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  • From: <activism98201@verizon.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply?
  • Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:56:43 -0500 (CDT)

When big dollars are involved is there any other outcome Other than
exploitation?


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/dixon06062007.html

The Profits of Philanthropy
Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply?

By BRUCE DIXON

Genetically altered crops will rescue Africa from endemic shortfalls in food
production, claim corporate foundations that have announced a $150 million
"gift" to spark a "Green Revolution" in agriculture on the continent.

Of course, U.S.-based agribusiness holds the patents to these wondercrops,
and can exercise their proprietary "rights" at will. Are corporate
foundations really out to feed the hungry, or are they hypocritical Trojan
Horses on a mission to hijack the world's food supply --- to create the most
complete and ultimate state of dependency.

"Poor-washing" is the common public relations tactic of concealing bitterly
unfair and predatory trade policies that create and deepen hunger and poverty
with clouds of hypocritical noise about feeding the hungry and alleviating
poverty. It's hard to imagine a better case of media poor-washing than the
hype around the recently announced $150 million "gifts" of the Gates and
Rockerfeller Foundations to the cause of reforming African agriculture,
feeding that continent's impoverished millions and sparking an African "Green
Revolution."

For ADM, Cargill, Monsanto and other agribusiness giants farming as humans
have practiced it the last ten thousand years is a big problem.

The problem is that when farmers plant and harvest crops, setting a little
aside for next year's seed, people eat, but corporations don't get paid. That
problem has been so thoroughly solved in U.S. food production that chemical
fertilizers and pesticides create a biological dead zone of hundreds of
square miles in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi, draining much of
the continent's richest farmland, empties into it. U.S. law requires the
registration all crop varieties, and makes it extraordinarily difficult for
farmers to save and plant their own seed year to year without paying
royalties to corporations who "own" the genetic code of those crops.

But until recently in the developing world, farmers still planted, plowed and
harvested without paying American agribusiness anything. The first attempt to
"monetize" food production took place a generation ago in Southeast Asia and
India. Called the "Green Revolution" its public face was a masterpiece of
pious poor-washing.

A thin layer of native academic, "experts" and local officials were bought
off, and slick ad campaigns were told local farmers the road to prosperity
was the use of vast quantities of pesticides, herbicides, and high-yield
crops grown for international markets instead of feeding local populations.

The "Green Revolution" in India worked out well for the middlemen who sold
the chemicals and lent poor farmers money to buy them, and for its wealthiest
farmers. But when millions of farmers, on the advice foreign and domestic
"experts" produced cotton, sugar and export crops for the world market
instead of food to feed their neighbors, several nasty things happened. The
prices for those export staples went down, so poor farmers wound up without
the cash to repay loans for the year's seed and chemicals. Food which used to
be abundant and locally grown became scarce, expensive and had to come from
other regions or overseas. The chemicals killed many beneficial plants and
insects, and promoted the emergence of newer, tougher pests and diseases.

Export crops needed more water than traditional ones, so wealthy farmers
monopolized what water there was to feed their export crops. Man-made famines
occurred. People starved or became dependent on imported foreign grain.
Millions of farmers were forced to sell their land (or sometimes their
children) to pay off their debts, and move to the cities.

In the tradition of the European explorers unleashed on the rest of humanity
with letters from their kings entitling them to claim and seize the lands,
treasure and inhabitants of all places not under the rule of white Christian
princes, the U.S. patent office began in the 1990s, granting American
corporations exclusive "patents" for varieties of rice produced in Asia for
thousands of years, for beans grown in Mexico centuries before Columbus, and
for all the products which were or might be made from trees, plants, roots
and molds growing in the rain forests of Africa and Asia.

Indian courts, under pressure from their citizens, rebuffed for now American
attempts to collect royalties for the production of basmati rice, which
farmers in India and Pakistan have cultivated for centuries. But every
developing country can't bring to the table against the U.S. the power that
India, with a fifth of the world's population can.

In the U.S. media this privatization of nature is called "the biotech
industry". Most of humanity outside the U.S. call it biopiracy.

In the last decade, corporate "life scientists" in the biotech industry have
invented, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has patented a perverse but
profitable technology which prevents a current year's crop from producing
usable seed for next year's planting. These "terminator seeds" will force
farmers to return to corporate seed suppliers every year.

For the last 20 years, the U.S. has, with varying degrees of success,
bullied, bribed and threatened governments on six continents to enforce its
skull-and-crossbones patent laws through bilateral trade agreements --- think
NAFTA and CAFTA --- through World Bank and International Monetary Fund
dictates, and the World Trade Organization.

Today UN bodies and dozens of individual countries are under pressure to
allow the introduction of genetically modified crops and terminator seed
technologies into their food chains. Despite their poverty and need for
development aid, African countries, informed by the world media (outside the
U.S.) have been forced by their own citizens, scientists and farmers to
stoutly resist Western efforts to undermine their food security. But the
slick and shiny PR campaign around the Gates and Rockerfeller initiatives,
supposedly addressed at alleviating world hunger seem to mark a new stage in
the continuing scramble for African resources.

Last year, the Gates Foundation hired former Monsanto VP Robert Robert Horsch
as senior robert_horschprogram officer for Africa. Monsanto is the company
that invented "biotechnology" and the patenting of life forms by
corporations. This is the context for the "philanthropy" of the Gates and
Rockerfeller Foundations, and their expressed concern for foisting a "Green
Revolution" upon Africa.

Will African farmers and their governments be forced to pay American
corporations to cultivate the crops they have for centuries? Global capital
and competition to control the world's remaining energy have put Africa's oil
resources in the sights of America's strategic planners.

If the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, along with Monsanto, Cargill, ADM
and other agribusiness and biotech and "life science" players have anything
to say about it, Africa's food supply is up for grabs too.

BRUCE DIXON is editor of the Black Agenda Report.



  • [Livingontheland] Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply?, activism98201, 06/08/2007

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