Empty feilds in Valentia Island in Kerry in Ireland where cattle used to graze. The EU pay famrers NOT to carry stock so as to create a blobal market for beef from Brazil, the price then too high for local Brazillians to afford who go hungry. The ranchers profit, as they sell the meat to the EU, and the smaller farmer goes bankrupt and ends up in the favela slums and a life of prostitution and drugs, drink and crime awaits the future generations.
The powers that be tell you that we
Should be happy with beef from Brazil
They suppose its racist to oppose
What they want and their will.
The powers that be tell you and me
It gives farmers and families a fair living
Trade we should support, to our arguments they retort
As a market to them we are giving.
What we do not see is a child hungry
As the price of beef in Brazil is too high
The child – we will call her Majella, lives in a favela
Her father has now turned to crime to get on by.
What we dont understand is that now the land
Belongs to the rancher, not the small farmer any more
He lives now in the slum where the child sucks her thumb
To hide the unger pains she never knew before.
Crime ridden favela slums in Brazil are filling with bankrupt small farmers
While life was tough, he had enough
His family to – though plain the food – to feed
But in times of plenty, her mother barely twenty
Must sell her body from need.
Thousands of miles away in Ireland today
We in the supermarket buy Brazilian beef
We think we should as we do good
Yet we who think we are good are the thief.
The farmer fears the bankers letter, hopes that times get better
On grants to stay solvent he is now dependent
Should we leave the EU we suppose. lost the grants he will he knows
Who should be trading and working be independent.
We are the fools who learned in schools
That there was good for all in globalisation
The third world will thrive, we help the poor stay alive
It was the growth of global civilization.
In Brazil we hear, the price of beef is too dear
For the locals who buy who it to live need
In Ireland we show the price is too low
To keep a farm solvent, higher price wanted is not for greed.
2013 in Ireland where in the first six months 400 families were evicted for banks profits – today in 2016 it is that number a month
The politician chancers made rich the ranchers
Who in Brazil are taking the small farmers land
Who ends up in crime in the slums for all time
It is just as globalisation planned.
We are a market to buy, a consumer to live and die
As a people we are for a use for others to be
We are a citizen, we are Irishmen
Not just a consumer for corporation use to be.
The powers that be tell us for a future to be
We have to change our ways to be green
Buy I ask you how will beef shipped 5000 miles from Brazil
Eco freindly possibly can be seen?
I have a solution to end the polution
A fair living for Irish and Brazilian farmers to give
Stop the export or beef for more than its local worth
Let the locals buy at a fair price so all can live.
Not in a city slum as a criminal or a bum
But as a farmer on their own land
The ranchers I tell to go to hell
As we make a future for farmers in Ireland.
Our prices rise a future we realise
For the beef from our own fields
Less grant dependent we are economically independent
As we profit from our local yields.
To plate from the grass green, little distance between
No pollution from global transport
Farmers have a living fair, food can be afforded there
Beef sold from each land in it at its fair local worth!
Let us refound the Land Commission and save our homes and farms in Ireland
Of five farmers who had their lands taken by banks some three months ago, three committed suicide. This is the hidden cost of cheap beef, globalisation, the bank bailouts and capitalism in Ireland. The Land Commission if refounded could give the land back to the people, save their homes, and stabilise the banks as it did for the Landlords when originally founded.
Why Cheap Brazillian Beef Comes at a High Cost to both Ireland and Brazil
