Dancing on Capitalism: Target Starbucks : Houston Indymedia

On Saturday in the hot afternoon a FEW Houstonians stood outside of two Starbucks to let consumers know of the dangers of the capitalist food industry.

Starbucks, like the large majority of the agribusiness/food sector:
1) refuses to appropriately label products that are genetically engineered,
2) buys a relatively small portion of their coffee from organic, fair trade farmers but does not offer this as a daily-brewed choice, and
3) takes business away from locally owned coffee shops, effectively lowering wages and siphoning the wealth out of the community and into the hands of corporate executives.

This trend is not isolated to Starbucks; it is part of the entire food industry, affecting both humans and the environment. “Capitalist production,” wrote Karl Marx in Capital,

…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the fertility of the soil….All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker (Vol 1, Pp. 637-8).

This behavior has been developing within all capitalist industries. All businesses, everything from food to manufacturing to sports, have within themselves the need to expand, to consume an ever-growing amount of resources in order to maintain an ever-growing profit margin. This logic is incompatible with the principle that the earth’s resources are limited.

For the agribusiness/food sector, even though recombinant DNA techniques for developing disease resistance and increasing fertility among plants and animals are available to scientists unlike a decade ago, the potential side effects of such techniques have been ignored in the anxious and highly competitive quest for funding (i.e. profit) for genetic research.

The academic periodical Nature Biotechnology in 1998 (Vol. 16, n. 11) reported the accepted prediction that biotechnology crops would be worth $7 billion by 2005. The journal Science in 1998 (Vol. 282, n. 5397) stated that genetically modified crops planted in the U.S. had increased to 20.5 million hectares in 1998 from 8.1 million hectares in 1997.

As Starbucks continues to grow and open stores in Houston and in foreign countries as well, the need to inform consumers on the human and environmental effect of supporting such businesses. Along with providing a criticism of capitalist firms comes the alternative to capitalist firms. Always demand a food alternative that is better for humans and the environment than genetically engineered food. Also, there are many locally owned coffee shops and restaurants that offer healthier choices. Eat local! Grow local!

Sources:
http://www.organicconsumers.org