http://countercurrents.org/dixon070607.htm
Is Bill Gates Trying To Hijack
Africa's Food Supply?
By Bruce Dixon
07 June, 2007
Black Agenda Report
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.
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>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.