.html?emc=edit_th_20160417&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=47943027